RUNNING
Walsh, Lawrence
BY LAWRENCE WALSH The idea was to find John Judis and go over our coverage of the Democrats' mid-term conference. He had come to Philadelphia from Chicago to inspect the neoliherals, so called, who...
...He'd thought all this through...
...Yes, yes, the conference was a resolute bore and something of a fraud (no dissent), but better to beard the Democrats for their cowardice in swallowing whole the Israeli invasion of Lebanon than to do patronizing, forty-inch stories on Annie Glenn's victory over stuttering...
...I knew no one who would willingly go off on an Easter egg hunt in search of Wheeler's political essence...
...He has his back up...
...Some party of the people, the man sniffed...
...I'd learn soon enough that Wheeler was committed to making a Congressional race in '84...
...It was to be unity RUNNING The first hurrah at all costs, or at least a game appearance of unity...
...I took in (he "workshops," the catered merriments, the corridor gossip, the speeches crackling with tedium, the hearings on party resolutions...
...Since then, we've backed and filled, quit jobs in semi-principled huffs, swore that we'd never set another gainful foot in a newsroom anywhere—and embarrassingly run into one another at stories here and there over the past fifteen years...
...That's as morally ruinous as its opposite...
...The whole drill is about 1986, don't you see...
...I don't know from peace of mind...
...He demanded to know when The Progressive would leave off with its "runny millennial-ism," its "droning, sloganeering chat" about radical change, its "deluded" contempt for anything smacking of gradualism, and its "whacko chiliasm" when it came to the "near-term utility and fortunes" of the Democratic Party...
...The absurd happens...
...Wheeler is on guard...
...I'd get the lawyers from the old-line Philadelphia firms who do convertible debenture work but dabble in leftish causes and campaigns, go off on an occasional ACLU jag...
...Wheeler's mind, it was true, was fast and sharp, but it was not enormously suspectible to the contributions of others...
...then he would have to fix his teeth It seemed my job to tell Wheeler to forget it...
...If corporate America has a broodmare in the Republican Party, it has the world's longest one-night stand going with its girl friend, the Democratic Party...
...He had a mean, reckless tongue, and he liked to tell people to go to hell...
...I'd maybe get the food cranks, the guilt-riven coupon clippers, the Quakers in Haverford and Bryn Mawr, and your pal Judis's Narberth madonna, who would make a swell receptionist at my h.q...
...not for him our "mindlessly perfectionist ethic" that made of any reform movement an engine of vast iniquity...
...And utterly beside the point...
...Over the course of the next two days in Philadelphia (the conference had degenerated, if that were possible, into an applause-o-meter contest between Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale) we talked politics, hurray-for-Wheeler politics, Wheelerismo, in bars and out, across restaurant tables and on foot...
...Hobbes merits your close attention, I said...
...Wears bow ties...
...It was a simple matter of going for the real thing...
...I have here on a cocktail napkin my notes from his rolling critique of what he called the Left's "condescending attitude" toward organized politics...
...The money...
...He understood that he would be setting his soul at great peril by running, never mind winning and holding office...
...He seemed to think he could smuggle himself into the Democratic Party, play possum for a while, and then burst out of the confines of office and pronounce himself a Along East River Drive, Wheeler talked vigorously of phone banks, direct mail, PAC money...
...Pennsylvania's Thirteenth Congressional district would be tough to crack, I said...
...He wouldn't get anywhere, no matter how he might prosecute his bizarre scheme...
...it could never happen...
...who'd give $50 to a candidate favoring universal military service as a means of undermining the Army with hundreds of thousands of the critical, resistant young...
...I like them, and for reasons that perhaps only a clinician could explain...
...There was no theme...
...Hah-hah...
...You know what's almost as bad as the dopes from The Times and The Post and the networks...
...As a candidate, he'd have to trade in his Datsun for a Ford, become a churchgoer, and get himself a new wife...
...He reminded me of the drunks of yore who'd tumble out of the bleachers at Connie Mack Stadium and, in a hallucinated quest for transcendence, run out to the infield and offer to spell a hapless second baseman...
