Culture Vultures: See How They Run
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn See How They Run G eorge W. and the State of New Hampshire have at last met, and everything went smoothly—as smoothly as Bill and Monica's first meeting. Dubya...
...But running against a lean, efficient presidential campaign pared down to a single middle initial, poor old Lamar...
...In 1996, asked why he wanted to become president, Bob Dole said, "Well, we've never had a president called Bob before...
...It's just that this time round the press is too busy doing Bob jokes to dust off the old J. Danforth catalogue...
...Instead, they thought it was the cutest thing ever: "Hey, that's so goofy...
...I'm pro-gun, pro-life, pro-God and pro-Constitution," he says...
...As New Hampshirites know, in Quebec you can drink at 18, the bars are open till 3:0o a.m., and the danseuses noes weigh under 300 lbs...
...Can you get me one...
...Unfortunately, the new New Hampshire isn't yet sufficiently liberal and progressive to tempt Maureen, Rosie, and the New Republicboys to move here and register to vote...
...But we don't have a Bob in the White House...
...I think not...
...another (more of a Fleet Street tradition) is the contrarian principle—figure out what's going to happen and then plump for the opposite just for the sake of it...
...Few presidents have pandered to minority demographic groups so assiduously—blacks, gays, soccer moms, but, above all, white male columnists who derive a substantial proportion of their income from writing about U.S...
...Four years on, we still don't...
...That's pretty much the GOP isolationist line on the efforts of PresThough none of them's a match for Sen...
...populace...
...Smith from my seat in the Senate gallery...
...But the Bauer campaign insists that this year's Willie Horton is, in fact, America's friendly neighbor to the north: It happened in Canada, he warns, it could happen here...
...Bob-wise, I'll take Smith...
...He's pro-veterans, and no-one's worked harder for the families of POWs and MIAs...
...She's been offered a top job in the Smith presidential campaign...
...No, but if he wanted a woman on the ticket, there are, thanks to Clinton, plenty of Jane Does to choose from...
...He was in fine form when I caught him a few weeks back, denouncing the Kosovo intervention and attacking Tony Blair for "his usual foppish abstractions...
...Under a Dole presidency, the short drive across the border to Magog or Sherbrooke will start looking better and better...
...But somehow his pudgy, doughy face is a tad too archetypally Bob-like and Smithesque for what Tina Brown calls "the heatseeking glamour" required of the modern presidency...
...Of course it'll never happen...
...Senator McCain...
...The only thing I don't quite understand is that resolution he sponsored to prevent Ringling Bros...
...John Kasich...
...Dole...
...Dole's stance on guns had sent her poll numbers rocketing all the way to 11 percent, down in the basement with John McCain...
...Gary Bauer...
...But that's what they said when I tipped Buchanan to win the primary...
...Dan Quayle's been laying off campaign workers, so's Lamar Alexander...
...Butit's Bob Smith who's crazy—not the guy who claims to be a dirtpoor Tennessee sharecropper and to be the model for Love Story when in truth the only thing he's ever been the direct inspiration for would seem to be the Unabomber...
...Bobcat...
...Horton, you'll recall, was the Massachusetts convict who, in the course of a weekend pass from Governor Dukakis, stabbed a man and raped a woman...
...No wonder the self-described "country-music Republican" thinks America needs a political realignment and is now toying with the idea of a third-party challenge...
...This time round, the bloodcurdling speechifier was threatening not to run: After the impeachment trial, he explained that, because of continued public support for the president, he wasn't sure that the American people deserved Alan Keyes, For once, he and the American people were in agreement: They weren't sure they deserved him either...
...But insofar as his campaign has made any impact on the public, it's only as this year's suicide mission...
...Bob Smith isn't mean-spirited — not like John McCain and the nasty little Chelsea/Hillary/Janet Reno joke he chose to deliver at a public meeting...
...Who's his vice president...
...I did this four years ago and predicted Pat Buchanan would win the New Hampshire primary...
