Dickie Morris’s genius was to stick the Republicans with all their truly unpopular causes (assault weapons, abortion ban, end to affirmative action) and co-opt all the rest for Bill Clinton. It worked like a dream. As for Bill, I along with thirty million Americans of Irish descent liked what he did for Gerry Adams.
November 13
It’s just like the man said: vote for the lesser of two evils and you get both. Or, vote for Clinton and you get the other one free. Hardly had the polls closed before Clinton was saying that he’s likely to appoint the man—Dole—he’d spent the previous six months reviling to be in charge of a bipartisan commission to re-evaluate Medicare—a program he’d spent the previous six months hollering that Dole would destroy. And people wonder why the citizenry is cynical! The whole point of democracy is not to have bipartisan government.
Goodbye to the “soccer moms,” altogether the silliest confection of the entire campaign. In the end the soccer moms, deemed Clinton’s secret weapon, voted for him less than other female cohorts. Biggest enthusiasts for the man from Hope were elderly widows and young single mothers, far too frazzled to care about soccer. Judging from the ones I know, the soccer moms voted for Nader. What next? Across the past three elections the press has given us Joe Sixpack, the Reagan Democrat, the Angry White Male and most recently, the Soccer Mom. Aging Boomers?
In Humboldt County about 20 percent of the voters went either for Perot or Nader. In Mendocino the percentage was a bit higher. In a straw poll of 2,000 high school kids in Humboldt, over 25 percent went for a third party candidate, which is a comfort.
There’s not much to console oneself with otherwise. Large portions of the nation’s affairs are now being run by three men from Alaska. Appropriations, the powerful committee that Hatfield used to run, will now be under the sway of Ted Stevens, who really would drill through his mother if he thought there was oil in substrates below her coffin. Energy policy is under the sway of Alaska’s junior Senator, Frank Murkowski. In the House natural resources are overseen by Rep. Don Young, a former trapper and riverboat captain whose congressional office resembles a cheap Ketchikan taxidermy, its wall covered with the skins of Alaskan grizzlies, the lacquered corpses of king salmon and severed heads of Roosevelt elk and Sitka black-tailed deer.
Young does have a certain charm. Animal rights advocate Mary Tyler Moore once read a poem about the cruelty of steeljaw leghold traps before the Merchant Marine subcommittee, on which Young was serving. Accompanying Moore was Cleveland Amory, who periodically inserted a pencil into a trap, causing it to snap shut. The moment was highly charged and Young, as a hunter, trapper and taxidermist, realized dramatic action was required to turn the tide. His solution was to place his hand in a trap he had brought along and then begin calmly to question a witness as though nothing unusual had occurred. “I never told anyone, but it hurt like hell,” Young later confided to a congressional aide.
November 14
Goodbye, Larry. The only incumbent US Senator turned out of office was … yes, you’ve guessed it, Larry Pressler of South Dakota. I claim the victory. He went down by about 5,000 votes, against the trend in the state, where Republicans mostly carried the day. Before I traveled to Sioux Falls at the invitation of Jim Abourezk (Pressler’s predecessor in the Senate), Larry was running even with Tim Johnson.After my slurs on his character his standing briefly rose, as Dakotans made a show of standing by their man, then sank steadily as solidarity was overwhelmed by rank prejudice. I am responsible for the Democratic majority in the Senate. Take that, you work-within-the-system types!
November 20
In the early 1970s Mobil decided to fight back against the consumer lobby denouncing it for price gouging in the wake of the
November 13
It’s just like the man said: vote for the lesser of two evils and you get both. Or, vote for Clinton and you get the other one free. Hardly had the polls closed before Clinton was saying that he’s likely to appoint the man—Dole—he’d spent the previous six months reviling to be in charge of a bipartisan commission to re-evaluate Medicare—a program he’d spent the previous six months hollering that Dole would destroy. And people wonder why the citizenry is cynical! The whole point of democracy is not to have bipartisan government.
Goodbye to the “soccer moms,” altogether the silliest confection of the entire campaign. In the end the soccer moms, deemed Clinton’s secret weapon, voted for him less than other female cohorts. Biggest enthusiasts for the man from Hope were elderly widows and young single mothers, far too frazzled to care about soccer. Judging from the ones I know, the soccer moms voted for Nader. What next? Across the past three elections the press has given us Joe Sixpack, the Reagan Democrat, the Angry White Male and most recently, the Soccer Mom. Aging Boomers?
In Humboldt County about 20 percent of the voters went either for Perot or Nader. In Mendocino the percentage was a bit higher. In a straw poll of 2,000 high school kids in Humboldt, over 25 percent went for a third party candidate, which is a comfort.
There’s not much to console oneself with otherwise. Large portions of the nation’s affairs are now being run by three men from Alaska. Appropriations, the powerful committee that Hatfield used to run, will now be under the sway of Ted Stevens, who really would drill through his mother if he thought there was oil in substrates below her coffin. Energy policy is under the sway of Alaska’s junior Senator, Frank Murkowski. In the House natural resources are overseen by Rep. Don Young, a former trapper and riverboat captain whose congressional office resembles a cheap Ketchikan taxidermy, its wall covered with the skins of Alaskan grizzlies, the lacquered corpses of king salmon and severed heads of Roosevelt elk and Sitka black-tailed deer.
Young does have a certain charm. Animal rights advocate Mary Tyler Moore once read a poem about the cruelty of steeljaw leghold traps before the Merchant Marine subcommittee, on which Young was serving. Accompanying Moore was Cleveland Amory, who periodically inserted a pencil into a trap, causing it to snap shut. The moment was highly charged and Young, as a hunter, trapper and taxidermist, realized dramatic action was required to turn the tide. His solution was to place his hand in a trap he had brought along and then begin calmly to question a witness as though nothing unusual had occurred. “I never told anyone, but it hurt like hell,” Young later confided to a congressional aide.
November 14
Goodbye, Larry. The only incumbent US Senator turned out of office was … yes, you’ve guessed it, Larry Pressler of South Dakota. I claim the victory. He went down by about 5,000 votes, against the trend in the state, where Republicans mostly carried the day. Before I traveled to Sioux Falls at the invitation of Jim Abourezk (Pressler’s predecessor in the Senate), Larry was running even with Tim Johnson.After my slurs on his character his standing briefly rose, as Dakotans made a show of standing by their man, then sank steadily as solidarity was overwhelmed by rank prejudice. I am responsible for the Democratic majority in the Senate. Take that, you work-within-the-system types!
November 20
In the early 1970s Mobil decided to fight back against the consumer lobby denouncing it for price gouging in the wake of the
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