Son of a Corncob! Jeffords Steals McCain's Media Posse
Thursday, May Twenty-Fourth, Two Thousand and One, a date that will live in infamy... Okay, that's a touch dramatic, but watching Pedro Martinez lose a 2-1 game at Yankee Stadium isn't for sissies. I'll say this much: Mike Mussina, the former Oriole who threw his arm out for the money-grubbing trial lawyer Peter Angelos during his years in Baltimore, deserves credit for twirling perhaps the best game of his career. And it was a sensational afternoon at the ballpark. I let the boys play hooky for half a day, picking them up at school at noon and scooting into a cab bound for the Bronx to meet Andrey Slivka in our seats just behind the Yanks dugout. I don't suppose Junior and MUGGER III's teachers thought a Red Sox-Yankees match-up was a kosher excuse for early dismissal, but the counterargument, that seeing Martinez, the most dominating pitcher since Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax, was extraordinarily persuasive to me.
Both Mussina and Pedro fanned 12 batters, but, as usual, the Sox failed to provide offensive support for the team's linchpin, who still sports a 6-1 record with a minuscule 1.60 ERA. There was one glimmer of hope for Sox fans, occurring in the top of the seventh, when rookie firebrand Shea Hillenbrand (who'll be a sophomore also-ran if he doesn't learn to take a base on balls) ran from first to home on a leftfield blooper by Brian Daubach, momentarily tying the score at 2-2. The kids and I were jubilant, but the hit was ruled a ground-rule double, Hillenbrand returned to third and Trot Nixon whiffed to end the rally.
Baseball purists would say this classic pitchers' duel was a gem, a joy to watch no matter who won. Nuts to that load of baloney: Boston blew an opportunity to salvage a split in the series (the underrated Andy Pettitte outgunned the retired-by-August David Cone the night before) and fell into second place. So, basically, the game sucked, and I couldn't blame Junior for feeling carsick on the ride home.
Oh yes, May 24 was also the day Vermont's Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party and supplanted St. John McCain as the mainstream media's favorite "maverick."
I don't mean to minimize the significance of the Jeffords jump: he's a skunk who gladly accepted financial help from GOP colleagues for his reelection last year, and was fully aware of presidential candidate George Bush's conservative platform. So he's betrayed colleagues by accepting Tom Daschle's bribes and thus ceding Senate control to the Democrats; but the political "earthquake" that's received even more attention than Al Gore's 40-pound weight gain wasn't exactly Pearl Harbor. It's a monstrous media story, a delight for reporters and pundits to write about instead of missile defense, and just one more rebuttal to the absurd claim that the press has rolled over for Bush.
Make no mistake about it: Jeffords' fit of "conscience" is all about Florida, just as every political event will be until at least the midterm elections of 2002, when I hope that Gov. Jeb Bush will annihilate Janet Reno or whoever else tries to reclaim the state for all those phony "disenfranchised voters" who apparently lacked the rudimentary knowledge of how to cast a ballot. Once the initial shock wore off, it makes sense that Reno, a Floridian, would want to take on Bush, despite her poor health. If you'd been the most corrupt U.S. attorney general since John Mitchell you'd probably want to be remembered at least in part for something else. On Sunday, the Miami Herald published a poll showing Bush six points ahead of Reno, which at this stage ought to give the President's brother about 918 more gray hairs. It's certain to be one of the nastiest and most expensive races of 2002.
(Completely lost in the Jeffords bonanza and Reno hype was the bad news that Rep. Joe Scarborough, a conservative Republican from Pensacola, will retire on Sept. 6 to spend more time with his two sons. Hey, even pols that you admire use that hoary euphemism: Scarborough, 38, is divorced and sees his kids every other week. An article in the May 25 Pensacola News Journal reported that the Congressman is being wooed by a lucrative law firm and also has had discussions with CNN and MSNBC about a regular tv slot. Anyone who saw him destroy Rep. Peter Deutsch, a Democratic colleague from Florida, during the recount process, nearly every day on a different station, can understand the allure cable stations might hold. I hope Scarborough makes some money and then runs for a Senate seat in 2006.)
