The Campaign Spectator/Wanna Party?
Ferguson, Andrew
THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR WANNA PARTY? by Andrew Ferguson T he Saturday night before the Re- 1 publican National Convention opened, I arrived in New Orleans, dropped my bags at the hotel, and set off...
...Several of the young Republicans I had been trailing started to follow the ref and Angel and her challenger inside to the Big Daddy ring, when one of them drew me aside...
...All night long...
...The cumulative effect of the lackluster speechmaking in New Orleans was to make you realize how good Ronald Reagan is: if nothing else, he alone among contemporary politicians has mastered the ubiquitous modern teleprompter system, in which two screens, flashing the text of the speech so that only the speaker can see it, are set at some distance to either side of the podium...
...Poor Grandma...
...Not only did the Republicans understand that such a grandly irrelevant event requires great emphasis on superfluities—silly hats, comely security personnel, lots of day trips—they also understood the utility of bars that never close...
...All night...
...What should have been the killer line'George was there"—was oddly placed: it followed a segment crediting the Vice President with reducing government-required paperwork "by an estimated 600 million manhours a year...
...a slight Bob Eubanks smile...
...But the spirit was willing...
...With that he and his comrades lit into a chorus of "We've Only Just Begun...
...Congratulations, fellows...
...Young Bill stood at the podium with the splendid posture (and haircut) of a Ken doll...
...This of course is what Michael Dukakis would like you to think the Reagan years amounted to...
...Which is cold comfort...
...and clearing endless acres of brush from his ranch...
...And so in his acceptance speech before the full convention (and in other speeches since), Dan overcompensated—to a degree that called to mind the Bob and Ray interview with the President of . . . the Slow . . . Talkers . . . of . . . America...
...something of a jerk...
...New Orleans, on the other hand, proved that the future belongs to the Republicans, for the future not only works, it chugalugs too...
...I (ACU rating: 46, and falling) checked, it was the Democrats Warren Beatty and assorted rock stars, Gary Hart and Gerry Studds, Hamilton Jordan and Teddy, and remember Peter Bourne?—who formed the party-down party, the party for party-animals, the inclusive party that let in anybody so long as he didn't spill the bong water and stink up Andrew Ferguson is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...This is a party in ferment, so disagreements are frequent 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 and greeted with toleration, but on the subject of Reagan's stature there was unanimity...
...George Bush: an office manager for the nineties...
...honoring the boys of Pointe du Hoc...
...The facts, not the way the press reported them, have created the 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 resentment some voters (probably not many) will feel toward Quayle through the coming months...
...His arms chugged like the little engine that could...
...George Bush, I suspect, will be a transitional personage merely, a figure linking epochs, contiguous with both Ronald Reagan and the new leader who will move the party of Lincoln into the twenty-first century and teach its followers how to do the shimmy-shake...
...First of course was the National Guard-war wimp controversy...
...for unlike other effective orators, the President never raises his voice above familiar, conversational levels...
...I f I am correct about the Republi- 1 can party reconstituting itself—and there's no reason to think that I am—the question posed by the convention in New Orleans is, Who will lead this new party...
...His theme was "the politics of inclusion" (although one friend of mine, noting Kean's odd speaking style, suggested the term "the politics of malocclusion...
...The keynote address, by Tom Kean of New Jersey, was what you'd expect from a man who called Adlai Stevenson "one of the great masters of the English language in the past half century...
...Naturalness, as I say, has never been a problem for him...
...And when, with the man of the next generation shouting his way into incoherence, Bush stepped forward to shake his hand—the political equivalent of what in vaudeville was called "the hook"—Quayle wheeled and said, "Hold on a second...
...His enthusiasm, which never seems to give him a moment's rest, is not the infectious kind, as was painfully demonstrated in his dockside remarks immediately after Bush anointed him...
...A few doors down, a woman with a BUSH sticker wrapped around her rump was pouring beer over the head of a woozy friend, who had collapsed against the side of a gift shop that sells what used to be called French postcards...
...Partly this was caused by the weak sound system in the Superdome, which was particularly unsuited to Reagan's style...
...He assumed an air of mock gravity and intoned, "We Republicans refuse to dwell on the past...
