The only thing to fear is fearlessness.You Brits may be looking on bemusedly at the current American congress wondering what in God's name we have done to ourselves electing these twits."Hyena." R.E.M.
We are too.
The Republicans seem to have done a bait-and-switch. People who thought they were voting for smarter, less intrusive regulation, find that they apparently voted to return to the dear dead days when oil-soaked rivers caught on fire.
Somewhere along the line, "Give me liberty or give me death" became "Give me E-coli AND give me death." "Make government work better" has become "Turn it over to AT&T; now THERE's an efficient organization!"
Newt and his robots are charging fearlessly into the unknown, deconstructing a complicated, jerry-rigged, house-of-cards government without knowing exactly which cards they can pull out without the whole structure collapsing. But then again, they don't care if it collapses.
The thing is, no matter what you see going on in Congress, or hear on Rush Limbaugh, most Americans just are not that driven by ideology. Not for nothing is pragmatism our only home-grown philosophy. Our fundamental question is, "Does the damn thing work?"
And our fundamental directive to politicians is "Don't just stand there, DO something!"
So in 1992, we made a not-very-ideological choice, a governor who had done a pretty decent job of dragging a poor and backward state a little farther into the 20th century. Clinton was middle of the road, just like most of us: he believed in racial equality, but owed no allegiance to Jesse Jackson; he believed in helping out the working poor but not the deadbeats; he believed in bringing people together and using the talents of all of our people; he believed in using the powers of government to help US, the ordinary, struggling citizens who "work hard and play by the rules."
He came along just at the right moment, when it had finally occurred to us that our quaint tradition of electing Republican presidents and Democratic congresses meant that none of them ever had to accomplish anything, and everybody could blame the other guy (and use this as a fundraising ploy). Clinton was the guy who was going to be able to work with his own party in Congress to fix things: the economy, the health care system, the budget deficit, the cynical defeatist spirit of our politics.
It sounded good to us. And it all should have worked.
Except, as Jim Hightower says, the only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
For sure there's not a party organization to support you. Democrats don't raise money by being reasonable; they raise money by reminding us that Republicans want to stick it to the poor, the elderly, the blacks, the gays, the Constitution, and, of course, women. There's no payoff in admitting that now and then the Republicans have a point. There's no payoff in cooperating, and letting Republicans get some of the credit.
And Republicans don't get one of theirs back in the White House by helping a Democratic president succeed.
With the Republicans refusing to help at all, and the Democrats undercutting him every step of the way, it's amazing how much of his agenda Clinton actually got through. Not that you know anything about this, because God knows, our press didn't bother to cover it. They were much too busy with Clinton's haircut and penny-ante scandals (can you imagine? A governor may have done favors for his state's primary employer!).
He fixed the student loan program by cutting the bankers out of the middle (the Republicans are now stuffing them back in). He streamlined government, cutting staff, simplifying forms, simplifying purchasing. Al Gore got the entire government, and all its information resources, onto the Internet. Clinton cut the budget as much as his Democrats in Congress would allow him to. He established Americorps, which mayors and businesspeople and charities alike have called a national treasure; he instituted his urban loan plan to help rebuild the inner cities, and put his apprenticeship program for non-college-bound youth into place.
It didn't matter, of course.
The press didn't report, and the people didn't see, these accomplishments. What they saw, night after mindnumbing night on the evening news, was endless wrangling on the floors of Congress, and mean partisan sniping. It didn't LOOK like the government worked.
The American public asked Clinton to take us back to the Garden of Eden. When he hadn't done it after 18 months in office, they had a collective temper tantrum. They said, "I don't like you anymore, and I'm going to take my ball and go home. It's MY ball." And they gave the ball to the people who promised to give them everything they ever wanted.
So that's how we got into this mess. But we can get out of it, I think. Like Winston Churchill, I have enormous faith in the American people to do the right thing once all other alternatives have been exhausted. The evidence is that the American public is not all that thrilled with Newt's doings. Maybe next November we can start putting our dismantled government back together.
Maybe next time we will think longer and harder about voting for men with too much certainty and too little fear. And maybe next time we will realize the value of saying "Don't just DO something, STAND THERE!"
Previous Columns: Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map
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