David Corn's
Loyal Opposition

Wednesday, November 24, 1999

It Didn't Happen

It's hard to be authentic. God knows, all the presidential candidates are trying, for authenticity, as the political handicappers keep saying, is in. After the past few years, that's no shocker. Candidate Clinton came on the scene in 1992 as The Natural, the sincere pol who could feel your pain, whether it was caused by a root canal or by problems with affordable day care. True, he would do little for either. But he seemed genuine. Well, now there is a too-long list of Clinton lies (Rwanda, China, the bombing in Sudan, campaign finances, and, of course, you-know-what). Presumably in response, the voters, the poll-gazers tell us, want a real thing. In these roaring 90s days, policy is out; it matters less than it did in 1992, when those who bothered to vote desperately yearned for someone to lead the country out of the recession (never mind that it was already ending). So the '00 wannabes are endeavoring to be all-whatever.

Yet there have been a few snags.

Bill Bradley has been hawking himself as the non-packaged politician, a down-to-earth fellow with real-American values. His pitch is simple: what you see is what you get. But he's also the contender who enlisted a claque of Mad Ave. ad execs to cook up an advertising campaign. The slogan they derived is Nike-esque: "It Can Happen." Alex Kroll, the adman in charge, caused a day of bad press for Bradley last week, when it was reported that Kroll once headed Young & Rubicam, when it was handling the Joe Camel account for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. A-ha, the Gore posse exclaimed, Bradley has his own Big Tobacco connection. (The Gore crew still smarts from the stink raised when the public learned that Gore had retained as his main message man Carter Eskew, the consultant who designed the tobacco industry's $40 million propaganda blitz against the Clinton-Gore-backed tobacco legislation.) Kroll pooh-poohed the brouha, ha, noting R.J. Reynolds was but one of 5000 clients for whom his firm toiled, and the flap blew over. But what was most significant about this tempest was that Bradley -- supposedly the anti-Slick Willie -- had retained the same hucksters who plot devious ways to prey upon consumers' insecurites in order to sell them soap, toothpaste, beer, and cars. Authentic or not? You make the call.

There was something distinctly unauthentic -- Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post called it, "highly misleading" -- about one of the first two television ads the Bradley campaign unveiled. In the spot, a woman named Maureen Drumm noted that Bradley proposed a law that women be allowed to stay in the hospital for 48 hours after giving birth and that because of that "my daughter is alive today." Within seconds of its release, reporters were vetting this claim, and they quickly discovered that Drumm's comment was not accurate. In 1993 -- two years before Bradley proposed the law -- Drumm and her first child developed problems 26 hours after the delivery. But her insurance company allowed her to remain in the hospital and the illness was treated. She went on to have another child. The daughter which "is alive today" thanks to Bradley actually is her third child, according to the Bradley campaign. How so? Bradley's mouthpieces say Drumm would have been too afraid to have this child without Bradley's two-day hospital stay law -- even though she received her two days during her problematic first pregnancy and then went through a second pregnancy without this law. The Bradley ad was stretching the truth. Even worse, when opponents and reporters challenged the Bradleyites on this, Eric Hauser, his press secretary, spouting indignation, pronounced all criticism of the ad an attack on Drumm. It was the Bradley campaign that, seeking to melodramatize his fine proposal, put Drumm in the line of fire. CNN's Bernard Shaw said the Bradley advertising campaign is "selling integrity." That's a nice way of putting it. But integrity is better demonstrated than sold.

George W. Bush would seem to be on the winning side of the authenticity gap with Vice President Al Gore. If only because he is no mystery. Gore, on the other hand, is a definition-in-waiting: Washingtonian or Tennessee, mountain-climbing jock or Internet nerd, loyal hanger-on or his own man, dark suit or tan suit, live or Memorex, alpha or beta? Bush is a frat-boy who had the good sense, as did Gore, to be born into the right family. But he's okay with that. (Now that the coke and National Guard questions have been shoved aside, here's another query: how did a fellow with a C-average at Yale get into Harvard's business school?) As for the new Big-A, Bush's problem has become AI -- authentic intelligence. To prove he's no ninny on foreign policy, he gave a speech on the subject last week. That at least qualified him to be a news reader. But a more revealing event came a few days prior to the address, when Glen Johnson, an AP reporter, conducted a phone interview with Bush about the upcoming speech. During that conversation, Bush read Johnson a portion of the draft speech in which he promised to take action "if the Russian government attacks innocent women and children in Chechnya." Johnson asked if such attacks were already under way. Whoops. Bush had no answer. He moved the phone from his mouth and called out to someone, "They are attacking women and children, aren't they?" He then told Johnson, "Condi Rice" -- that's Condoleeza Rice, who worked at the National Security Council for Bush's father -- "is shaking her head in agreement." It seems reasonable to expect a president -- or a presidential candidate -- to know whether or not Russia is engaged in a public activity that warrants US threats before he issues such a threat. But Bush was willing to bang his chest without possessing the crucial details. Here was an authentic Bush moment.