It was Florida's misfortune to be the state where the massive fraud that occurs in every single state, on every single election day, was highlighted. Ground zero for the 2000 presidential election could just as easily have been in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or any combination of states. That's why I'm in favor of voting reform, because the theft?a lifeline to both the Democrats and Republicans?of elections is as common as jaywalking. The Bush administration, while correctly opposing (at least in private) the folly of campaign finance reform, is negligent in not making this issue an immediate priority. Not only is it the right thing to do, but Karl Rove ought to consider the brownie points the White House would receive.
And let's be honest about Jeffords' rank opportunism. How you feel about his joining the draconian forces of Daschle and Teddy Kennedy is strictly a partisan reaction. The media and liberals hail Jeffords as a Norman Rockwell kind of self-effacing character in prose that's even more syrupy than the sap that's harvested in that time-warp state of Vermont. Conservatives and libertarians see Jeffords as a selfish tool, a man who knew that he'd cause a national stir by tipping control of the Senate before Strom Thurmond croaked or McCain needed a publicity fix. Had the Democrats gained control in one of those instances, Jeffords switching to an independent would be a two-day story at most, and he certainly wouldn't be hailed as a modern-day Paul Revere. After all, this is a man who voted against the Reagan agenda at every opportunity, didn't support Clarence Thomas, moaned about Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House and is more liberal than perhaps 20 Democratic senators.
One not insignificant consolation of the Jeffords hoopla was? contrary to gleeful left-wing propagandists like MSNBC's Eric Alterman?that Ted Olson was confirmed as solicitor general and Bush's tax cut passed with an indisputable bipartisan vote of 58-33. McCain, already showing the pique of being left out of the media limelight for even 12 hours, was one of two GOP senators who voted against the legislation. Who knows, maybe there was some arcane provision in the bill that would adversely affect Anheuser-Busch; it can't be said enough times that the Arizona Senator, who married into Budweiser money, hypocritically attacks tobacco companies while staying mum on booze, a drug that wrecks more lives, and at younger ages, than cigarettes.
And McCain's press release of May 24 was a hoot: After praising Jeffords' integrity, he closes by saying, "Tolerance of dissent is the hallmark of a mature party, and it is well past time for the Republican Party to grow up." A bit self-righteous from the straight-talker who entertains reporters by telling jokes about "gooks" and people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease.
The supposedly taciturn Jeffords made the most of his notoriety last week, warning Bush that he'd be a one-term president if he didn't heed more "moderates" such as...well, himself. Not surprisingly, Bush didn't fire his political strategist Rove in favor of Jeffords, but listened to the Senator (no doubt trying to keep his temper in check) in what was described as an "awkward" meeting. I'll bet. It must've been like when an employer pink-slips a bad hire and has to stomach an analysis of everything's that wrong with the company as an exit-interview is being prepared by the accounting office.
What, was Bush supposed to make Jeffords a happy Ben & Jerry's legislator? He'd already allowed the Democrats to gut his education proposal?an excessive, and mistaken, example of compromise?by allotting more spending on lousy teachers than was warranted, as well as jettisoning the crucial school voucher provision. As for the tax cut, should Bush have handed over his legislation to Jeffords and said, "Hey Jimbo, you're a man of principle, why not just white-out all the items you think might offend your friends like John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and Barney Frank?"
I doubt Jeffords, after his brush with media sainthood, is capable of embarrassment, but too bad Fouad Ajami's excellent "Washington Diarist" piece in the June 4 New Republic wasn't on newsstands when the Senator made his decision to cast his lot with the likes of Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson. Ajami deftly mocked President Clinton's largely fruitless trips abroad?which increased in frequency postimpeachment as he attempted to tot up an accomplishment or two for legacy purposes?and predicted that Bush wouldn't follow that self-aggrandized and promiscuous use of Air Force One.
