Subject to Debate | The Nation
Subject to Debate
Katha Pollitt
Only yesterday pundits assured us that George W. Bush, who lost the popular election by half a million votes, would tread softly and govern meekly. "He has no mandate to do anything except Be Nice," Molly Ivins wrote in the December Progressive. But who needs a mandate, with the mainstream media resolutely ignoring the still-unfolding scandal of the Florida election? Bush is making hay while the sun shines--paying off his debt to business with the nominations of Elaine Chao, late of the Heritage Foundation, for Labor; Gale Norton, lead-paint champion, for Interior; and Christie Whitman, governor of the state with the second-worst air pollution in the country (Texas is first), for EPA. Over at HHS, anti-choicers get Tommy Thompson--whose devotion to welfare reform provides a note of continuity with the worst aspects of the outgoing Clinton Administration. Most ominous, the Christian and loony right gets its reward for keeping quiet during the campaign: the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General.
How far to the right is Ashcroft? As I write, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are doing their best to help him obscure his ghastly twenty-five-year record on abortion, guns, women's rights, gay rights, the separation of church and state. A rare exception was Ted Kennedy, who closely questioned the nominee on his crusade as Missouri's Attorney General against voluntary school desegregation. But so far the only senator who has publicly said she will vote no is Barbara Boxer, never a Nation favorite, while "progressive" stalwarts like Paul Wellstone and Russell Feingold (who was particularly fawning and vacuous in his questioning), not to mention Tom Daschle and Joe Biden, have all said they were inclined to vote yes (Wellstone and Biden later backpedaled after an outcry). You'd think the Democrats had lost the popular election! Unless Ashcroft is discovered to be sleeping with Barney Frank, his confirmation looks assured. Who in the Senate can be expected to care that as governor of Missouri, Ashcroft twice vetoed bills that would have equalized voter-registration procedures in mostly black and mostly white counties, given that not one senator would sponsor the Congressional Black Caucus's January 6 protest of the Electoral College vote? As the Last Marxist says, the Republicans really are reactionaries, but the Democrats are only pretending to be liberals.
If Ashcroft is not too far out to be confirmed, who is? Accepting an honorary degree at Bob Jones University in 1999, Ashcroft proclaimed that in America, "We have no king but Jesus." (Why aren't Jews up in arms about that?) This is a man who, on the eve of his swearing-in as a Missouri senator, anointed himself with Crisco, supposedly after the manner of the Hebrew kings. Can it be that Barbara Boxer is the only senator discomfited by the thought of an Attorney General who thinks the Bible instructs him to put salad oil on his head?
John Ashcroft is not just a conservative: He stands at the place where Christian fanatics, anti-choicers, militiamen, gun nuts and white supremacists come together. As Chip Berlet reports, he has acknowledged meeting with the head of the St. Louis chapter of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens to discuss the case of a member jailed on federal charges of conspiring to murder an FBI agent. He defended the leaders of the Confederacy in Southern Partisan, the neo-Confederate magazine that has done a brisk business in T-shirts celebrating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Timothy McVeigh was wearing one when arrested). If Southern Partisan rings a bell, by the way, it's because when editor Richard Quinn was discovered to be managing John McCain's South Carolina campaign, a Bush spokesperson criticized McCain for associating with him.
Among Ashcroft's many connections on the far side is Larry Pratt, who, as head of Gunowners of America, functions as a kind of liaison between the militia movement and Capitol Hill. A handwritten note from Ashcroft is posted on Pratt's website (www.gunowners.org). According to the Manchester Guardian, "the two men know each other from a secretive but highly influential rightwing religious group called the Council for National Policy, of which Mr Pratt is a member and whose meetings Mr Ashcroft has attended." Tom DeLay and Trent Lott also belong.
In a glowing profile in CounterPunch (July 1/15, 1999), Alexander Cockburn uncritically paraphrases the position for which Pratt is best known--that the surest proof against Columbine-type school shootings is to arm teachers to shoot students "just like they do in South Africa, where one instructor recently gunned down a bellicose student." South Africa is one of the world's most violent countries, with a long history of serious corporal punishment--with whips--in its dismal black schools, so it's not immediately obvious why the United States should follow its lead even if Pratt's tale is true. But the South African Consul says there is no such policy and knows of no such incident having occurred, nor did a media search turn one up. Need one point out as well that millions of pistol-packing teachers present something of a danger to defenseless schoolchildren? On the other hand, since Pratt also believes in guns for kids (Ashcroft's note was to thank Pratt for enlightening him about the antigun provisions in the juvenile justice bill), the students could just shoot back.
