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I, for one, wish there were an even greater difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but the claim that they are Tweedledum and Tweedledee is one of the huge false assertions of our time.
Why am I feeling so bitterly anti-Democratic? Let me count the . . . No, seriously, I’m thinking of one issue in particular: This coming Sept. 11, the governor of New York is scheduled to recite the Gettysburg Address at an official commemorative ceremony. The governor of New York happens to be a Republican (George Pataki). We now learn that, the day before — Sept. 10 — the New York Democratic party will air a television commercial in which leading state Democrats — including the two candidates for that party’s gubernatorial nomination — will recite the Gettysburg Address. As the New York Post’s Fred Dicker noted, this is a major act of upstaging. The spokesman for the Democratic party said, “[The ad] is an opportunity for our Democratic office-holders to express condolences in a nonpolitical way.” Asked why no Republicans would appear in the ad, she responded, “This is on behalf of our organization of Democrats.” As one old Democrat once said about his Republican rival: No class.
Ouch. This, no doubt, was an allusion to Bill Clinton, who loved to relax (and other things) among the Beautiful People, except during reelection year, when Dick Morris’s poll told him to go camping out West. George W. Bush is not the kind of president who takes a poll to find out where he should vacation with his family. Say that for him, and more.
I direct you to this Tamar Lewin piece in the New York Times. It begins,
Affirmative action will be on the skids when Americans generally have the confidence to believe and say that they are not evil — not Ku Kluxers — just because they subscribe to the old liberal principles of colorblindness, equality, Americanness, and universality.
Well, forgetting that shameful appellation “African-American,” it is a shame that our society will almost surely be further Balkanized and racialized in this way. “African-Americans” — black Americans — don’t need their own museum; they are enshrined in the American museum. They don’t need their own “history month,” either; they are part and parcel of — inseparable from — American history. Special pleading — the racial “look at me” — as I’ve written roughly 1.3 million times, is the current curse of this country. You could, to be super-affirmative actiony about it, have a museum to every single ethnic group in America on the Mall. But we have, instead, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, who represent us all, through their principles and ideals, even if those principles and ideals have not always been met in practice. My usual prayer: Save us from race. A desire for a vacation from race — a long one — is not a denial of the racial factor which permeates all of American history; it is a plea for the lessening, and eventual transcendence, of that permeation — one that smells, and spoils life for us, in endless ways.
But we have said, some of us, that it’s incumbent on all of us to be involved, to fight this war, not merely to rely on the instruments of state to do it for us. (The same is true with crime, by the way — the POH-lees can only do so much.) “Ask not . . .,” and all that jazz. The TIPS program is one way not to be a passive citizen — merely a “taker” — but an engaged citizen, knowing that our security is the responsibility of more than Don Rumsfeld and the glorious jarheads. Y’know? A smallish point, but there it is.
Few people in public life are more admirable than Pete du Pont. He was, for my money — for the average Reaganite’s money, I would say — clearly the best presidential candidate in ’88, though he went nowhere. (So easy to poke class fun at him.) He is a person who genuinely changed his mind about things (I did too, for that matter): As governor of Delaware, he was fairly Rockefellerish, but the Reagan experience made an impression on him. The course of the world made an impression on him. He is not someone with his eyes closed, unwilling to learn, to re-examine. Besides which, rare — rare — is the man of inherited wealth who understands how the economy works, how money is actually made, what must be done to make others rich. Steve Forbes is another such person. Both men — du Pont and Forbes — are miracles in this way. As far as I can see, the average person of inherited wealth is more like Ted Kennedy, who says, “I’ve got my pile — was born with it — so now let’s socialize.” Du Pont for . . . something.
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hate to be so partisan. I really do. Many have been the times my grandmother
and I have looked at each other and said, “Aren’t we such awful
Republicans? I wish we could be more evenhanded.”
Can
I give you a quick example of why I like George W. Bush — a lot?
He can be prickly, and he’s a “needler,” as he likes to
say. He said to the Associated Press last week — on the subject of
vacations, must’ve been — “Most Americans don’t sit
in Martha’s Vineyard swilling white wine.”