He wrote: "There is nothing of this in Bush. The man's ease with himself is, in part, an ease with home and country and familiar verities... Those who predict that, with time, President Bush will take to the road and succumb to foreign temptation are wrong. A different wind blows, with a different judgment about the world beyond the water's edge. Consider this passage in the president's big speech in early May calling for national missile defense: 'Like Saddam Hussein, some of today's tyrants are gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. They hate democracy and freedom and individual liberty. Many care little for the lives of their own people.'"
Those are the words of a "radical" president?
Newsweek, in the throes of a demoralizing advertising recession, attempted, in its June 4 issue, to shore up its Vermont subscription base. Its "Conventional Wisdom" column, which may as well be written each week by Hillary Clinton, was an ugly portent of the content farther back in the magazine. Following are assessments of politicians in its "Special Switcheroo Edition":
Jeffords: "Capra-esque Vermonter rewrites Election 2000. Could conscience be infectious?"
Bush: "Blindsided by defection, overplayed his non-existent mandate. Ouch!"
Daschle: "Suddenly, he's Majority Leader. Smart, popular, but is he mean enough?"
Lott: "Suddenly, he's Minority Leader. Pompous, power hungry, but was he too mean?"
Rove: "So-called WH 'genius' wasn't smart enough to know that moderates are people, too."
Cheney: "Buck-raking at VP mansion. What was your problem with those Clinton 'coffees' again?"
I'll grant that the Veep's fundraiser last week, given the three-volume catalog of Clinton/Gore improprieties during the 90s, wasn't a highlight of this administration's first months in office. As for the rest, it reeks of Jonathan Alter (who strikes me as one of the models for Jeffrey Frank's puerile The Columnist); and sure enough, the Beltway insider who's prone to bragging in print about his access to power, provides his own slant on the Jeffords decision, a sappy piece called "The Odyssey of Jeezum Jim." It's explained on page 4 of the issue that Alter, in the early 80s, played on a softball team with Jeffords, and by golly, sometimes after a game the then-Congressman would honor young reporters like Jon and join them for cheeseburgers at a DC "dive." That's Jimmy Appleseed for you, an egalitarian from head to toe.
Alter's profile is long and sickening, so I'll spare readers a complete critique?although his slur on Calvin Coolidge was typical?and simply get to the guts of his argument.
He writes, with one true sentence: "Like everything else in hype-addled America, the political ramifications have been overstated. 'Not everyone gets to wake up one morning and decide an inner voice has told him to overturn the results of a national election, an unprecedented legal struggle and a decisive Supreme Court decision to form a government,' The Wall Street Journal editorial page opined, as if the unassuming Vermonter were a craven usurper.
"Another way to view it is that Jeffords is restoring the true message sent by the evenly divided electorate last November, which is that the parties must share power. For the past four months George W. Bush has been acting as if he had won a Ronald Reagan-style landslide, a shrewd political strategy, perhaps, but out of sync with the actual election returns. Last week's midcourse mandate correction comes early in Bush's presidency, but late in the key policy struggle that will shape the future: the 11-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut headed for approval may well prevent the Democratic Senate from boosting spending beyond the margins for years to come. Even so, the days of the Bush's catering exclusively to conservatives are apparently over. Every part of his agenda will now be subject to compromise."
These two paragraphs are riddled with so many fallacies it's difficult to fathom that Alter is considered by the incestuous Beltway crowd to be a "player," but this is the left-wing (or West Wing) Washington bubble we're talking about.
However. Yes, the electorate was evenly divided (with Gore receiving more actual votes) but Americans who cast ballots weren't in favor of the parties sharing power. If you supported Bush, it was his conservative agenda that was endorsed; a Gore vote, likewise, was for the Democratic candidate's faux-populism and a continuation of Bill Clinton's policies. As for "mandates," I'm sure Alter remembers that in 1992 Clinton received 43 percent of the popular vote, which certainly, if you follow his reasoning, wasn't a mass appeal for the socialistic healthcare legislation that the new President and his wife engineered.