Pratt's website is a grab bag of nuttiness ("What the Bible Says About Gun Control"; "Guns Save Health Care Costs"). But it would be wrong to see him as a marginal, if colorful, figure. CounterPunch doesn't mention it, but Pratt has been a leader of the hard-core Christian right for many years: He led the walkout of religious conservatives at the White House Conference on Families in 1980; he has fundraised for Operation Rescue. In 1996, he was co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign until he was forced to resign when his links to Christian Identity and white-supremacist groups became public. Today Pratt pals around with Lott, DeLay and Ashcroft--whom Bush Senior reportedly considered for the Attorney General post but rejected as too extreme to be confirmed.
That was then, this is now.
A cold snowy start to the new year, the first day of the new millennium. Not the fun one with champagne at the Pyramids and the all-night, round-the-globe pseudoprofundities and the secret letdown when our computers didn't turn into pumpkins at midnight. I mean the real millennium, with the bad news bears basking on their ice floes as the stock market sinks and thousands tremble as The Anxious Consumer ponders whether to spring for the new Chevrolet Astro or live with the old Dodge Caravan a bit longer. On the radio a mom explained that her kids just wanted gift certificates for Christmas so they could take advantage of the post-holiday sales. How old are these kids? 50? This morning, same station, a man from the Cato Institute instructs us to count our blessings: We are all a lot better off than a hundred years ago; after all, Americans are two inches taller now.
On New Year's Day, a stern young black man missing his front teeth preaches on the subway: "Mr. Black Man! Mr. White Man! What is the meaning of Eternity? Repent! Repent!" He stalks the aisle, dressed all in black and carrying a blood-red Bible, like a mad priest in an opera, while passengers stare stonily into the headlines: I'm Sacking Satan, declares ex-Jet Marc Gastineau in the New York Post, once again evading jail for beating his wife, who like him has gone into Christian therapy ("'I contributed to a lot of the violence,' said the slight, 5-foot-5 woman"). In the passageway between stations, a tiny man of unguessable age wearing a filthy Ralph Lauren American Flag sweater plays a violin as if it were an unfamiliar object he had found in the trash; a young black man sings Beatles songs expertly and with unflagging good cheer. The Christmas-caroling street minister with the fantastic baritone voice is gone, but the Chinese musician is still seated on the L train platform, bending in total concentration over his pipa, an elegant longnecked stringed instrument that emits at the touch of his bow a thin wail, like a dying cat.
My father turns 81 in his hospital bed. After three brain surgeries, who knows what he understands? Flowers arrive that he does not look at; cards are read that he does not listen to. Friends arrive with "get well" offerings--a sleep mask, earplugs, pictures of their children--and leave quickly, stricken. Newly arrived from England, a Kazakh friend complains, "They won't move him to the other bed, although I keep asking!" It seems that bed is the lucky one, the one where the patients get better. A staggering amount of medical help and equipment swirls around my father; it is as though experts have been summoned from all over the world--a doctor from Korea, nurses from the Philippines and Ireland, aides from Jamaica and Guyana and India and Central America--all for the express purpose of tending a few limp, pale Americans. And yet the simplest realities--that my father has eaten essentially nothing for almost two weeks--seem to evoke no sense of urgency, to fall into the spaces between specialists and between changing shifts.
In Man's Fate, the Russian Communist Katov prepares himself to be thrown alive into a furnace after the Shanghai rebellion he helped organize is betrayed by Stalin. He says to himself, "Let's suppose I died in a fire." What style, I thought as a teenager, what cool. Today I think: Well, it would be scary and painful, but at least it would be quick. And by dying in 1927, Katov got to keep his political dignity: He didn't have to persuade himself that voting for a protest candidate was a radical act or inveigh against "global capitalism," or "corporate capitalism," as if there were some other kind--national capitalism? mom-and-pop capitalism?--that could be brought out of the closet of history, and donned like a comfy old suit.
