Russia Watch: Run, Gorby, Runt
Bernstein, Jonas
"Russia Watch: Run, Gorby, Runt" by Jonas Bernstein Run, Gorby, Run! As far as I know, there is no clinical evidence that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is suffering from a serious mental disturbance. Yet he really...
...But the Democrats' problem is bigger than simply having to defend nearly twice as many open seats...
...Kommersant Daily quoted him the following day as saying: "No bastards are going to force me to give up the fight for the presidency...
...Just for good measure, Kiselyov brought up Gorby's recent opinion-poll numbers, which were now showing his support at less than 2 percent...
...They hit me in just the right place, where parachutists hit...
...Perhaps the ultimate slap in Gorby'sface, at least in the figurative sense, came from Lebed...
...I preferred to remain an orphan...
...The assailant, who was apparently aiming for his face but missed because he was drunk, told police that he did it in revenge for what the last Soviet emperor had done to the country...
...Like Bob Dole, he frequently refers to himself in the third person...
...Mikhail Sergeyevich wanted very much to become my daddy," he told Russian Public Television...
...Gorbachev continued on to Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, for a Victory Day commemoration...
...Of course, the Western press not getting it is the only thing in Russia that isn't news...
...Such is the Republicans' underlying strength...
...But he devoted most of his time to the attempt to slap him to death...
...Why would we bother...
...In his habitual growl, Lebed dismissed Gorbachev's intention to lead the Third Force...
...Does he think we're going to slap him...
...The TV crews began taking down their equipment even before the press conference was over, and one reporter heard Gorby mumble: "Of course, everything is clear...
...For one thing, of the forty-seven House members leaving as of mid-April, twenty-eight are Democrats and only nineteen Republicans...
...The former general is an open admirer of Gen...
...In the 1994 mid-term election, Republicans won 71 percent of open House seats...
...If muzzling fails, then there are other methods...
...Even if the pollsters are wrong, and your support is twenty times what they say, that still isn't much," Kiselyov commented, a dismissive smirk on his face...
...The ill-fated candidate then came face to face with Viktor Anpilov, leader of the neo-Stalinist Working Russia, who was campaigning for Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov...
...Since then five Democrats have joined the GOP: Mike Parker of Mississippi, Nathan Deal of Georgia, Greg Laughlin of Texas, and Jimmy Hayes and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana...
...What makes Gorbachev seem so pathetic these days...
...The next day, against the backdrop of Dzhokhar Dudayev's assassination and the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, he held a press conference in Moscow...
...Although Republicans won short-lived House majorities in 1946, 1952, and 1994, this will mark the first time that the GOP has re-elected a House majority since 1928...
...publications have been beefing up their staff for the June elections, and that he himself was heading off to Volgograd with several correspondents...
...Although each party has about fifteen districts currently held by incumbents considered to be particularly vulnerable, the Democrats have failed to convince their best candidates to become challengers...
...war seemed to loom, Gorby hit the campaign trail —and got dissed at every turn...
...The Democrats need a net gain of twenty seats to win back their majority—and to do so, they will need to overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable...
...Augusto Pinochet who recently warned that if there is a civil war in Russia, he personally will win it...
...This despite the fact that at the time his name wasn't even making it into the opinion polls...
...This from the man who sent airborne troops to crush demonstrations in Vilnius in 199o...
...Gorbachev naturally is in the minds of the electorate," he explained...
...One babushka shouted as Gorby scurried by, "What's he afraid of...
...Whatever the case, they don't understand that he's a joke...
...Yet while the Russians don't take him seriously, the Western media still can't seem to get enough of Gorby...
...Gorby was undaunted...
...Host Yevgeny Kiselyov flicked aside the assassination attempt theory and, stating the obvious, said the attack was simply "hooliganism...
...Gorbachev is simply incapable of facing the facts: There is no place for him in contemporary Russian politics...
...Yet he really seems to believe he has a chance of becoming Russia's next president...
...RUSSIA WATCH by Jonas Bernstein Run, Gorby, Run...
...Maybe it's his Nobel Prize...
...Anpilov also dressed Gorby down for having sold out the Soviet Union, but did offer flowers to ex-First Lady Raisa...
...Gorbachev denied that he and the rest of the Politburo had covered up the scale of the Chernobyl accident back in 1986...