...Wheeler said he'd work on all this...
...I do not think, as 1 once did...
...I still couldn't see it, but nothing I said would discourage him...
...Was against the freeze this summer...
...His interest, his determination, as I would see, was the product of many nights of sober lucubration...
...This is some of what I wanted to take up with John Judis...
...From the podium, DNC Chairman Charles Mannatt, a millionaire banker-lawyer and cookie-cutter apparatchik, oozed bonhomie and performed ridiculously as a sort of Ricardo Montalban, rolling out the Harts, Glenns, Cranstons, and Mondales as if they were sedans in the Chrysler Le Baron series...
...Wheeler on the main-course issues didn't add up to someone a reporter could write about confidently...
...He is a close friend, though I rarely see him...
...You could tell: The learned captions running along the cases left no doubt about it (and, in the bargain, were a better read by far than the boilerplate of pulled punches on the Middle East, the economy, and Reagan's military buildup issuing from the 900 or so conferees meeting a few hundred yards down the street...
...Individualism has a rap sheet 8,000 miles long...
...What did Hart have to say...
...I pressed on...
...yelled—and I do mean yelled—the woman of the house in a Main Line suburb where Judis was staying This blast of maternal im-periousncss rattled mc unaccountably...
...He was trying to squeeze some life out of the Democrats, and was not having much luck...
...A blowhard...
...It didn't make sense to me...
...But I care about pols...
...How, Wheeler, could you win with those people...
...Surely I did not need to disclose to him the awesome cost of this urge to seat himself in the House of Representatives...
...I do noi have j good opinion of the journalists who...
...Neo-nobody," said Wheeler...
...Your prudishness about power and those who want it is the sorriest thing of all," Wheeler said...
...I told him he had a hair across his ass...
...He knew his own mind well enough to push on in good faith...
...In a new Philadelphia district...
...It had never sent a Democrat to Washington...
...I simply couldn't imagine people charging at him to grab at his cufflinks...
...He grew bitterly adjectival...
...Wheeler was now a journeyman reporter at One of America's Great Newspapers...
...We understood this and quit for the night...
...The Democrats had drawn all the bootlicking, power-fawning scribes in the country, just about all of them intent on filing "color" pieces and every form of written bitchery for the nation's news columns and "Style" pages...
...He had sought out the funereal Egyptians instead, Lawrence Walsh, an associate editor of The Progressive, votes absentee from Philadelphia...
...much better to be rude and call the party on its failure to come out hard and clear for the nuclear freeze than to suck a thumb in print about polls and charisma and other goofy abstractions while the economy was flying apart...
...Of course, there are risks," he said...
...We went off to the bar next door at the Hilton...
...And credibly...
...The mummies were a better show by far than the conferees, if only because the Egyptians were clearly dead while one could not be sure about the Democrats I like Wheeler...
...I suspected that in Montgomery County Jeffersonian democracy was but a piece of quaint sentimental hackery, what was left of it, and that Wheeler would look like a vindictive soaker of the rich...
...The party got used, all right, and so did those who called themselves Democrats in the House and Senate...
...Trades on his Korean war duty as a Marine and aide to Chesty Puller...
...Answer: Powerlessness...
...We take this vow of chastity when it comes to power...
...After college, we conferred about the future...
...Go for it, Wheeler...
...Against the advice of my Progressive colleagues—in the face of their sneering incredulity would be more like it—I'd come in from Madison to see for myself if the Democrats were as deep into meaninglessness as the writing Left thinks...
...But I could not have been more mistaken...
...It was, of course, my friend Wheeler, the pseudonymous Wheeler...
...He got a nice hand, some of the news people joining in...
...Pigs fly...
...It may turn out that I've waited too long to get started...
...Won in 78 and '80 over faceless Democrats, 71-to-29...
...One noted an ominous, Nixonian defen-siveness, an eagerness to duke it out with supposed adversaries...
...If John Cheever had been Philadelphia-born, he'd have set his stories in the Thirteenth, a natural locale...
...What peace of mind...
