Scrapbook
Scrapbook WORRIED ABOUT DOLE? JOIN THE CROWD At a private Washington reception this past week, one GOP strategist was asked virtually the same question...
...Try “wicked,” or, better still, “evil...
...It’s oddly nice to know that the Left is back...
...Titled “A Voice, Not an Echo” (itself an evocation of Barry Goldwater’s slogan in 1964), it assailed the Democrats and the Republicans—“the DemReps”—as a “two-party duopoly,” “essentially one corporate party with two heads,” albeit “wearing different makeup...
...Clinton’s Health Care Task Force is seen stealing extra yogurt from the dispenser...
...Striking about the manifesto was its unabashed use of the language of the Left...
...And the old Left, not the updated, politer one...
...At a lunch in Boston attended by about 400 people, mostly Republicans and conservatives, one prominent businessman stood up, identified himself as a Dole supporter and donor, and asked the speaker (who works for this magazine, but we won’t tell you which of us) whether Dole could possibly continue to run as bad a campaign as he has so far...
...One of the Democrats, a senior member of the White House staff, expressed amazement at how easy it had been for the president to preempt so many of Dole’s issues and initiatives...
...Sure, they don’t engage in open, head-to-head warfare, but as a matter of simple fact, they’re rather bold...
...And so the buzz about Dole goes among both Democrats and Republicans around July 4, 1996— just 20 months after the biggest and most significant Republican victory of our time...
...Clinton...
...We read of “oligopolists” and “autocrats...
...JOIN THE CROWD At a private Washington reception this past week, one GOP strategist was asked virtually the same question by three prominent Democrats: “When is Dole going to begin doing something...
...Also striking about the document was that, for a manifesto, there was really no program in it...
...only a harsh indictment of the major parties...
...Two gay men were discovered on a desk by a workman...
...Another young employee showed up in a short skirt, bending over in sight of Mrs...
...His party is the Green party, and last week he issued something of a manifesto in the pages of the Nation...
...Heads nodded in agreement...
...The locution was popular in the Reagan administration, and the tradition, in this country at least, dates back to the Carter administration, when two pro-Palestinian mayors on the West Bank were blown up in their booby-trapped cars (“cowardly acts”) in 1980...
...But Republicans around the country are asking similar questions...
...Nader never indicated what he would run on, apart from a paragraph of generalities about a “modest-sized party” that “focuses on new and stronger tools of democracy,” “breaks through the DemRep taboos,” and “brings into progressive politics a young generation of Americans...
...The cowardly avoid doing things that might get them beheaded...
...Just a week earlier, on June 15, speaking of an IRA bomb that was detonated in Manchester, the president condemned “this brutal and cowardly act of terrorism...
...Aldrich’s description of the the White House Mess is by itself worth the price of the book...
...Gary Aldrich’s memoir will get widespread attention for the immediately relevant charges it features—that the White House allowed staffers without proper security clearance access to classified documents, among other illegal things...
...The second Democrat, a member of the Clinton cabinet, was incredulous when told it appeared that Dole would hold off unveiling his economic plan until the Republican convention in August...
...Bill Clinton, Christopher Dodd...
...The parties are merely Tweedledum and Tweedledee, just as George Wallace, another crusading anti-establishmentarian, alleged...
...Not everyone got the message...
...Yet some of the most revealing passages in Unlimited Access have nothing to do with breaking the law, but with crimes against civility, good taste, and personal hygiene...
...According to Aldrich, despite the prohibition against petty thievery, “we had a major problem with interns walking off with laptop computers...
...Wicked” is more like it...
...The fons et origo of this oratorical set piece, as far as we can tell, was the Vatican...
...When a bus bomb killed 20 in Israel in March, Spain spoke out against “blind and cowardly terrorism,” German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel described the attack as “cowardly and abhorrent,” and Boutros Boutros-Ghali called it a “a brutal and cowardly act...
...Nader and his Greens are now on the ballot in seven states, including California, generally agreed to be a must-win for Clinton...
...When they weren’t making life difficult for the janitorial staff, Aldrich recalls, many staffers were, in violation of the liberal creed, bringing government into the bedroom—or at least the bedroom into government...
...at least you know where they stand...
...One amorous lesbian couple monopolized a good part of a communal shower...
...The third Democrat, heavily involved in the reelection campaign, couldn’t believe that months of Clinton campaign advertising had gone unanswered by the Republican National Committee...
...COWARDLY CUSTARD The June 24 Saudi Arabian bombing led President Clinton to warn that “the cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished...
...On December 15, 1969, Pope Paul VI referred to Maoist bombings in Rome and Milan as “cowardly and wicked terrorist misdeeds...
...But every country has adopted it...
...They’re just “further corporatizing the Democratic party while signaling to progressives that they have nowhere else to go” (except, now, to Nader...
...Happy Independence Day RALPHING UP THE GREENS Buckle your chin strap, America: The man they call “consumer-advocate Ralph Nader” is running for president...
...It’s true that, in politics, overconfidence often goes before a fall, and there was a fair amount of over-confidence in these comments...
...Let’s not forget that the latest attack was in response to Saudi Arabia’s recent beheading of four other terrorists...
...the “major Clinton nominations” are “all Wall Street-approved...
...At one point, Aldrich says, “Craig Livingstone actually had to issue warnings to the Clinton staffers and interns that passing bad checks to the handicapped man who ran the Secret Service gift shop would not be tolerated...
...Enough already...
...presidents every time a bomb goes off...
...UNLIMITED ACCESS, LIMITED HYGIENE Unlimited Access, a new book by a retired FBI agent once assigned to the Clinton White House, is out this week from Regnery...
...If there is one act more predictable than the Pledge of Allegiance before school, it’s the invocation of “cowardice” by U.S...
...There’s something weird about calling terrorists cowardly...
...This, apparently, was the limit: The first lady promptly issued an order requiring White House staff to wear undergarments to work...
...Others throw garbage on the floor, toss coffee on the walls, refuse to use the recycling bins, and “double dip” from the drink machines...
...A member of Mrs...
...And for something Green, there was barely a chirp about environmentalism...
...It’s worse than any of us suspected,” said the businessman...
...There is no “counterpull,” Nader complained, “to the corporate, right-wing pull...
...Clinton has paid “obeisance to the nuclear power and timber industries, and to the auto industry on fuel economy...
...As Aldrich tells it, members of the Clinton administration were sloppy, had bad phone manners, and indulged a seemingly uncontrollable urge to be rude to the help...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 42