Bush won the election. Yet despite that fact, suck-ups like Alter believe that his slender Electoral College majority (which the pundit, on Nov. 8, advocated on MSNBC be ignored in favor of Gore's popular-vote victory) dictates a division of power, with Bush eschewing his conservative platform to accommodate the liberal ideology he vigorously campaigned against. As for "catering exclusively to conservatives," despite the rhetoric from the media, that's simply not true, unless you consider Bush's cabinet appointments Colin Powell, Christie Whitman, Norm Minetta and Rod Paige to be political blood-brothers of Tom DeLay.
And yes, Alter is correct that Bush will have to compromise with a Democratic Senate, just as he has these past four months. Much as I approve of the spirit of the President's tax cut?a slightly more-than-symbolic victory in that it changed the conversation about wasteful congressional squandering of taxpayers' money?it was a back-loaded bill, with no capital gains relief, and failed to reduce the top income bracket to a level that would really stimulate the economy in favor of the $300 and $600 checks that'll be sent out beginning this summer. I was surprised that the repeal of the death tax wasn't gutted, but that, too, won't be eliminated for 10 years, postponing the axing of one of the IRS's most penurious methods of unfairly larding the government's coffers with money to waste on unproductive programs.
Daschle, meanwhile, is being portrayed as an amiable but shrewd, aw-shucks kind of guy. Sure. That's why on Meet the Press last Sunday, the incoming majority leader called Bush's plans to drill for oil in Alaska "finished." As in, end of conversation, George. Also, as Greg Pierce reported in Monday's Washington Times, Daschle has no fear of New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli facing an indictment later this summer. When Tim Russert (on the same edition of Meet the Press) asked Daschle about a front-page story that morning in the New York Post, which was headlined "Torch Is Toast," the South Dakotan said, "I'd say consider the source." Perhaps Daschle's been so busy courting Jeffords this spring that he wasn't aware that The New York Times originated the press investigation of Torricelli and has been relentless in its coverage of the gift-taking Democrat.
Finally, Geoffrey Norman, sportswriter for National Review Online, summed up how the Silent Majority might feel about Jeffords. He wrote on May 26: "Jeffords (who is my senator in the sense that I am from Vermont and so is he) had been doing his political transvestite act for so long that nobody even noticed any longer. The only way for him to make news was to finally get the operation. Vermont is the most insignificant state in the Union. Wyoming may have fewer people but it has a lot more oil, coal, cattle, and other useful things. Vermont no doubt led the world in macrame production in the 70s. Now it refines maple syrup and governs itself like the last 60s commune."
Back in the Real World
It was 6:30 on the nose two Saturday evenings ago and as Mrs. M, the boys and I stood with 150 other guests at my niece Jenny's wedding ceremony in Sonoma, CA, I was wondering whether my brother Jeff would be misty-eyed as he and his wife Mary escorted their daughter to stand with the groom, Rick Unruh. As it turned out, watching Jenny and Rick exchange their vows, after readings from Rilke and Corinthians, a harpist noodling away as we looked off in the distance at the fields of the Viansa Winery, as gorgeous a night as newlyweds could hope for, it was my eyeglasses that were fogging up.
Seeing Jenny holding hands with her intended, tears trickling down her face, I was lost in a flood of memories, triggered not only by so many familiar faces, but also from scanning the wedding program, which thoughtfully concluded with a short list of people "no longer with us to celebrate this joyous event." As one of maybe 15 people who've known Jenny her entire life, it was thrilling to see her so happy?not to mention her proud parents and sister Zoe?and also somewhat incongruous to witness a rare instance of fragility.
Jenny's one of the most stoic members of my family, a natural athlete who's overcome various injuries to participate in all sorts of nature-related activities, whether it's hiking, running, biking, camping or marathon swimming. I remember her birth in Mineola back in '69, when I was 13; visits to the Smith homestead in Huntington; and then jaunts with my parents up to Mt. Kisco, where Jeff and Mary settled for a short while before moving out to Mill Valley, CA. After her parents moved back east, Jenny would rack up red-eye miles from Los Angeles or San Francisco to attend family reunions, and not complain a whit about jetlag or the inevitable airport delays.