...The crowd cheered, and I think it's safe to say that Keyes was well on his way to making Blair the Willie Horton of the 2000 campaign...
...48 August 1999 • The American Spectator...
...He came for brunch at my local inn and patronized the natives...
...He was a victim of it...
...Had Bush won re-election in 1992, I'd be living in a rusting doublewide at the back of the trailer-park down by the freight yards...
...The truth is I agree with Bob Smith on practically everything...
...for example...
...This was too much even for New Hampshire's Union-Leader, which strongly backed Pat Buchanan last time...
...Nah, she's this year's Lamar...
...and Barnum & Bailey from bringing performing elephants into the grounds of the Capitol...
...So this time, assuming Dubya has the Republican nomination sewn up, to whose doomed mast should we contrarians nail our colors...
...The wrestling and the third party, I mean...
...Amen to all that...
...Dole, for example, thinks the legal drinking age should be raised to 24—I'd like to have seen her telling young Bob that when he was over in Italy during the war...
...the media pick who gets all the press raves, but whose candidacy, in the more prosaic world of polling stations and eligible voters, doesn't actually exist...
...Campaigning in Grand Blanc, Michigan, the man whose candidacy was itself a grand blank warmed to his theme...
...But in the dumpling features of basic Bob you can discern the American ideal: the citizen legislator...
...The Grand Blanc High School football team, it turned out, were called the Bobcats...
...Now there are two approaches to the opinion business...
...He's got a great new toupee...
...I liked his answer to the Dartmouth student who asked about the apparent contradiction between the Senator's pro-life and pro-death-penalty positions: "Capital punishment certainly existed in Christ's time," said Smith...
...Say what you like about Canada's descent into moral degeneracy, but at least its watchword is "anything goes," whereas, increasingly in America, only certain things go...
...In fact, Mr...
...But here he is, back for more...
...Bob is such a regular Joe that his Christmas card last yearshowed him proudly dancing with his daughter at her wedding, under the slogan "Season's Greetings from the Father of the Bride": It was the only Yuletide greetings card still up in the Senate press gallery in February, and one can't but feel that it was hanging ironically...
...She's not exactly a disinterested party...
...But that stuff's for the birds: The Clinton-Gore team rode out Kosovo, and now Gore 'oo can resume its micro-presidential campaign of focusing on the real issues like suburban traffic jams, bicycling helmets, mandatory labels on tinned food warning you that the lid can be a bit sharp so not to try opening it on your own if you're under 21...
...as I like to think of him) can no longer afford the upkeep on his exclamation point...
...Elizabeth Dole...
...had posted in every snowbank...
...Thanks to that early jump on his rivals, his current position in the polls is somewhere between one percent and statistically unmeasurable...
...In the 1996 primary, you could hardly move in this state for all the exclamations and ejaculations Lamar...
...W hich brings us, by process of elimination, to Granite State Senator Bob Smith, the first candidate to announce officially that he was running for president, back in February...
...But in small, dogged ways, Bob Smith does...
...In the most recent survey of actual Granite State inhabitants, Mrs...
...But, alas, like Senator McCain, Alan Keyes has lost his issue...
...How your appellation plays in the Appalachians can be crucial...
...The war's over...
...Amazingly, he did—leaving Dan Rather & Co...
...He puts it this way: He doesn't mind debating Ted Kennedy but he's tired of having to debate Republicans on conservative issues...
...We do have a cat in the White House: Socks...
...Didn't you see him on 'Meet The Press...
...He came to the Masonic Hall in one of my neighboring towns and told us that "in Canada, it is now illegal to write an article or even a letter to a newspaper critical of homosexuality...
...Bob Smith...
...Sure, he may be a no-good four-flushing fornicator who's given all our nuke secrets to the Chinese, but Bill Clinton's been great for me...
...Don't do it, Bob...
...Alan Keyes...
...The importance of nomenclature in electoral politics is not to be underestimated...
...I went to a McCain breakfast at Lebanon Airport the other day, where his folks were handing out McCain 2000 cards promoting "*Honor*," "*Integrity*," "*Courage*," etc...