The Republican with the most serious authenticity problem is Steve Forbes. He ran in 1996 as a New Jersey horse-country libertarian. He mocked the religious right, refused to talk the talk on abortion. This time out, he's campaigning as if he was reared in the Bible Belt, not the manse country of the Garden State. He's gotten religion on abortion. And he's come out for a new gimmick to push prayer into public schools. At a campaign stop in Trenton last week, the publisher-candidate declared his support for state legislation that would require public school children each morning to recite a 56-word passage from the Declaration of Independence. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.") This is an idea worthy of the propagandists of North Korea or the old Soviet Union. What could render these words more meaningless than rote recitation? And -- not to be too PC about it -- where are the non-men humans in this equation? Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to force kids to mouth these hallowed words, as long as each morning, the children also recited the list of people -- women, non-landholders, African-Americans -- who were not originally granted the benefits of these noble sentiments. (That would teach the students a real lesson about the role of rhetoric in politics.) And here's another condition: make sure the meaning of inalieanble is spelled out ("not transferable to another or capable of being repudiated," says my dictionary) and hold a classroom discussion on whether the death penalty can be reconciled with the recognition that every person has an "inalienable" right to live. This brainwashing bill has been around for eleven years. Yet not until Forbes was trying to corral Christian rightists into his camp did he endorse it. How authentic is his support?

Authenticity is in much demand, but short in supply. John McCain, the fierce and earnest advocate of campaign finance reform, pockets gobs of cash from the special interests he decries, claiming he has to play by the current rules of the corrupt game. His message: I may be authentic, but I'm no fool. Pat Buchanan, that devoted anti-Communist, heartily accepts the endorsement of pseudo-Marxist and political cult leader Lenora Fulani. Buchanan -- say what you want about his hateful rhetoric and demagogic tribadism -- used to be, at least, an authentic ideas man, one who preached absolutist and fundamentalist values. Now he's just another situationalist.

So who is the most authentic guy in the race? Donald Trump. He's genuinely abrasive, crass, egomaniacal, weird, and impetuous -- and he makes absolutely no effort to hide any of that. (By the way, I'm not pronouncing him the most authentic because I like his soak-the-rich-and-erase-the-debt proposal, his criticism of the NAFTA treaty, his opposition to privatizing Social Security, and his call for Canadian-style universal health insurance. He does, alas, appear much too eager to carpet-bomb North Korea.) With all his hubris, there's not much room for hypocrisy. If the public is truly hankering for authenticity, Trump may be wise to ante up.

Making Kosovo Safe for Gangsters

As President Clinton last week was preparing for his trip to Kosovo, I came across an email from an acquaintance who works in the Pentagon and who was recently in Kosovo. His note was a scathing counter to the official happy-talk appraisals of life in Kosovo. For example, when General Michael Jackson, NATO's top commander in Kosovo, recently vacated that post, he declared, "We have seen a return to normality" in Kosovo. He also hailed the "successful demilitarization" of the Kosovo Liberation Army and "the establishment of law and order." Now what channel has he been watching? My Pentagon pal's dispatch neatly sums up the troubles there -- and illustrates the hollowness of the Clinton promises that accompanied the bombing of that province. With his permission -- and in accordance with his wish to remain unidentified and employed -- here are his observations:

Things seem much gloomier today than when I was there in the summer. I can only speak for myself (and the dozens or so various people who told me similar things), rather than on behalf of the US government, but it is clear the UCK (KLA to non-Albanophones) is totally out of control, and unlikely to live up to its commitments on demilitarization. Ethnic Serbs and Roma continue to be attacked and leave the province. Right after I left the city of Pec (Peja in Albanian) in the western part of Kosovo, where violence was at its heaviest in the spring, a group of Serbs leaving the province, only ten miles from crossing into Montenegro, was attacked by a mob and barely got out alive (though their cars were all burned). Some of our (US) guys told me that in several villages where the ethnic Albanian citizens had elected their own mayors and councils, the UCK came in and told them who their new mayors would be. It's clear that disenchantment with the UCK is not limited to Serbs. It also appears that the judicial system is a sham, since all judges not associated with the UCK have been shot at or have quit their jobs or have been intimidated into releasing suspects. It's possible the UN Mission will turn that around, but I'm not optimistic. In essence, the international community went into Los Angeles, drove out a corrupt and brutal LAPD, and left the Blood and Crips as the de facto government. This is hardly an original revelation on my part, but the vision of a multi-ethnic Kosovo is giving way to reverse ethnic cleansing. I agree that we needed to something about the mayhem which Milosevic and Company authored. Unfortunately, it seems that we drove the Yugoslav military and police out with the promise that we (the entire international community) could provide a safe and stable environment for all Kosovo's citizens. And we just could not deliver.

So much for the authenticity of that Clinton endeavor.

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