I had planned a very different column--upbeat and energetic, with exhortations to do more and a list of clever resolutions. I e-mailed my whole address book asking for suggestions for feminist activism. I don't know what I was hoping for--seize the TV stations? Dangle John Ashcroft off a skyscraper till he promises to spend the rest of his life cleaning abortion clinic toilets? Raise a lesbian militia to fight the Taliban? What came in was nothing like that. Write letters, the activists said, make phone calls, raise money, bother your politicians, volunteer. Challenge the sexism of daily life, the writers wrote: racist and sexist remarks, panels with no women, all-male magazine forums and debates. Link issue A with issue B, the academics urged.
Fine, but according to Newsweek, there are now 1 million slaves in America, mostly women and girls--cleaning houses, making clothes, servicing men sexually to pay off traffickers and pimps. Ask yourself what kind of man would fuck a slave, some Chinese or Albanian or Thai teenager in a plywood cubicle with a mattress on the floor. Do you think he cares if you write a letter to your congressman? Maybe he is your congressman.
The world spins only forward, says Prior Walter in Angels in America. But which way is that? Most members of my study group think intellectuals and activists have no special role to play in history. They only perch atop its shifting tectonic plates, ready to jump on the backs of the workers at the first sign of autonomous action. "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing," quotes the Last Marxist at least once per meeting, which goes on all day and ends with a wonderful meal. Last time, we invited the Race Traitors--Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, Beth Henson--and accused them of daring to think they could spark a movement with a magazine and a book. Wow, said Noel, you guys are really depressed. Yes, I said, usually it takes us all day to feel this irrelevant, and it isn't even lunchtime yet.
I go home in the snow, I e-mail the President to save the Alaskan wilderness, proving yet again that I have no dignity and do not read my own columns. At bedtime we read aloud from Mona in the Promised Land, by my daughter's favorite contemporary American writer, Gish Jen.
"If there's a depression, will we have enough money?" Sophie asks as we turn out the light. "Don't worry about it," I say. "Everything will be fine. We can always sing in the subway."
So it's ending the way it was always going to, with George Bush in the White House. As the Last Marxist said all along, he had the most money, so he should win. True, in order for this to happen, Americans had to see laid bare elements in our system that are usually carefully hidden: You probably didn't know that the election process is controlled by party and campaign officials, that the machine you voted on may well not record your ballot, that in a dozen ingenious ways the black vote is still being blatantly suppressed, that people like Katherine Harris even exist. It is entirely fitting that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who voted with the conservative five-member majority to halt the counting of the Florida vote, intimidated black and Hispanic voters himself as an Arizona pollwatcher in the early 1960s. And given the general air of cronyism and corruption and self-interest that surrounds the whole Florida business, it's fitting too that Clarence Thomas's wife is working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, where she is collecting résumés for openings in the Bush Administration, and that two of Scalia's sons are employed by law firms representing Bush. Now, having helped run out the clock, the five regret that time's up.
Who knows what might have been if Al Gore had encouraged and joined, rather than avoided and thwarted, popular outrage at black voter suppression in Florida? We might have seen racially integrated civil rights marches to rival those of the l960s, and over the same issue too.We may see them yet. If not--if we let the media bury the Florida outrages in a blizzard of blather about the need to "move on" and "come together"--we will truly have the government we deserve.
President Clinton, at least, has finally achieved the perfect political moment in which to enact the liberal agenda many readers of this magazine believe he has always secretly supported. It's taken eight years, but at last he isn't running for re-election, the Gore campaign is over, the Republicans have done their worst. If you believe Ralph Nader's 2.7 percent of the popular vote represented a message from the restive left, there's nothing now preventing Clinton from opening the envelope and reading it.
Many people cited their opposition to capital punishment as one reason they were voting for Nader. Now along comes Clinton's chance to show he feels their pain by commuting the sentence of Juan Raul Garza, the triple murderer scheduled to be the first person executed under the federal "drug kingpin" death penalty statute, and the first federal execution, period, since 1963. So did the President do not just the right thing but the costless and perhaps even politically astute thing? No. Professing himself troubled by a Justice Department review noting that 80 percent of federal death-row inmates are people of color (but not troubled enough to let them live), he granted Garza a six-month stay of execution, leaving the decision to his successor--the necrophiliac George Bush, who would cheerfully give the lethal injection himself.