...Achieving natural effects has never been his problem...
...I assume his grandmother had C-SPAN, which was the only network diligent enough to broadcast these doldrums...
...There is, for starters, his annoying habit of referring to himself almost exclusively in the third person...
...On my way back to my hotel Thursday night I got caught up with an animated group of young Alabama Republicans outside Pat O'Brien's bar...
...by Andrew Ferguson T he Saturday night before the Re- 1 publican National Convention opened, I arrived in New Orleans, dropped my bags at the hotel, and set off through the French Quarter in search of a late dinner...
...I was here last night, and you know it was the same volunteer...
...Lloyd Bentsen characterized the high hilarity of the Republican convention as merely a "Mardi Gras for the Moral Majority...
...Up and down Bourbon Street that Thursday night his legacy was discussed, usually at high volume and in varying degrees of coherence...
...She would have been lucky to hear this homey touch, since at that very moment there was the sound of three and a half million C-SPAN viewers barfing into their morning coffee...
...If they discounted ideology, most of his supporters would have to admit that as a public figure—in speeches, in interviews—Dan Quayle comes off as (how to put it...
...Even in speaking of his wife and children the insincerity was palpable...
...If you'll just indulge me for a moment, I'd like to say something to my ninety-year-old grandmother, who's watching right now...
...If memory serves, the Democrats planned a single trip for delegates, a train ride to Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, the well-known memorial to the heroism of Confederate generals (a big hit with the Rainbow, as you can imagine...
...As I walked along the upper rows, searching for my assigned seat, I listened to him in mounting disbelief...
...getting reelected...
...Avolunteer...
...And straight into the camera: "Hi, Grandma...
...Where's Dan Quayle stand on this issue...
...Across the street some middle-aged folk in Robertson hats glanced good-naturedly into a saloon advertising "Unisex Love Action...
...It was almost like walking onto the set of Satyricon, the difference being that, for this version, central casting had brought in all Republicans: a kind of PG-13 Satyricon...
...I saw a perfect personification of the problem on Monday morning, during the convention's inaugural session, when I first went in to case the Super-dome...
...As has been reported and reported, the Atlanta Democrats eschewed the patriotic red, white, and blue for a "salmon, eggshell, and azure" color scheme...
...Listen," he said, urgently...
...It sounded terrible, but I got the point...
...Well, Dan Quayle happens to be the kind of guy . . ." and so on...
...Even so, in interviews the rudiments of understandable speech—things like subject-verb agreement and pronoun placement—fly off at once in a swift and brilliant flight, leaving him unarmed but for that patented pol's grin and a wide-eyed stare that could snuff out a candle...
...one of them yelled, with some conviction...
...He was a great man," one of them told me, apparently unaware he was using the past tense...
...That means there will be roughness, there will be toughness, and there will be nudity...
...It fell short here, too...
...To my untrained ear, the politics of inclusion sounds much like the old Republican strategy of being for whatever Democrats are for only less of it, with a lot of talk about the death penalty thrown in whenever you're suspected of going soft...
...Watch for Happy's reemergence in '92...
...debauch followed debauch...
...His voting record reveals a politician with principle and even guts...
...Not so with Reagan...
...But who believes it...
...cried the ref...
...For most pols this results in great awkwardness—most obviously, because the speaker's head sways from right to left in the pretense of addressing the entire crowd while his eyes remain fixed to the teleprompter screens...
...The old Reaganite objections to the 1970s environmental movement—for instance, that it was merely an attempt by the propertied classes to use government as a breakwater against the encroachments of a rising lower class—were never mentioned...
...Unfortunately, beyond him the ranks of candidates for New Leader are thin indeed_ Most of the young up-and-comers in the Republican party are in the Quayle mold: probably hard-working and ambitious but a bit too pretty, not stupid but not exactly rocket scientists either...
...The place, incidentally, should be pretty much cleared out by now...
...They weren't biting...
...And they will quickly have to grow more worldly about the underbelly of urban life, which in New Orleans they began to probe for the first time, with shy, tremulous fingers...
...Most important, the strategic decision was made (and enforced) to keep Maureen Reagan under wraps for the entire week...