...Oh, look, I wouldn't the first time, in '84, that's clear enough...
...Friends fumbled our phone messages (and refused to take them: "How do you expect me to write all this down when I'm nursing my baby...
...And he didn't give a good goddamn about his wardrobe...
...And unbeatable, it seemed...
...I sometimes wonder what kind of a friendship we have, oiled as it is, in the main, by a common distaste for the work we do, but Wheeler is a fine fellow...
...He had studied the incumbent: "In his seventh term...
...I did not have a good grip on things—I figured that Wheeler had got a good look at the people milling about the convention floor—the delegates, the governors, the members of Congress—and then concluded, God almighty, I'm better than this bunch...
...Where do you get off to make fun of politics the high-horse way you all do at The Nation, In These Times, Working Papers, The Progressive, Christ, even The New Republic...
...Wheelerismo would confuse everyone...
...Something like that must have taken hold of my friend...
...And that was that...
...I saw no future there for Wheeler, or in fact for anyone, in stumping for social spending, for a less porcine military, for unilateral moves toward disarmament, for an assault on economic concentration and regressive taxation, for fairness...
...Wheeler said he had to check in with his desk and that he wanted to see me the next day...
...That's it...
...As a Democrat...
...My God, the world-weariness you trade in...
...Suck up to the comers, the cover boys and girls, the Harts of this world...
...He had dull, glaucous eyes, lousy, almost jack-o'-lantern teeth, and the thickening trunk of the ruined athlete...
...He wore a journalist's scapularlike credential around his neck, and he looked instantly familiar, even in the distortion and glare and sheen coming off the lapis lazuli...
...At the 1980 Democratic convention, the man reminded Hart, only 5 per cent of the delegates earned less than $12,000 a year...
...I said in as politic a way as I was able that he drank too much, and that I couldn't see what he had in the way of magnetism...
...that the politician is the crown of creation...
...Surprise, surprise...
...on the strength of a risk-free, greaseless/stainlcsssense of virtue, mediate <>ur iiaiion.il arguments in the secure employ of the news-gathering combines...
...the food co-opers and the back-lot economists praying their knees off for the post-Keynesian disaster that might finally lend meaning to their lives and their 'work,' such as it is...
...But not to try...
...It wasn't too long before we were beating up on our brother and sister journalists...
...Judis and I never met up...
...Two blocks away, I killed some time at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which offered an exhibit of mummies...
...Not for Wheeler (long a subscriber, by the way, to the publications he ticked off) the magazine Left's "deterministic, paralyzing conviction" of the futility of traditional, partisan political striving...
...I soaked up atmospherics...
...We had dethroned ourselves of reason and sailed off into the unintelligible and the unreportable...
...But I have to think I'd do better than the ciphers the Democrats ran in the last two times out...
...In 1984...
...Oh you bet, I said...
...At the cab stand, as I thought how unlike My Dinner with Andre my bar siege with Wheeler had been, he said...
...1 took lots of notes...
...But it is too much the defeatist view to see in it only the pathological and not the hopeful...
...I was bored spitlcss, The Democratic National Committee had perverted the proceedings with an enforced conformity of outlook and behavior that would have done the Politburo proud...
...That's when my ministry to the Republicans should pay off...
...Would I talk with him about it the next afternoon...
...The underrepre-sentation of low- and moderate-income Democrats could only be worse at this Philadelphia meeting, the reporter said, because the delegate selection was an inside job, as everyone knew: Mannatt and his flunkies had shut out the obstreperous poor...
...You go to Congress...
...Arouses not the slightest enthusiasm at home or in the Congress...
...or who would do almost anything to help small business, saw in the market economy much worth saving, yet liked worker takeovers...
...I told him I thought he wouldn't hold up well when the examining angels from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the FBI started routinely to poke around the outre doings of an unruly life...
...my gorge rises with anyone's at the timidity and hoggishncss of the general run of men ami women who ask for votes...
...Wheeler and I go way back...
...Let it be said, 1 find American politicians more compelling figures than the prisses and Nosey Parkers of the press corps...
...No one "used" the Democratic Party except the corporations...