Here's another test for Clinton: One of the surprises of the recent election was the victory of anti-drug war referendums in California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Utah. Now 650 religious leaders, members of the Coalition for Jubilee Clemency (www.cjpf.org), have appealed to Clinton to offer a presidential pardon to some of the thousands of Americans serving long mandatory sentences for minor drug offenses, allowing him to undo a small amount of the immense damage of the war on drugs, a cause he has relentlessly, and to my mind mysteriously, promoted. The President does seem to wish to dissociate himself from his own drug policies: In his Rolling Stone interview, he decries the "unconscionable" sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine and claims he tried to equalize it but was thwarted by a Republican Congress that wanted only to narrow it. (Actually, it was he who in 1997 proposed reducing the disparity from 100-to-1 to 10-to-1 while resisting calls to eliminate it.) He even calls for restoring voting rights to all ex-convicts and for a "re-examination of our entire policy on imprisonment."
Well, better late than never. Harsh drug laws and racial bias at every step from arrest to sentencing have done immeasurable harm to poor and minority communities and to unlucky people of all sorts. Imprisonment of minor offenders has destroyed families, left children without parents, spurred a sevenfold increase in the number of women in prison between 1980 and 1997 and is a major reason that the United States now has the world's second-highest rate of incarceration. Leaving aside the horrors of prison itself, a felony conviction means probable unemployment and in thirteen states, as we now know all too well, loss of the right to vote. It isn't often that a person, even a President, gets to wave a magic wand and rectify a mass injustice. Will the President avail himself of this astonishing moral and political opportunity? I'm not holding my breath. For one thing, he's preoccupied, mulling a pardon for junk-bond king Michael Milken, who made off with billions, for which he spent twenty-two months in jail--good thing he didn't try stealing a slice of pizza in California, or he might be doing life! If pardoned, the New York Times noted, Milken would be able to vote again. If the 31 percent of black men banned as convicted felons from voting in Florida had received the same treatment, even Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris might have had trouble suppressing enough votes to deliver the White House to reactionary nincompoop George W.
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Was it only a few short weeks ago that I turned on the TV in my hotel room to hear conservative commentator Tucker Carlson explain to Don Imus that Gore would win the Floridian chadfight because Republicans were too nice, polite, modest and fair to get down and dirty like the Democrats? That was before a small army of rowdy Republicans descended on Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties and successfully intimidated election officials while turning themselves into a media spectacle halfway between a fraternity brawl and an ancient Roman mob. Like the false announcement of a Bush victory on election night--courtesy, we now know, of a Fox TV reporter who is a cousin of George W. Bush--the demonstrators helped produce the mistaken but widespread impression that Bush had won an election that Gore was trying to undo, when in fact the election, as I write, is still undecided. According to the Wall Street Journal and other papers, the demonstrators, originally portrayed as John Q. Publics following their hearts to Florida, are GOP operatives and Congressional staffers financed by the Bush campaign, which is putting them up in Hilton hotels and entertained them on Thanksgiving with turkey and a performance by Wayne Newton.
Al Gore's position is that there should be an accurate count of the Florida vote--the fraudulent nature of which becomes daily more obvious. What's wrong with that? Outrageous, say the Republicans; boring, say the media, which from the start urged "closure," like a prosecutor urging a quick lethal injection so that grieving survivors can start "the healing process." Flip a coin, advised Ralph Nader, fliply.
And what of Nader? Campaigners have been quick to put a brave face on his unimpressive 2.7 percent--unmentioned now is the magic 5 percent that would bring the Greens federal funds and that they themselves had made a central rationale for a Nader vote. "We accomplished what we set out to do," Nader campaign manager Theresa Amato told me. "We helped the Greens, we raised issues, we got new people into the political process. The Greens are now the leading third party, the only viable third party. I'm positive, I'm upbeat, I'm not depressed in any way." Longtime Green activist and former member of the town council of Princeton, New Jersey, Carl Mayer was even cheerier, telling me that Nader had mobilized 150,000 volunteers and 50,000 donors and sparked the formation of some 500 local Green organizations and 900 campus groups, and crediting him with "changing the tenor of the whole race" by pushing Gore to take populist stands against the drug and oil industries. Mayer even argued that it was because of Nader that President Clinton declared wilderness areas national monuments in several Western states and that the FDA approved RU-486. Unlike virtually every other Nader supporter in America, Mayer not only accepted the mainstream analysis that Nader votes had cost Gore the election (assuming Bush wins), but said it didn't bother him a bit.