...There was even a booth manned by the "New Orleans Chapter of Dialysis Patients," which sold, among other items, a T-shirt reading: "I survived the Republican National Convention...
...And they share with Quayle the inability, on camera, to put across even a slightly greater sense of reality than that provided by your average game show host...
...My God," said a delegate next to me as we watched the gruesome scene on TV, "what has George done...
...The other 62 percent, incidentally, actually are pederasts...
...Reagan's parting, for all its flaws, avoided the sin of despair...
...Quayle is a student of the latest Republican Merlin, Roger Ailes, and it's possible that he is simply overschooled in the media arts—that the tricks of style have been so drummed into him he has forgotten how to say what he means...
...The Party of the Future, inured to charges of sexism, (continued on page 48) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 27 FERGUSON (continued from page 27) also made heavy use of pretty girls—as hostesses, as ushers, as guides, even as security guards...
...I myself managed to hold back, but only by tuning out the rest of his speech and admiring the hall itself...
...They elbowed one another and laughed...
...The last time...
...I've met people in Hollywood who swear to this day that Jayne Mansfield enjoyed reading Kant...
...The Republican women drew back quickly, but at the same time an athletic black woman charged forward, apparently from nowhere, loudly questioning Angel's prowess and making extravagant sideshow gestures with her huge arms...
...I think it's a set up...
...Republicans staged riverboat cruises, tours of the bayou, plantation galas...
...These particularly came in handy on Thursday night, after Bush's successful acceptance speech, when the Republicans took to the streets seemingly en masse—to reassess their chances in November, to take stock, to appraise where they've been and where they're going, but mostly to drink rivers of Hurricanes...
...flipping the switch that lit up the Statue of Liberty...
...I don't know...
...The head, in other words, is doing one thing, the eyes are doing another, and the intended effect of naturalness is completely undone...
...More likely it was a matter of austere political calculation...
...The convention was not only a coming-out party for Bush and (less happily) Quayle...
...But there were other problems as well...
...At the intersection of Bourbon and Bienville a Bush cheerleading squad did cartwheels for the benefit of a local camera crew, and at the finish several of the girls ran over to their boyfriends and sloshed down Hurricanes from enormous plastic cups...
...The speech was preceded by a video recapitulation of Reagan's tenure, which reduced eight years of rather substantialachievement to: getting shot...
...And the prose poem at the end, brimming with sunrises and new days and the like, was swallowed up among the rafters of the cavernous Superdome...
...But we've got a good candidate now in Vice President Bush...
...I f I were asked to plan a political 1 convention—a request this humble Hoosier is not anticipating—I would follow the Republicans' blueprint rather than the Democrats...
...You," Quayle said, leisurely as molasses but twice as syrupy, "are . . . looking . . . at one . . . humble . . . Hoosier" (something no Hoosier, by the way, humbled before many millions of spectators, would say...
...If only the action inside the hall had been as invigorating as what took place outside it...
...Those who know Quayle say he is a hard worker and a quick study, affable and interested...
...After New Orleans, the answer that presents itself most obviously to Republicans, through no fault of their own, is Dan Quayle (ACU rating: 82)—an answer that is, as pundits are fond of saying, problematic at best...
...but in the Superdome countless booths were set up, selling all manner of glorious junk...
...Environmentalism figures prominently, and much was made of it throughout the week...
...First I saw Senator James McClure (American Conservative Union rating: 100) sauntering down Bourbon Street, the legendary avenue of gin joints and flesh parlors...
...it was also of course a farewell to Reagan, whose popularity has allowed the Republican party to recast itself as the party of forward-lookers and boogie monsters...
...So it's been awhile since I checked...
...making a solemn speech after the Challenger blew...
...Tearing off his jacket, Dan appeared to be a man a few thumping heartbeats away from sun stroke...
...I caught sight of him as he passed by Big Daddy's All-Female Wrestling Parlor...
...In every convention appurtenance the Republicans outdid their rivals...
...The speaker was a fellow named William Paxon, introduced as the candidate for Jack Kemp's seat from Upstate New York...