...Are we ever on board...
...The nomination is not thought worth having, so the ward leaders ask for Chinese volunteers...
...It's like priests laying in a supply of skin mags...
...High petulance at $20 a year...
...Yes, of course, he could see that this was so...
...Then run son-of-a-bitching hard...
...There's all kinds of prurience, but name me one worse than the above-the-fray journalist toadying up to the pol...
...I have worked with him, bickered with him, had piles and piles of beers with him, have been churlish and cynical and wrong-headed with him, but I have never wasted time with him...
...Through the glass that domed over some grinning remains I saw another gold-bricker...
...I'll smuggle myself into the party and volunteer...
...The Left press gave offense, too...
...But, what the hell, tomorrow we'd talk about his "campaign...
...But look, we're no better than the pols...
...I said I'd put his questions to the other editors when I returned to Madison and get back to him...
...I think the world of Wheeler, but there in the Hilton bar I had an intense desire to be somewhere, anywhere, else...
...Can't touch, no no no...
...And he would have to unpack the wild, all-comers truculence he had carried around for so long...
...I had to agree with him on this...
...It's coming to be their time—they're due...
...We'll see...
...It took a good two hours in the presence of John Glenn, the narcoleptic astronaut-Senator from Ohio, to compose me) I have yet to shake John Judis's hand...
...It took in most of the Main Line, and was the very soul of rich, complacent suburban Republicanism...
...out of despondency or desperation, as I had...
...He had some ideas...
...They're as exciting as kelp...
...All right, all right, I said, the impossible happens...
...Wheeler, I said, read Hobbes: Power riddles every aspect of life as both ends and means, and comes into a wholly ungovernable life of its own...
...I identify fiercely with their sins, follies, and descent into banality and compromise, if not moral extinction...
...If I had a woman opponent in the '84 primary, I really wouldn't know what to do...
...He knew that he could become a casualty rather than a master of the political culture...
...It's depressing to think about, but I could probably count on the Volvo Democrats, the people who send UNICEF cards at Christmas and brag about how their kids don't watch television...
...The delegates' median income was $37,000, and 45 per cent of them had more than four years of higher education...
...And if nothing else, if absolutely nothing else, he could say more in a campaign than he had in fifteen years seated before a type"Am I didactic...
...It's you" Wheeler said, leading with his torso...
...Wheeler wanted to know what else was new...
...What then...
...Harvard and Yale...
...It didn't happen...
...He'd have to trade in his Datsun for a Ford, probably start going to church and come into the possession of another wife...
...But why they preoccupy me, I don't know...
...I asked if he had listed himself in the Yellow Pages...
...Wheeler roached back his hair...
...he said he had decided to run for Congress...
...Everything argued against success...
...I said he wasn't one to put up with the indignities of a campaign...
...If I had one, I would urge my sister to marry him, now that he's divorced...
...I was certain now that my friend would go ahead with this unsound project...
...It's one thing to kiss Kennedy's ass in a morning interview and then gut him at dinner that same night—that's just the folkways of this business...
...Someone would come upon the bench warrants sworn out for his arrest in seven or eight states for unpaid parking tickets, or the libel suit brought by a pair of Mormons, or the time he drove DWI from Rutland, Vermont, to Montpelier with a woman from a Montreal paper in what a justice of the peace would call "an advanced state of undress...
...Fur mam I know, ami for several of the people I work with, politicians and electoral politics arc but a scum on the waters of life...
...His constituent services are so-so...
...I know the district well...
...I'm going to run for the House...
...I had given only my surname and phone number...
...Did he suppose he had a natural constituency...
...Question for you: What's more corrupting than power...
...I had not seen the Democrats en masse since the summer of 1964, when I was a mere droplet in a seersucker sea of officious collegians working for Lyndon Johnson at the Atlantic City convention...
...Where does it come from...
...We pretty much put the conference behind us...
...I told him not to catechize me...
...Yeah, no banging, but you can cheat down deep...
...The real reason they find reform and reformers so repellent is that under the covers at night they tell themselves they're really better people than the reformers...