One hesitates to inject a discouraging word, but 2.7 percent of the vote is not a lot. It puts him in the company of conscience candidates like Barry Commoner, but behind most major third-party challengers in recent memory. Even John Anderson--who?--and his National Union Party--what?--eked out 6.6 percent in 1980. Sure, you can spin these gloomy stats--Nader got more votes than any progressive third-party candidate since 1948! Nader would have gotten lots more votes but for the closeness of the Bush-Gore contest, which kept Dems in the fold! Third-party runs aren't about votes, they're about changing the discourse! But when I think about how many furious letters and e-mails I got for writing skeptically in this space about the possibility of a meaningful third party, especially a progressive one, I have to say events have borne me out. I said that in the end most voters would stick with the two parties because the differences that seem small to Naderites are concrete and significant to them, because the two-party system is the way civic favors and services are distributed and because people understand that the winner-take-all system insures that a left-leaning third party throws elections to the Republicans--as the Republicans understood when they ran Nader's attacks on Gore as ads for Bush.
Commentators will be analyzing the Nader vote for months, and no doubt the campaign could have done some things better or not at all: the invisible and tokenistic vice presidential candidacy of Winona LaDuke, the waffling over whether to go for votes in toss-up states, the attacks on "frightened liberals." But even a perfect campaign would run up against the structural obstacles that have rendered marginal every modern attempt to build a strong and lasting third-party alternative to the two- party "duopoly."
Future elections will be even tougher. Whoever wins the presidency, people now know every vote counts--the frightened liberals are really frightened now. If Bush wins, the energy left of center will go into re-electing Democrats--any Democrat. Meanwhile, the small Nader vote--only 2 percent of Democratic voters chose him, while 11 percent chose Bush--means that the Democratic Party will move, if anywhere, rightward. The Greens may move that way also; after all, they failed to dislodge the old progressive voting blocs--feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, labor. The typical Nader voter was a young white man, college educated but income poor. Nader did well among students, independents and Perot voters; outside a few left strongholds--Madison, Portland, Berkeley, western Massachusetts--his best counties were rural, his best state Alaska (10 percent), of all places. None of this sounds like a recipe for a powerful progressive voting bloc. In an interesting post-mortem on the Newsforchange website, Micah Sifry argues that the Greens may be too far left for the actually existing electorate and that the future lies in the "radical middle," from which sprang Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot. In other words, for leftists to achieve even the momentary electoral prominence of the now-moribund Reform Party, they have to be more, well, conservative.
If Gore loses the White House--and some of you reading this will know whether or not he did--he'll have no one but himself to blame. Readers of this page know I've been something of a Naderskeptic all along (I'm planning a tactical vote for him here in Gore-solid New York, but if I lived in a toss-up state I'd vote Democratic and hope you would--or did--too). Still, it's not Nader's fault that huge numbers of voters don't care if Bush is a reactionary moron and find his Christian frat boy act appealing. Ralph didn't tell Gore to go after the dithering undecideds and to forget about energizing his base and reaching out to suburban and working women. Remember when abortion and gun control were going to be key issues? When the Million Moms were going to sway the election? Ralph didn't make Gore distance himself so far from Clinton--a genius campaigner with a 60 percent approval rating--that he couldn't plausibly claim the "good" economy as his own, even as he also wasn't willing to acknowledge the millions who have been victimized by Clinton's policies on prisons, welfare, drugs, civil liberties, privacy. Who was stopping Gore from announcing that on second thought, sending a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package to Colombia was a terrible idea? Wouldn't that have been a better way to prove he was his "own man," not Clinton's, than spouting sanctimonious pieties about faith and family?
Or take capital punishment: When the issue came up in the debates, Gore and Bush both said they were for the death penalty. Gore could easily have said that, like Republican Governor Ryan of Illinois, he supported the death penalty but was troubled by studies showing an alarming number of false convictions in capital cases, and so he also supported a moratorium on executions. Sure, some of the undecideds would have peeled off to Bush--you can imagine the campaign ads in which relatives retell ghastly murders of loved ones and accuse the Vice President of denying them "closure." But then Gore could have run ads highlighting Bush's appalling record as death-penalty king of Texas, and his lazy and frivolous approach to the whole issue, which troubles some conservatives and has even become a standard laugh line for David Letterman. By taking a political risk--in a righteous cause--Gore would have been able to counteract the popular view of him as calculating and expedient, which is doing him more harm than his actual positions, which voters tell pollsters they like.
