TIPPER CAN DO AND AL GORE TOO
REES, MATTHEW
TIPPER CAN DO AND AL GORE TOO by Matthew Rees Last November, after Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua and Honduras, President Clinton dispatched a delegation led by Tipper Gore to assess the...
...But this elastic notion was too much even for Hillary, who according to the New York Times expressed reservations about its "political and financial feasibility...
...As Hillary Clinton, Ira Magaziner, and others crafted the administration's health-care proposal back in 1993, Tipper had one goal in mind: guaranteed treatment for anyone with a mental disorder that posed "a serious risk for functional impairment in family, work, school or community activities...
...An article in Daily Variety, based on a secret audio tape of the meeting, quoted Tipper calling the 1985 senate hearing "a mistake" that "sent the wrong message...
...He described how everything she did was stage managed for the press, quoting her aide Nathan Naylor telling television reporters how to get the best picture during the clean-up: "She's gonna be shovellin' mud...
...As her image changes, her popularity may wane, which wouldn't help her husband's hopes for becoming president...
...The American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental disorders lists, for example, "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," which it describes as "a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least six months...
...Part of Mrs...
...The three are now working to expand the reach of this parity requirement...
...This has led to her longstanding interest in mental health—she holds bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology—and after the 1992 election she assumed two titles: second lady and mental health adviser to the president...
...Tipper's relief work garnered lots of coverage, including interviews with CNN and the Today show...
...The impact could be even more dramatic if her work with Domenici and Wellstone succeeds...
...If I could rewrite the script I certainly would...
...The Littleton, Colorado, shootings, however, gave Tipper an opportunity to speak out against violence...
...What does this mean in policy terms...
...Since her husband became vice president, she's barely uttered a peep about the entertainment industry, which gives milAsked by Cokie Roberts about her earlier challenge to the entertainment industry, Tipper begged off with the excuse that "it's a complex issue...
...lions to the Democratic party, and she's disassociated herself from the PMRC...
...And should he succeed, her model will be less Hillary than Nancy Reagan, who quietly held enormous sway in her husband's presidency...
...Thus ended Tipper's lobbying to clean up rock music, movies, and video games...
...She says she doesn't want to use her access to become a policy activist—"I've never done it that way," she told the Associated Press in March—but on her Web site she calls herself "something of a crusader at heart...
...36 percent said politics...
...By contrast, the private Tipper is an astute, image-conscious political operative who engineered the recent hiring of Tony Coelho to manage her husband's presidential campaign and who's used her position to press for expanded health-insurance coverage for mental disorders...
...Her public profile is that of the anti-Hillary, an ebullient mother of four who's said the "the most wonderful part of the vice presidency" is having Navy stewards who cook for the family...
...A staple of any story about Tipper is her parents' divorce when she was 4, caused in part by her mother's bouts of depression...
...Asked by ABC's Cokie Roberts about her earlier challenge to the entertainment industry, Tipper offered only the mildest criticism and begged off with the excuse that "it's a complex issue...
...A White House conference on mental health, scheduled for June 7, will give Tipper an opportunity to explain what "mental-health parity" means...
...Tipper's office vehemently denied politics factored into the admission...
...Given Tipper's increasingly partisan profile—she thundered against the Republicans at the California Democratic convention in March—the public's readiness to question her motives is perhaps inevitable...
...our delegation pitched in to help, spending the day shoveling mud and caring for young children...
...She also squeezed in a couple of speeches—in Iowa and New Hampshire...
...Tipper didn't give up...
...But given her position as "the most visible advocate for mental health care services nationwide," as the Gore 2000 Web site puts it, he'll be hard pressed to ignore her views on that subject...
...Matthew Rees is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard...
...Tipper was attacked at the hearing by musicians ranging from Frank Zappa to John Denver and emerged as a nationally recognized critic of the entertainment industry...
...The provision was dropped from the administration's final plan...
...Tipper's crusade bears the hallmark of do-good liberalism: It strives toward an admirable goal— helping people get treatment for mental disorders— while giving little heed to costs...
...Then she'll wipe the sweat from her brow, like this...
...When Gore arrived at the designated spot, Davison observed, "I counted eight shovelfuls and, sure enough, up came the glove to flick away the sweat...
...Tipper will be highly influential in Al's bid for the White House...
...In July 1994, as ClintonCare was dying a bipartisan death in Congress, she applauded a White House directive calling on the federal government to stop asking questions about employees' mental-health history before giving them security clearances...
...The interview, splashed across the front page and accompanied by a color photo, was picked up across the country...
...There's no reason why seeing a psychiatrist makes anyone more of a security threat than seeing an oncologist for colon cancer," she said...
...she said in the interview she came forward because she's "comfortable now...
...In 1985 she grabbed headlines when she and other Washington women formed the Parents Music Resource Center, to lobby for warning labels on records with explicit lyrics...
...Her husband isn't complaining...
...And later that evening, wrote Gore, "we slept in tents outside a shelter" and talked with "a blind man who had to find his way out of danger by touching the wet and slippery walls...
...An analysis of her mental-health parity proposal, performed by the Congressional Budget Office, predicted the measure would raise the cost of health-insurance premiums 4 percent a year and boost the number of uninsured by 400,000...
...TIPPER CAN DO AND AL GORE TOO by Matthew Rees Last November, after Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua and Honduras, President Clinton dispatched a delegation led by Tipper Gore to assess the damage...
...she went on to write Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, published early in 1987...
...But after Al's past exploitation of personal tragedies, the public wasn't entirely convinced: 40 percent of those asked in a Newsweek poll said educational concerns dictated the disclosure...
...Tipper's persistence on mental-health issues contrasts with her retreat from an earlier high-profile crusade...
...But in her appearances she didn't exactly sound like Bill Bennett...
...Gore's report described her work at a school in Honduras submerged in mud...
...Of all the media exposure she's enjoyed, the most significant was an interview with USA Today, published on May 7, in which she revealed she'd taken medication for "situational depression" after her son was seriously injured in a car accident in 1989...
...In keeping with her metamorphosis into a cultural liberal, she cavorted at a California fund-raiser last month with former members of the Grateful Dead, a band that celebrates practices she once preached against...
...He told Newsweek recently that she's his "closest adviser," adding, "I'm a better person when I'm with her...
...But one reporter on the scene, Phil Davison of the London Independent, had a different take on Tipper's activities...
...The scale of the disaster is beyond anything we have ever witnessed," she would write in a "Report to the President" that's featured on the White House Web site with photos from the trip...
...The episode nicely captures the two Tipper Gores...
...In the spring of 1996, she worked closely with Senators Pete Domenici, a Republican, and Paul Wellstone, a Democrat, to win passage of a bill requiring health insurers to provide the same coverage for mental as for physical illnesses...
...soon the senate Commerce Committee, where Al Gore sat as a junior member, held a hearing that attracted hordes of media...
...Another illness is called "Malingering," with symp- toms like "avoiding military duty, avoiding work, obtaining financial compensation, evading criminal prosecution, or obtaining drugs...
...Make sure you get that shot, all right...
...But in October that year, when Al was in the throes of a presidential campaign and desperately in need of money, he and Tipper met with top executives from the entertainment industry—a popular fund-raising source for Democrats—and retracted their earlier statements...
...But one of Tipper's greatest political assets is her appeal to the apolitical suburban soccer moms whom she tries, with some success, to resemble...
...She appeared on Meet the Press, This Week, and Larry King Live, and penned articles for Time and USA Today...
...Tipper is a conventional liberal, neither to the left nor the right of her husband...
...That's because mental disorders are notoriously difficult to cure—and even to define...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 35