...That Saturday night on Bourbon Street, a crowd, mostly Republican by the look of it, gathered outside Big Daddy's (the All-Female Wrestling Parlor) when the "referee" and the club champion, "Angel," stepped outside and announced that they were looking for a volunteerany of these fine looking ladies out here"—to challenge Angel for the grand prize of $100...
...Folks," he said, as the handful of delegates present chatted among themselves and paid him no attention, "there's something I feel I have to do...
...All week is more like it...
...According to James Baker, in asking him to join the ticket Bush told Quayle, "You are my choice, you are my first choice, you are my only choice," but I doubt that it was as passionate as all that...
...It's entirely possible, then, that Quayle, if Bush is elected, will eventually go the way of John Nance Garner—thanked and then given the pink slip come 1992...
...Then he winked...
...the dorm room, while the Republicans were the austerity nerds, the chin-pullers, the what's-so-funny-about-ourfuture guys, the belt-tightening, greeneye-shaded, budget-balancing . . . oops...
...The National Guard business aside, Bush's attempt to reach across the generations still has serious defects...
...Bill allowed a pregnant pause...
...What made the old man's exit graceful and touching, however, was his own spontaneity: at the conclusion of his speech the thousands of balloons fell about him and he gleefully batted them back to the crowd, toward the security guards, at the journalists on the podium, all the while beaming like a kid...
...Will someone please tell me when the rules got changed...
...But I must caution you," shouted the ref, "that Angel is a champion of wolf-style cajun wrestling from the swamplands and bayous of the great state of Louisiana...
...There was also a healthy lack of regret...
...A party of the future, like New Orleans itself, should never call last call...
...But there are nevertheless a few kinks still to be worked out in this new, re-made Republican party...
...Maybe it's true...
...It was the preeminent political decision of the campaign, and it has proved—will continue to prove—an endless migraine...
...You feel as if you're watching someone worried that a mugger is creeping up on him just beyond his peripheral vision...
...Nevertheless, his valedictory at the convention was a disappointment...
...the Republicans, to their credit, stuck to the traditional, more robust motif, with colors so brilliant and lights so bright you felt as if you were sitting in a giant test pattern...
...If, as some predict, the politics of inclusion becomes the guiding philosophy of the new Republican party, its patron saint will be not Ronald Reagan but Nelson Rockefeller...
...I asked them about Reagan's farewell, hoping, I suppose, for some suitably sentimental quotes that would place the thing nicely in perspective...
...Even when he stumbles---i'Facts," he said in New Orleans, with gusto, "are stupid things"—the genuineness that lies at the heart of his political personality never fails to carry over...
...This doubtless is the Dan Quayle that George Bush knew, and chose...
...Perhaps this is attributable to Bush's strong showing, but it is also testament to the party's resiliency and confidence in itself...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 49...
...Give 'em time...
...The same girl...
...In any event, I'd say it's now official: the Atlanta convention proved that the Democratic party, circa 1988, is about as much fun as an autopsy...
...Reagan himself tried to correct the impression by quoting some of his favorite economic statistics, but the bulk of the speech was devoted to sentiment and trumpeting Bush...
...A quick glance into any Bourbon Street music club, for example, immediately confirmed anew the ancient truth that Republicans can't dance, and probably shouldn't try to...
...He didn't stop, I admit, but he was smiling, and the incongruity—What's wrong with this picture?—starded me...
...But if, as the rumors have it, some in the Bush camp thought of Quayle's pleasing appearance as a political plus, they should have considered the dangerous obverse of good looks, as reflected, for example, in the word "bimbo...
...Since Senator Bentsen has not heretofore been known as a boogietill-you-puke sort, it's safe to dismiss the comment as sour grapes, the complaint of a guy whose mama made him bring his kid sister to the high school dance...
...Dan Quayle will ask rhetorically...
...The Democrats seemed to frown on the brandishing of outrageous paraphernalia...
...It does no good to tout the hypocrisy of the press—by citing, let's say, the recent scientific survey by the Times-Mirror Co., which demonstrated that fully 38 percent of the members of the national media between the ages of 37 and 42 made false confessions of pederasty to avoid the draft in the late sixties and early seventies...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