The same could be said of Gore's problems to his left. If Gore wants to defuse Nader, why doesn't he fire back on a whole range of substantive issues instead of acting like Nader has stolen votes that somehow belong to Gore by right? Gore has a record as Vice President, and he presumably believes in the positions that drive Naderites wild--for NAFTA, for military interventions around the globe, for welfare reform, for ladling vast sums of money into the Pentagon. He could take the trouble to explain why he is right and Nader is wrong on the issues that divide them, or why he is being wrongly blamed for policies that were actually the work of a Republican Congress, or why he is the best person to undo the damage Nader has identified.
Nader's not perfect, after all--Gore could ask why he doesn't belong to the party whose ticket he heads, why he told Outside magazine he would prefer a win for Bush (readers will remember he told me the opposite), why he has so little support among the people--minorities, women, blue-collar workers--whose interests he claims to represent. He could point out that while four years of Republicanism may move a few to the left, it may also drive far more people to embrace the Democrats, any Democrats, so the whole Nader phenomenon contains the seeds of its own destruction, in which case why not cut to the chase and vote for the Democrat now? He could make plenty of hay out of Nader's ill-informed and self-serving insistence that a Bush win will not endanger reproductive rights--most recently, Nader told Sam Donaldson that even if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, "it just reverts it back to the states." Just! As if there aren't at least fourteen states ready to criminalize abortion the minute they get the go-ahead. As if there aren't already more than 300 restrictions on abortion already on the books! At one time Gore's ferocity as a debater was going to be his decisive strength. It may have backfired with the feel-good nincompoop Bush, but Gore could always try getting down off his high horse and asking Ralph how he would feel about letting other freedoms lose their constitutional protection. Should fifty state legislatures decide every year how much freedom of speech Ralph Nader is going to have?
It's perfectly fair to attack Nader. It's even fair to attack him in nasty, personal ways, the way Naderites attack Gore--by, for example, spreading the right-wing disinformation that Gore said he invented the Internet and was the model for Love Story. But it's absurd and kind of pathetic for Toby Moffett and the "Nader's Raiders for Gore" to wring their hands and beg Nader to step aside for the good of the country--it would make more sense to beg Gore to address the concerns of Nader voters. It would even make more sense for them to address--since Gore isn't doing the job--the fence-sitters who are moving toward Bush: pro-choice women, for instance, who think Bush isn't serious about working to limit abortion (an illusion not shared by the Christian Coalition, one might add), and union men who are having trouble choosing between their guns and their job protection.
According to a group of seven academic political forecasters, Gore is supposed to win because the man and the campaign and the issues are unimportant: Whether the incumbent party stays in the White House all depends on the state of the economy, both actual and perceived. This alone can explain the outcome of every election since 1948. If Gore loses despite his tremendous structural advantages, what can you say except he screwed up monumentally? Clinton triangulated against the left, but Gore acted as if the left didn't exist. You can't blame the left if it came back to bite him on the behind.
I keep reading that the election turns on women's votes. Yet apart from the issue of abortion, women seem curiously invisible this election season--except of course for the endlessly focus-grouped, interviewed and psychoanalyzed women of Ohio and other toss-up states, who can't decide whether to vote for Gore because he kissed his wife or for Bush because they like his mother. Are these ninnies really representative, or is their prominence more a symptom of the emptiness of political reporting, which has cast the race as a personality contest between a Fibber and a Dope? What, for example, do women tell pollsters is their most important issue? Hint: It's not whether Al Gore or George W. would be more fun on a date or make a better babysitter. It's pay equity.
Yes, women are apparently unpersuaded that they earn 71 cents on the male dollar because, as the Independent Women's Forum insists, they choose low-paid jobs in order to have lots of time and energy for childcare and housecleaning. Yet when Bernard Shaw asked Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman about pay equity in their Veep debate, the two men quickly turned to the marvels of their respective tax proposals. Shaw let them--what's pay equity to him? Even issues that are on the table are discussed as if they have no gendered aspects--affirmative action, for instance, or proposals to privatize all or part of Social Security, which will affect women much more than men: Not only do women on average live longer, they make up the large majority of retirees and dependents who survive on Social Security alone. Violence against women has gone unmentioned--as opposed to media violence and smut, a major theme and supposed woman-pleaser--ditto insurance coverage for contraception (Viagra's already covered, but you knew that), high-quality daycare, the near-impossibility of collecting court-ordered child support from an ex-husband who doesn't want to pay it (there's a middle-class issue for you) and dozens of other problems facing real-life women. There are a number of women running for national office, but you don't hear much about them. From the media point of view, the continuing scandal of women's underrepresentation in government is as musty as the ERA. Women had their year back in 1992.
