SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Soul-Searching Time With the Bill and Bob Show off the air, your faithful political correspondents are now engaged in their traditional post-election ritual of beating...
...But the media can damn-well sit down and do a little dark-night-of-the-soul-searching its own se-li See y'all around the roundtables...
...Clinton knows Dole called for a special prosecutor in Whitewater while he was on his way to his mother's funeral...
...I've seen him go from sun-up to past midnight on the campaign trail without flagging...
...I think of it as my Erwin Knoll vote for the decade...
...Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram...
...One is the rather remarkable willingness of pundits to trash President Clinton's "character...
...Those who fought in our war and those who fought against it all deserve credit...
...As near as I can tell, it's one of those freak metabolisms that turns food directly into energy...
...During the Fall of Dick Morris (this year's most satisfying event), there was a flapette over the fact that the Clintons and the Gores had all called Morris post-fall to commiserate with him...
...No, they didn't, and they should have...
...It took me a minute to figure out that she's probably never met the man, that almost none of these people who carry on in public about Bill Clinton as though he were a moral sewer have ever even dealt with him...
...They didn't do that for Kimba Wood...
...A couple of points seem to me worth making...
...Clinton signed a welfare bill he didn't believe in, and Dole ran on a tax cut he didn't believe in...
...Woe is we...
...From David Brock to Gary Aldrich, you never read such an astonishing collection of unsourced crap in your life...
...As near as I can tell, the D.C...
...They both took special-interest and laundered money...
...Gene Lyons's book Fools for Scandal does not paint a pretty picture of the national press corps—which missed the entire S&L scandal to begin with—on the Whitewater story...
...When you're dealing with sleazy people, you will notice they tend to assume everyone else is sleazy, too...
...But has anyone ever considered the man's metabolism...
...We tend to storm about the roundtables like King Lear, gnashing our teeth and wailing...
...Of course, Dole's generation did have a better war than Clinton's, but that's not Clinton's fault...
...The Senator from ADM, Dole thinks Clinton broke his word during negotiations on last year's budget bill...
...Not to mention our total failure to get the candidates to talk about anything real...
...media corps puts Clinton's fondness for Big Macs on exactly the same level as his having committed adultery...
...Dole certainly proved, in his 1974 Senate race, that he'll do anything to get elected...
...OK, so it was not a great campaign on the part of the pols...
...When I heard Mona Charen one night on "Capitol Gang" refer casually to "Vince Foster's murder"—without anyone correcting her—I realized it was allie-allie-come-in-free on the Prez...
...Jerry Falwell and other players on the "Christian right" have been distributing the loony videotape "The Clinton Chronicles" for four years now, in which Clinton is accused of drug-dealing and murder...
...Entire books have been published about the Clintons by people who don't know them from a hole in the ground...
...If I had Clinton's energy and did as much as he does, I could eat twice as much...
...He also ate all day...
...But the references to Clinton's "appetites" (see Maureen Dowd's columns), to Clinton's "sensual weakness" (see Joe Klein, that paragon of honor), to Clinton as a "liar," "untrustworthy," "unprincipled" (see everybody) were endless...
...But au contraire...
...You may think that we take ourselves and our overtime off to some Mexican beach, there to sip margaritas and wax cynical...
...SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Soul-Searching Time With the Bill and Bob Show off the air, your faithful political correspondents are now engaged in their traditional post-election ritual of beating themselves over the head...
...The media, like the French Army, are always refighting the last war...
...Actually, we report immediately to a series of panels, conferences, forums, and roundtables to figure out how we screwed it up this time...
...I know we were treated to the full-bore "liberal-media" dodge in the waning days of BobDole's campaign, but nonpartisan observers must have been a little bewildered by the extent to which it is considered perfectly acceptable to attack Clinton in the vilest terms...
...This time we couldn't even get the electorate interested, for God's sake...
...They're both politicians to the bone...
...As one whose fondness for beer and barbecue is near-legendary in some circles, I'm in no position to criticize here...
...Frankly, it's starting to look to me as though Susan McDougal, who may be guilty of gross fraud in California, has more integrity than anyone on the prosecution side...
...Damned if I could see any great moral difference between BobDole and Bill Clinton...
...One night on Crossfire Linda Chavez expressed her moral revulsion over Bill Clinton in a way that made me believe she knew him intimately, and must have spent long hours listening to him plot political crimes and misdemeanors...
...Even James Stewart's book about Whitewater just proves we are all the prisoners of our sources...
...I hereby declare my own lack of a dog in this fight: I didn't vote for Clinton—someone had to stay mad about his signing the welfare bill...
...They didn't do that for Lani Guinier, noted the media...
Vol. 60 • December 1996 • No. 12
