David Corn's
Loyal Opposition

January 26, 2000

Finally...

By the time you read this, the voters of Iowa will no longer matter, thank god.

A small number of these Midwesterners declared their presidential preferences on Monday night, and now all the politicos are looking ahead to the next big thing: the New Hampshire primary this Tuesday, where the challengers to the lead-dogs of both parties have their best shots. If John McCain and Bill Bradley -- who are vying against each other for New Hampshire independents, who can vote in either the Republican or Democrat primary -- don't stop George W. Bush or Al Gore here, politico junkies can turn off their TVs until after the conventions in the summer.

What's made the run-up to the actual campaign interesting -- at least to the 10 percent or so of the Americans who have bothered to pay any attention -- is that in each party the contest has boiled down to an outsider-insider versus an establishment front-man. True, each outsider-insider is not as much of an outsider as he maintains. McCain, who decries the special-interest-dominated campaign finance system, raised big bucks from the lobbyists for the telecommunications industry, the insurance industry, the HMO industry, the automotive industry, the securities industry, and the computer industry. Bradley, who decries the special-interest-dominated campaign finance system, raised much of his campaign cash from Wall Street executives. How insurgent can either be? Still, Republican McCain and Democrat Bradley have thrown a few pebbles of sand into the gears of coronation within their respective parties. For that, political journalists should be damn grateful. They even sparked a few brief spasms of policy discourse. McCain, late in the game, questioned the GOP's love affair with supply-side tax cuts. Bradley, in his too-smug fashion, challenged the incrementalism of Clintonism. Neither would-be party-pooper has offered fundamental alternatives. But they have tossed up more flak than the politerati once expected.

Actually, McCain's face-off with Bush is more an outsider-verus-establishment clash than Bradley's competition with Gore. McCain's support of modest reform is utterly out of sync with the prevailing status-quo attitude of the Republican political class. Bradley's argument for reform agenda is not as foreign to the Democratic political class. (Democrats in Senate, for instance, have rallied behind McCain's reform legislation; GOPers have not.) And McCain, by pushing anti-tobacco legislation in the Senate, has displayed more daring than Bradley ever did as a Senator.

McCain, though, is following an unusual game plan for a Republican: whack away at special interests and assail Big Tobacco, one of his party's most reliable funders. It may not be a smart strategem, but it sure is fun to observe. In the final pre-primary season weeks, McCain pushed even further: he attacked Bush's tax cuts for being too generous to the rich. When was the last time a Republican complained about that? Other GOPers immediately pounced on him for waging class warfare, but McCain quipped, "Class warfare is when you want to take from the rich and give to the poor." He was rightfully pointing out that under Bush's tax plan, hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used for Social Security, Medicare and other programs that serve the middle-class and the poor would be zapped to the wealthiest Americans. (A third of Bush's $1.7 trillion tax cut will go to the top 1 percent, people making over $319,000 a year, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.)

It's hard to believe McCain can get far among Republicans by assailing tobacco, campaign money, and big tax cuts. In fact, his quasi-maverick campaign has resulted in solidly positioning Bush as an establishment Republican, which is not the role Bush set out to play. But this development is not likely to hurt the guy. "Four months ago, George Bush was running as a compassionate conservative," GOP pundit-publisher Bill Kristol said last week. "It was a new kind of Republicanism.... It was not going to be the old standard conservative establishment type of campaign. Now, he is running a totally orthodox Republican establishment campaign. He is the candidate of the Republican establishment and the conservative establishment."

Once upon a time, Republicans did look upon Bush's so-called compassionate conservatism with suspicion. Lamar Alexander dubbed Bush's slogan "weasel words." (These days, Alexander is a weasel-backer.) Dan Quayle, in disgust, ordered his staff never to use the term. And when Bush slapped the Republicans in Congress last year for proposing a delay in disbursing tax credits for the poor, many Republicans wondered what the party was stuck with. But Bush has come home. Stephen Moore, an analyst at the libertarian-conservative Cato Institute put it this way: "McCain's attacks are actually helping Bush, because it makes him look like a Ronald Reagan supply-sider. This helps establish Bush's fiscally conservative credentials."

Bush has McCain on money. Bush's positions are more in keeping with present-day Republican thinking. McCain's chance lies in Republicans voting for leadership over ideas, or for an oddball war-hero-jock, over the affable, cool kid on campus. But outsiders tend to lose, and no outsider has ever beaten an insider with so much cash.

Over in Democratland, Bradley's problem is similar to McCain's. His purported outsiderism has failed to connect with the main constituencies of his party. That is partly because this outsider-challenger does not believe in coalitional politics. Never has. As a Senator, Bradley neither reached out to blocs of citizens nor worked with organized groups. He did talk passionately about race in America, but civil rights leaders in his home state of New Jersey rarely heard from him. Even if Bradley's positions (the campaign 2000 models) are closer than Gore's to those of traditional Democratic liberals (though not unionists), Gore, who has been visiting black churches and union halls for years, has played the constituency game better. Moreover, Bradley's supposedly outside approach to health care -- subsidies so people can buy private health insurance -- scores well for boldness but flops on actual details, for it strengthens the insurance industry. Bradley's effort is no Jerry Brown-like campaign aimed at energizing traditional Democratic blocs neglected by the centrist waverers of the party. Consequently, Bradley may be vanquished by an establishment candidate who both attacks Bradley for being too left _and_ maintains better ties with the left-leaning elements of the Democratic electorate. It's a damn weird dynamic.