There's only one woman on the political scene who seems to evoke any kind of passion--and that's Hillary Clinton, or "Hillary." But most of the passion is negative: She's like a Rorschach test of feminine evil. Through direct mail aimed at Hillary-haters across the land, the Conservative Leadership Political Action Committee has raised almost $2 million for her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, a hyperaggressive nobody whose wife boasts that she cleans her own house--I suppose that's the contemporary equivalent of Pat Nixon's good Republican cloth coat. The First Lady, a supporter of the death penalty, welfare reform and interventionist foreign policy, is depicted as an "angry woman who is abusive to White House staff and obsessed with imposing her radical left vision on the rest of America." How hated is Hillary? Eighteen percent of Democratic primary voters pulled the lever for her totally obscure challenger, a doctor who subsequently revealed himself to be a Lazio supporter. Maureen Dowd has completely lost herself in an ecstasy of psychological projection--her Hillary is like Joan Crawford in an old weepie: While the Gores and Liebermans bill and coo, she rattles around in her empty new house, loveless and lonely, and excluded from society as "Manhattan's dread extra woman." On the Drudge Report, Juanita Broaddrick accused Hillary of threatening her at a political function two weeks after her alleged rape: The threat was conveyed by thanking Broaddrick effusively--too effusively--for her support.
Disapproval of Hillary for sticking with her marriage cuts across party lines--Jimmy Breslin and George Will together at last with all those suburban harpies happy to knife a woman who steps out of the box. But her devotion to Bill has brought her an odd defender, Linda Waite, author with right-wing columnist Maggie Gallagher of a book-length soundbite called The Case for Marriage. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Waite castigates conservatives like Will for taking opportunistic potshots at Hillary's decision to stay married: After all, Hillary is honoring the institution of marriage and making the choice conservatives--although presumably not Will, who is divorced--think people should make when faced with marital trouble. "Staying in an imperfect marriage is a perfectly reasonable choice for many women," writes Waite, not to mention good for society. Interestingly, Waite seems to have forgotten her own potshot at Hillary: In their book, Waite and Gallagher torment a remark of Mrs. Clinton's that seems clearly aimed at gossips and Nosy Parkers ("I learned a long time ago that the only two people who count in any marriage are the two that are in it") to portray her as a standard-bearer for the idea that marriage is a private contract with no social significance. In fact, as they should know, Mrs. Clinton is quite a conservative on marital matters; she supported the Republican-authored Personal Responsibility Act, which begins by stating that "marriage is the foundation of a successful society"; in It Takes a Village, she wrote favorably of making divorce harder to get.
If you want to see a woman politician boldly standing up for the right to privacy--or anything else--you have to go to the movies. In The Contender, a swell political thriller, Joan Allen plays Laine Hanson, a Republican-turned-Democrat senator who is nominated to fill out a dead Vice President's term and finds herself under withering attack for supposedly participating in a fraternity sexfest as a college freshman. The movie, which is dedicated to "our daughters," is one long prayer for the abolition of the double standard--which it then, in typical Hollywood fashion, endorses. Laine is so pure and idealistic that she survives only because Jeff Bridges, as the wily Clintonesque President, stoops to tactics that would never even occur to her. In other words, in order to be in politics, a woman has to be too good for politics.
Every five years the psychologist Judith Wallerstein updates her ongoing
study of 131 children whose parents were going through divorce in Marin
County, California, in 1971, and every five years her warnings about the
dire effects of divorce on children make the headlines, the covers and
the talk shows. Her new book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,
ups the ante: She now believes that parents should grit their teeth and
stay together, so traumatized were her interviewees even into their 20s,
contending with drugs and drink, bad boy-friends, unsatisfactory jobs,
low self-esteem and lack of trust in relationships. Before you young
cynics out there say welcome to the club, remember: This is not a
moralistic sermon dreamed up by Dr. Laura, the Pope, your relatives or
even Judith Wallerstein. This is science.