...Instead, after cleaning up on Clinton's sex life for eight years, we columnar types face the grim prospect off trying to grub a living from a George W. presidency, or a Gore presidency, or—God forbid — a Bradley presidency...
...Ah, but the media hands out image on a whim...
...Dubya showed up, the Granite State dropped gratefully to its knees, the Compassionate Conservative thanked us kindly and moved on somewhere else...
...As the '98 election illustrated, it's proving harder and harder to get elephants into the grounds of the Capitol — and, even when you do, they don't perform...
...The world's interest in American politics ebbs and flows: It waned during the Bush administration, MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...A GOP with no room for the Bob Smiths of the world would leave electors with a choice between two identikit parties of Rockefeller Republicans...
...Smith went to Washington...
...profiles...
...said my assistant...
...Bob Smith's running for President," scoffed Jay Leno...
...Senator Smith isn't exactly New Hampshire's famous Great Stone Face, the Old Man of the Mountains...
...On the other hand, in less fanciful moments, his big lumpy unpresidential form reminds me more of Killer Nanny Louise Woodward with a bad combover...
...Governor Bush is now raking in a gazillion dollars a day, which doesn't leave much for anyone else...
...John Doe...
...He's also anti-Federal Department of Education, anti-IMF, anti-U.N...
...Why not let him go to the White House...
...Hmm...
...More to the point, unlike most former high-school teachers, this one is capable of explaining complex subjects in a clear, intelligible way...
...That's not true...
...46 August 1999 • The American Spectator 0 0 ident Clinton's British chum to conscript American ground troops: Here we go again, another bloodthirsty madman let loose by a liberal whacko Democrat to endanger the U.S...
...Quayle is refreshingly unchanged from 1992...
...If you don't recognize the name, Lamar is the Artist Formerly Known As "Lamar...
...He's a big, sprawling bear of a man in an off-the-peg sports coat, who reminded me of Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith" in repose: The smith, a mighty man is he With large and sinewy hands And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands...
...He's lost his issue...
...One is to re-state whatever the conventional wisdom is in a more ponderous way (the New York Times method...
...Keep that in mind," said Mr...
...I spent most of the impeachment trial staring down at Mr...
...Even before he'd declared, the media had already made the senator this campaign's designated dork, now that Dan Quayle has apparently "matured...
...So nuts to him...
...The Concord Monitor scoffed at Bob for getting up in the morning, looking in his bathroom mirror, and being so deluded as to think he saw a president staring back at him...
...Bob isn't vain or touchy—not like John Kasich, whose snappish response to an innocuous Keene Sentinel reporter suggests the boyish-charm act will be hard to keep up till November z000...
...on the big night with a lot of redundant in-depth Lamar...
...affairs for foreign publications...
...So you'll be wanting two weeks off then," I say—and instantly feel bad...
...Her stand on guns impressed Maureen Dowd, earned cheers from Rosie O'Donnell, and inspired the New Republic to pronounce her views as uncannily in tune with the new "liberal, progressive New Hampshire...
...My assistant, who after hours is a Republican Party county vice-chair, caught my eye in the crowd and gave me a quizzical look: She's faxed off zillions of pieces by me for my Canadian column critical of homosexuality and, although I'm routinely denounced as a homophobic bigot, to the best of her knowledge the Mounties didn't actually have a warrant out for my arrest...
...I have a feeling I'll be doing some downsizing myself in the months ahead...
...The state Republicans face a difficult election in 2000, and the paper has now advised the big fellow (6'6") that he might like to do a Jesse Ventura in reverse—that is, move from politics to professional wrestling...
...I had some liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans over for dinner the other night and The American Spectator • August 1999 47 stuck a "Bob Smith For President" sign up to provoke them...
...Conversely, if it weren't for that blasted constitutional amendment, we'd have a third Clinton term and I could retire to the Bahamas...
Vol. 32 • August 1999 • No. 8