I was tickled to see Mary's parents, Dick and Martha Hilderman?as well as her sister Barbara?an event that brought back the days, almost 40 years ago, when my brothers and I would have dinner at their house on Long Island. Jeff and Mary were high school sweethearts, and it was a grand time to sample Martha's roasts and pies?a respite from the fare my own mother, never much of a cook, cobbled together?and to horse around, often somewhat obnoxiously, with Dick, the fellow I called "The Big Guy." The Hildermans live in Florida now, Palm Beach County in fact, and Dick and I engaged in a long discussion about the recount farce that took place there last year. He's a Goldwater conservative from way back?the '64 model of Barry, not the elderly Arizonan who liberals like to cite today as a politician who "grew" with age?and we had a marvelous session stewing over that debacle.
The reception was just as glorious, with touching toasts to Rick and Jenny, and hobnobbing with Mary's bridesmaids from her own wedding back in 1967 at Old First Church in Huntington, one of whom I was paired off with as an usher at the event. I parried with my friend Eddie Safady, a Texan who's well-versed in the politics of the Lone Star State, Dana Lyon, and Andy Jaye, a serious Bosox fan who also happens to be Zoe's fiance.
Junior and MUGGER III were at the kids' table and had a ball, running wild with cousins, delighted to be in an atmosphere so different from New York City. One of the highlights was a piñata-bashing during the cocktail hour, an event Mary organized and for which Mrs. M was deputized as the official. A dozen kids took turns whacking the seemingly indestructible papier-mache donkey, and at one point, MUGGER III, who was desperate to burst it open, had a stern warning for his mother. When our kids were up at the plate, Mrs. M would playfully raise the donkey up and down, just to get their goats: after five or six turns, our six-year-old said, "Mom, if you do that one more time, you'll be the piñata!"
It was a whirlwind of a trip for us. We left for the awful Newark International Airport at 6 a.m. on that Friday morning; got picked up by a limo driver in San Francisco for the two-hour trip to St. Helena, where we immediately settled into a spacious suite at the incomparable Meadowood hotel, a sprawling institution with an immaculate croquet course, swimming pools, numerous tennis courts and golf courses, and a courteous and attentive staff. I took the opportunity to quiz maybe 15 different Californians about the political peril that Gov. Gray Davis faces, and not one of them?including cabbies, affluent guests, waitresses and a Mexican maid (whom I communicated with in Al Gore-like Spanish)?had a kind word to say about the man who not long ago dreamed of opposing President Bush in 2004.
The liberals all hope that Davis, whose favorability ratings, according to a May 25 Field poll, have dipped to 42 percent, will face a primary challenge. The Republicans are cautiously optimistic, despite the state's recent dominance by the party that sent the ludicrous Barbara Boxer to Washington, DC, that a GOP candidate can defeat Davis, despite his immense ($25-$30 million) campaign war chest. Outgoing L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, a possible Republican challenger, is currently in a dead heat with Davis in the Field poll.
President Bush, who's meeting with Davis about the energy crisis on May 29, isn't likely to provide the Governor much cover, or agree to price caps on electricity. Why would he, considering Davis' statement to a Washington Post reporter last Sunday? He said: "The last time I looked, California was still part of the United States of America. We have contributed disproportionately to the economic growth of this country. There's no reason why a president should not respond to a legitimate request from the chief executive of the largest state in the union."
Funny, I had the same feeling when Bill Clinton was president: While Arkansas reaped federal benefits, New Yorkers got screwed, despite the fact that Clinton won the state twice and used Manhattan as a playground.
Before we knew it, the 4:30 a.m. wake-up call rang on Sunday morning, and we were on our way back to New York, the weekend jam-packed with laughter, kiddie shenanigans, fancy attire, a flare-up with a ratty Continental stewardess, a viewing of The Mummy in the limo back to San Francisco, a long lunch with the extended family at the Meadowood's Grill, a dinner at L'Auberge du Soleil on Friday night, and of course the wedding itself, a perfect night that we'll all remember forever.
May 28
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