But what if it isn't? Scholars have long been critical of Wallerstein's
methods: She had no control group--kids just like the ones in her study
but whose unhappily married parents stayed together. (In her new book
she has attempted to get around this flaw by interviewing a "comparison
sample" of people from intact families who went to high school with her
subjects, but the two groups are not carefully matched.) She generalizes
too quickly: Can sixty Marin County families really stand in for all
America? Are the seventies us? Doesn't it make a difference that fathers
today are more involved with their kids both before and after divorce,
that mothers are better educated and better able to support themselves,
that divorce is no longer a badge of immorality and failure? It never
occurs to Wallerstein, either, that the very process of being
interviewed and reinterviewed about the effects of parental divorce for
a quarter-century by a warm, empathetic and kindly professional would
encourage her subjects to see their lives through that lens. "Karen" may
really believe divorce explains why she spent her early 20s living with
a layabout--blaming your parents is never a hard sell in America--but
that doesn't mean it's true.
The media tend to treat such objections rather lightly. Wallerstein's
critics "don't want to hear the bad news," wrote Walter Kirn in
Time's recent cover story. The real bad news, though, is the way
Wallerstein has come to omit from her writings crucial information she
herself presented in her first book about her research, Surviving the
Breakup, published in 1980.
How did Wallerstein find her divorcing couples, and what sort of people
were they? In her new book, she writes that they were referred by their
lawyers "on the basis of their willingness to participate." Surviving
the Breakup gives quite a different picture: "The sixty families who
participated in this study came initially for a six-week divorce
counseling service. The service was conceptualized and advertised as a
preventive program and was offered free of charge to all families in the
midst of divorce. Parents learned of the service through attorneys,
school teachers, counselors, social agencies, ministers, friends, and
newspaper articles." In other words, Wallerstein was not just offering
people a chance to advance the cause of knowledge, she was offering free
therapy--something she today vehemently denies ("Naturally I wanted to
be sure that any problem we saw did not predate the divorce. Neither
they [the kids] nor their parents were ever my patients"). Obviously,
people who sign up for therapy, not to mention volunteering their kids
for continuing contact, have problems; by choosing only therapy-seekers,
Wallerstein essentially excluded divorcing couples who were coping well.
Today, Wallerstein provides no information about the psychological
well-being of the parents before divorce, but in her 1980 book, she is
very clear about how troubled they were. Only one-third displayed
"generally adequate psychological functioning." Fifty percent of the men
and almost as many women were "moderately troubled"--"chronically
depressed, sometimes suicidal individuals...with severe neurotic
difficulties or with handicaps in relating to another person, or those
with longstanding problems in controlling their rage or sexual
impulses." Fifteen percent of the men and 20 percent of the women "had
histories of mental illness, including paranoid thinking, bizarre
behavior, manic-depressive illnesses, and generally fragile or
unsuccessful attempts to cope with the demands of life, marriage, and
family." Some underwent "hospitalization for severe mental illness,
suicide attempts, severe psychosomatic illnesses, work histories ridden
with unsatisfactory performance, or arrests for assault." It's not for
me to say whether a sample in which two-thirds of the participants range
from chronically depressed to outright insane represents the general
public--but attributing all their children's struggles to divorce is
patently absurd.
The way Wallerstein describes her sample has changed also. In a table in
her 1980 book, she places 28 percent of the families in the two lowest
of five social-class rankings, as defined by the Hollingshead index, and
23 percent in the highest. In the new book, these figures are mentioned
in passing, but at the same time she calls all the families "middle
class"--including a famous wife-beating TV executive and his former
spouse, a wealthy travel agent who spent her life globe-trotting. All
are now "educated," as well, including the substantial percentage of
parents (24 percent of the mothers and 18 percent of the fathers at
initial contact in 1971) who hadn't been to college. Gone too are such
relevant facts from the earlier book as that one-third of the couples
had "rushed into a precipitous marriage because of an unplanned
pregnancy" and that half the wives, "because of their age and lack of
job experience, were viewed realistically as unemployable."
In short, what we have here are not generic white suburbanites who threw
away workable marriages in order to actualize their human potential in a
Marin County hot tub. We have sixty disastrous families, featuring crazy
parents, economic insecurity, trapped wives and, as Wallerstein does
discuss, lots of violence (one-quarter of the fathers beat their wives;
out of the 131 children, thirty-two had witnessed such attacks). How on
earth can she claim that divorce is what made her young people's lives
difficult? The wonder is that they are doing as well as they are.
I still think third-party politics is mostly a crock, but then, so is two-party politics.
Author
Katha Pollitt
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