...The slappable-yet-unflappable Gorbachev was back in Moscow several days later, holding a press conference to urge the presidential candidates of the so-called Third Force whom Yeltsin had been courting —Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, eye The American Spectator July 1996 59 surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov, and former General Alexander Lebed—to throw their support behind him, not the president...
...If the elections are free and are allowed to take place, I will have all the chances to win and am going to win," he declared in April, right after submitting the one million signatures necessary to register his candidacy...
...The intent is clearly to muzzle Gorbachev...
...That same day, no doubt guided by his subtle sense of irony, Gorby went on a TV program called "Hero of the Day...
...Nobody has had the opportunity to learn about my stand on various issues," he groused...
...Only three of the nineteen GOP seats are conceivably vulnerable: Steve Gunderson's in Wisconsin, and the Iowa and Louisiana seats vacated by Jim Lightfoot and Jimmy Hayes, who are running for the Senate...
...Gorbachev canceled his planned speech, and promptly fired off a press release in which he called the bungled slap "an attempt on the life of a candidate for the post of president of the Russian Federation...
...According to unconfirmed but well-founded rumors, Gorby's signature lists were the most questionable among the whole questionable lot, although there is no reason to believe he knew that his signature collectors were paying out money and otherwise falsifying the lists...
...Filing into a conference hall in the city Omsk, Gorby and his entourage were greeted by a 29-year-old unemployed former soldier who promptly smacked the Nobel Prize–winner on the neck...
...I think he just likes to be a public figure," says Dmitri Babich, a political correspondent with Komsomolskaya Pravda...
...He started out with a bang in Siberia...
...After the '94 election, Republicans held 230 House seats to the Democrats' 203 (one seat is held by socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont...
...They believe that Gorbachev, as the most experienced man, should be the one to form this alliance...
...Once underway, his campaign provided the comic relief for an otherwise tense presidential election...
...It's impossible to understand why the Western press remains fascinated with Corby...
...He obviously suffered when he lost his power...
...More than half of these open seats are in the South...
...Yet Gorby still thinks his people love him and are waiting for him to come to the rescue...
...As LDPR deputy Boris Finko put it, "He did what many dream of...
...at almost every step...
...Six Texas Democrats are retiring (a mass "Texodus"), and of the twenty-five "Blue Dog" Democrats who united in 1995 to rally the dwindling "moderate" caucus, four have joined the GOP and four are retiring...
...In what has become a familiar pattern, pro-Communist pensioners cried "Traitor...
...They're finished with me now...
...Babich adds that while the Russian media paid some attention to him during the first few years afterhis fall, interest inevitably dwindled...
...This delusion appears to be a particularly acute case of Fallen Star Syndrome —a condition which, in the case of Russian politicos, stems from a life spent surrounded by toadies, during which contact with The People is limited to glances out the window of a ZiL or the occasional photo-op walkabout...
...As early as 1993, polls showed he was far less popular than Stalin...
...Maybe it's his commitment to the ecological movement...
...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Holding the House 0 n November 5, the Republican Party will retain control of the House of Representatives...
...By contrast, Republicans have an excellent shot at capturing at least twenty of the Democrats' twenty-eight open seats...
...If anything was not done," he declared, "it was explained by the fact thatwe did not know what to do...
...While the two front-runners were squaring off for a struggle in which the fate of the nation seemed to hang in the balance and even the specter of civil JONAS BERNSTEIN is a journalist in Moscow...
...They weren't following Yeltsin...
...He should open the road for new generations of politicians in the future...
...And he could not pass up an opportunity to discuss what he believes is an anti-Gorbachev plot...
...they were tracking Gorbachev...
...After Tom Campbell won the open California seat vacated by GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...The GOP has gleefully put out a list of thirty-six top-tier Democrats who could not be enticed to run this year even by calls from 60 July 199 6 The American Spectator...
...No doubt it was professional," he said...
...Democrat Norman Minetta, the Republican advantage swelled to 236-197...
...Later that same day, deputies from the Communist Party and Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia —Gorby would later accuse the latter of being behind the attack—added insult to minor injury: they voted to grant amnesty to the slapper...
...Sonny Montgomery's Mississippi seat— representing what is now one of the most Republican districts in the nation—will almost certainly be won by Charles Pickering, a former aide to Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott...
...I won't take them from you," she reportedly sniffed...
...An American photographer told me that the Moscow bureaus of most leading U.S...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
