2005: A Presidential Odyssey
CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER
Second Thoughts 2005: A PRESIDENTIAL ODYSSEY BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN DURING THE MORE ruminative moments of his new Speakerhood, Newt Gingrich enjoys describing himself as a "conservative...
...After making ambiguous noises about the School-Prayer Amendment and the Balanced-Budget Amendment, the President seemed to have a hard time deciding whether he was Truman in '48, Eisenhower in '58, Johnson in '68, orCarter in '78...
...What did the Dole Administration accomplish...
...It has long been and remains a national disgrace," he maintained, "that both candidates simply sidestep the defining issue of our time, the moral imperative to end the Bosnian agony by a wise yet determined use of American air power...
...The ensuing campaign was hard fought, though there were no debates...
...But the Los Angeles riots following the announcement that the jury in the seventh trial of O.J...
...Will the plan succeed...
...It transpired that the voters between the ages of 18 and 24...
...We're living in mighty strange times," he said to the pool cameras beside the plane...
...They went to the polls in unprecedented strength and...
...It would hardly be the first time that Democrats and their sympathizers in the press misjudged their adversaries, the public mood and the future itself...
...It looks to me like in the 21 st century you can kiss the laws of probability goodbye...
...The press has speculated that the Administration hopes to confuse Saddam into taking a fatal misstep...
...Jimmy Carter, as expected, was chosen to lead the delegation...
...All in all, it was a quiet time of modest prosperity and frugal, rather boring government...
...Politically speaking, the baby boom had been a bust, and former Vice President Al Gore made no attempt to seek the Democratic nomination in 2000...
...Simpson (no relation to Bart) was hopelessly deadlocked left the Governor looking soft on crime...
...Polls suggested, however, that even though the siege of Sarajevo had been going on for more than 12 years, few Americans could find it on a map...
...Given the strong feelings among his political base...
...Who would grab it this time...
...Soon afterward the Republicans nominated Governor Susan Molinari of New York, who had managed to unite most factions of the party behind her...
...But Mr...
...One tasty morsel of suspense ended in October when Hillary Rodham Clinton, now living quietly in Los Angeles, appeared on Larry King Live to endorse her estranged husband...
...Bart, not Alan...
...Governor Molinari, more conventionally, used the Bill Clinton and Mary Matalin shows...
...His advisers persuaded him to withdraw before the December New York primary, which Senator Simpson won easily...
...As President Dole's second term approached its conclusion, the country began to stretch its limbs and wonder whether it might not be ready for something different...
...His handlers had been dubious, on the theory that those who stood to gain (the much discussed Generation Z) would be unable to vote in November, and the proposal would scare the daylights out of everybody else...
...No candidate from Florida had ever come close to being elected President, and most of the early money was on Governor Beavis of California, a glamorous young man who was believed to be a Democrat...
...Second Thoughts 2005: A PRESIDENTIAL ODYSSEY BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN DURING THE MORE ruminative moments of his new Speakerhood, Newt Gingrich enjoys describing himself as a "conservative futurist...
...Enter Generation Y in the genial, unin-timidating person of Senator Simpson...
...It was rather a style, a hard-to-define tone to the whole occasion suggesting both that a new generation had arrived on the scene and that several intermediate generations had been skipped...
...Few people ever heard this phrase before he gave it utterance, and many listeners have imprudently dismissed it as a contradiction in terms...
...who had previously turned out in very small numbers, saw the amendment as a massive reinforcement of their own interest group...
...Paglia were pale and tight-lipped as they boarded Air Force Three at Andrews, weighed down by an evident sense of responsibility for world peace...
...No new orphanages ever got built...
...When Democratic National Committee Chairman Marion Barry announced that he was tired of supporting losers, it was widely speculated that he had Simpson in mind...
...There was no evading the truth...
...It wasn't that President Dole, for whom the aging process seemed to have stopped around 1970, looked so much older than his successor...
...The other two members were Jesse Jackson and Defense Secretary Camille Paglia...
...Senator Simpsons promise to seek a constitutional amendment reducing the voting age to 12 was probably the decisive stroke...
...AT FIRST it looked like a hoax...
...Why should the rest of us let conservatives keep the futurist game all to themselves...
...But the boost in the polls that White House spokesmen had predicted never materialized...
...President Simpson decided not to bomb Iraq right away, though he did send a carrier group to the Red Sea...
...The new President contributed to this effect by wearing a one-size-fits-all baseball cap backward as he delivered his inaugural address...