...We were both disinclined toward work, so we wandered, one by one, into newspapering as employment of last resort...
...nurturing of a democratic imagination, to appall "the parlor socialists on the campuses, in the foundations and the Left press...
...Butyou people...
...They resent anyone who makes headway in conventional politics...
...It is not a flattering pose...
...I was, after all, with him on much of this, and he knew it...
...Such a homely, romantic, McGuffey's Reader faith in one's self—in the ability of one man or one woman to still make some kernel of difference—has, I realize, made for towering mischief in other hands in earlier times...
...He called himself "an independent contractor in political ideas...
...Wheeler said the best thing he'd witnessed was an exchange between Gary Hart and a naughty reporter who asked him at an "issues forum" just who the Democrats were—and were for—these days...
...I rose to the defense of The Progressive...
...I figured—and this was a strain...
...Lawyer...
...I should like, in the end, to say this about Wheeler: He is far, far more right than wrong— or crazy...
...If he had an abiding fear, it was that a good woman would, as he had, see the percentage in a patient, lose-onei win-one strategy...
...1 partook of the Democratic fare in the downtown hotels and at the grubby convention hall in West Philadelphia...
...I asked him to expand on this interesting proposition, but he waved me off...
...or thought bilingual education was a cruel liberal joke but was enthusiastic about busing...
...Drink with them, eat and play tennis with them, and just about everything else, of course...
...He had come to Philadelphia from Chicago to inspect the neoliherals, so called, who would be on display...
...Which is what I am," he said...
...If, against all reason and odds, Wheeler got anywhere, he would, he said, become an object of ridicule from the "I-am-more-left-than-thou backbiters too lazy or wimpy to seek power themselves...
...I was a good scout...
...I said I couldn't think of one off hand...
...or who would protect abortion rights, but regarded abortion itself as an uncomplicated evil in most cases...
...And I agreed, too, that he'd be dismissed as another lesser-of-two-evils candidate, one more ersatz radical...
...One knew these Egyptians were dead...
...But after about a day of this...
...He was a mess...
...I'm sick of this fagged-out sense of the vanity of trying to do something in office, I really am...
...So what do we do...
...With Wheelerismo and me, it's becoming a little like it was for Graham Greene struggling toward Roman Catholicism: If you can get past God, the Immaculate Conception should prove a minor problem...
...If I was certain of anything then, it was that the matter would die there, out in front of the Hilton in the dirty heat of a drunken June night in our home town...
...I didn't want to psychologize a friend, to parse the prose of his nascent ambition, but I had to know what drove him to play hob with his peace of mind in the cut and thrust of politics...
...He expects his first hurrah, this stubborn, solitary (and so doomed...
...to have a quarrel with life itself...
...Your basic turgid, anonymous, moderate Republican...
...Cramming his attributes into words here seems foolish...
...I do not think he is anybody's idea of a madman, but single-mindedness didn't become him...
...We were high school and college classmates, and once had nearly the same census-tract background—we shared neighborhood, family income, schooling, class, and religious "characteristics...
...Only the possible entry of a woman in the Democratic primary seemed to unnerve him...
...It seemed time to look in on them again...
...It was entitled to its skeptical view of anyone who thought he could "smuggle" himself into the Democratic Party, play possum for a term or two, and then burst out of the confines of office—as a socialist—like a stripper from a cake...
...Boy, are we on board...
...Well, the former divinity student said, what was really important was that at least the Democrats weren't as rich as the Republicans...
...His patriotic, mildly nationalistic, anti-systematic, intellectually unprepossessing "politics" would be derided as clownish, as myopic—just so much whistling in the gathering dark of 1980s America...
...To waste time with talk of third parties, "consensus-building, new this, alternative that" was to "give up on life...
...Iknew I could not hold up under a fresh onslaught of alcohol, and it didn't look as if Wheeler could either...
...But I really don't want to fill in people's swimming pools...
...That is not my view...
...I told him voters didn't like that in a candidate...
...He's no Neanderthal, but he votes wrong on most labor and economic issues...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