...Only time will tell...
...Those people who wondered what strange contrasts Inauguration Day would bring out weren't disappointed...
...IN FACT SIMPSON was something of a dark horse...
...Whether Saddam, after so many failed attempts, had finally judged an American President correctly remains to be seen, for the crisis has not yet been fully resolved...
...Term limits became a reality when Democrats suddenly decided that Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms presented more persuasive arguments for them than Congressmen Tom Foley and Dan Rosten-kowski had a few years earlier...
...So let's fast-forward a decade to see what the last few years of this disappointing millennium and the beginning of the next one hold in store...
...Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, saw no reason to go to war for Madonna, whom many Islamic clergymen regarded as a worse threat than Saddam...
...Saddam Hussein, desperate to get the United Nations sanctions against Iraq lifted, confirmed to CNN the next day that he was holding her hostage...
...There's only one thing left to say at a time like this: "Keep hope alive...
...Or will an inexperienced White House become tangled in knots of its own making...
...Jackson, as always, was self-possessed and articulate, if more laconic than usual...
...George Will declared these accusations nonsense: "Pundits who ask of a Presidential candidate only that he promise to cut Social Security and the defense budget should remember the fate of the Gracchus brothers in the second century B.C...
...Just what it would try next was unclear, but after Thurmond (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) disappeared while swimming the Chesapeake Bay on his 100th birthday, pollsters discovered a public wish foranew generation of leadership...
...Contrary to nearly all predictions, the budget did finally get balanced, thanks in part to the export boom brought about by trade agreements that had been ratified during the Clinton years...
...Senator Simpson made most of his appearances on MTV3...
...So far this campaign is about as negative as tapioca" Anthony Lewis of the New York Times responded that, as viewed from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the campaign seemed remarkably lacking in substance...
...The inaugural ball had scarcely gotten under way before the video arrived from Baghdad...
...Apart from minor tinkering, welfare reform eluded the new Congress...
...His Presidency remained as it had begun, the classic pudding without a theme...
...After a week or so of rising criticism from Hollywood, the President has just sent a high-level delegation to Baghdad to negotiate Madonna's release, if it can be obtained without unacceptable concessions...
...Much of the press complained that the public had never before been subjected to such negative advertising, and that both candidates were refusing to discuss the issues...
...To start with, the last two years of the Clinton Administration proceeded about the way you would expect...
...the future is what politics claims to be about, and the game is fun to play...
...Ignoring the pleas of his party's leaders in Congress, Clinton insisted on running again in 1996, but his campaign was hampered by the fact that only in Massachusetts were other Democrats on the ballot willing to appear with him in public...
...Then the new Secretary of State remembered that the rock star had last been seen in Amman, Jordan, one of the stops on her Arabian Midnights comeback tour...
...Consultations with the Gulf War allies had given the new government a mixed picture...
...OnElection Day Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole carried 47 states...
...He telephoned her manager, whom he knew slightly from his own career with Motown, and learned the worst: Madonna had disappeared from her hotel in the company of three (some witnesses thought four) burly men with moustaches about the time the President was taking his oath of office...
...Historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin who describe it as an eight-year nap are not completely wrong, but there were some positive achievements...
...Crime declined a little, for reasons nobody could identify...
...After all...
...In retrospect...
...Former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen agreed to run, but his heart was obviously not in it...
...The country seemed happy to have a President again who had seen combat in World War II and tacitly agreed to regard Clinton's generation as an experiment never to be repeated in the White House...
...Why would Madonna be asking for Jimmy Carter...
...despite Molinari's support among women and conservatives, gave Simpson a convincing margin of victory...
...When Ross Perot teamed up with ex-Congressman Kweisi Mftime for a third-party ticket, the Democrats lost even the District of Columbia...
...The new Vice President compensated with her resplendent gowns—she wore five in the course of the day—and a strikingly original hairdo that became known overnight simply as an Arianna...
...The torch was about to be passed...
...First Newt, then Bart, now Madonna...
...Carter and Ms...
...I guess it's millions for defense now but not one cent for Madonna," ex-President Dole quipped the day before they left...
...What the Newter was saying, together with deeper meanings left unsaid, deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness by anyone who has hopes of peering beyond the sorry present...
...Britain and France were surprisingly belligerent, perhaps because the voting ages in both countries had recently been lowered to 10...
Vol. 78 • February 1995 • No. 2