Arianna's Revolution

Those citizens who gaze at the '00 campaign and discern only a battle between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dee should rush out and buy a new book entitled _How to Overthrow the Government_, which declares, "American politics is broken -- under the thumb of a small corporate elite using its financial clout to control both parties' political agendas." No, it's not written by the anarchist collective that went ape-shit in Seattle.

It is the work of columnist/commentator Arianna Huffington.

Anyone who remembers her as the wife of Michael Huffington, an oil-heir Republican in California who bought himself a seat in Congress in 1992 by spending a record $5.4 million of his own money and then, two years later, dropped $30 million of his own fortune in a loss to Senator Dianne Feinstein, or who recalls her as a prominent Newt-backer in the heady days of the so-called Republican Revolution, might be surprised by Huffington's latest volume. But she has been edging toward a progressive populist politics for several years now.

In the preface, Huffington, who was divorced from her husband in 1997, explains that during the 1994 Senate election she discovered that "modern campaigns... are so thoroughly dominated by pollsters and consultants that there's no oxygen left for ideas that might challenge the status quo." As for Gingrich, she confesses, "I was completely fooled." She took him at his word when he told her that one of his priorities was pressing bold and daring proposals to help the poorest Americans and that he liked her ideas on how to do so. Who would want to admit they were seduced by Newt Gingrich? But without going into details, she notes she came to see him as a fraud. And as she began to publicize her disagreements with him on policy matters in her column, she writes, "his attitude toward what he saw as my defection was Stalinist."

Huffington's primary gripe is that during this era of supposed plenty, "35 million Americans are living in poverty and more children are homeless than at any time since the Great Depression" -- and the political system, "peopled by politicians living on graft and sinecure," does little to address this tragedy. "The two-party system is bankrupt," she asserts. "...[T]he very process by which we elect our leaders has been seriously compromised by the influx of special interest money." The book goes on to prove this, as she highlights scores of campaign finance outrages and instances of institutional corruption in Washington. She whacks away at both parties. Recently, she notes, she was asked what could be done to raise the profile of poverty in this country: "'Put a Republican back in the White House,' I replied -- not because he would do more for the poor, but because it might inspire the champions of the Left" -- meaning the Democrats -- "to reunite with estranged consciences and regain their voices."

Huffington has written an engaging and often witty polemic that also bemoans the tragic triumph of spin and polls and the debasement of language in the political world. In response to George W. Bush's comment that the 80,000 contributors who donated money to his campaign represented "a huge groundswell," Huffington huffs, "Less than one-third of one percent of the population is a groundswell?" (Interest declared: I am indeed plugging the book of a woman who in November hosted a party for me and my novel, Deep Background.) She ends the book with an ambitious program. Support public financing for political campaigns. Engage in acts of civil disobedience and demonstrations like the ones against the WTO in Seattle. Push for same-day voter registration. Join volunteer groups like Habitat for Humanity. Sign up with third, fourth or fifth parties. Boycott corporations that do not donate to people in need. It's basically a call for the renewal of civic society and the rebirthing of citizenship.

Huffington is hoping to spark a movement with her book. Well, give her credit for thinking big. She has hooked up with progressive activists in Boston, Washington, and Los Angeles to launch her book in February with modern-day Boston Tea Parties. In Beantown, she and Mass Voters for Clean Elections will dump ballot boxes with "dirty money" into the harbor. In Washington, she will hit Capitol Hill with Sojourner's Jim Wallis who oversees the Call To Renewal, an interfaith campaign to end poverty. And in Los Angeles, she plans to stage an event with the Oaks Project, a citizenship group started by Ralph Nader that has run local campaigns to improve health care. One-quarter of the profits from the book, she says, will be donated to these groups. Huffington, who has deep pockets, will also air radio and television ads that promote the themes of her book. The spots are being designed by Bill Hillsman, who concocted sharp reform-oriented ads for Senator Paul Wellstone and Governor Jesse Ventura. Her pals Al Franken and Bill Maher committed to appearing in the commercials. (Using me-first comedians to make a serious political point will garner Huffington publicity but not necessarily enhance her credibility.) And she is launching a new web site: www.overthrowthegov.com.

When Huffington first descended on Washington in the early 90s, the line on her was, now there goes one hell of an ambitious woman. After all, she had been the president of the debating society at Cambridge University, she had written five books, including biographies of Pablo Picasso and Maria Callas, and she had married a millionaire. Since then, she almost became the First Lady of Newt's Revolution. She dabbled in New Age-ish philosophy. She did time as a political satirist on Comedy Central. And she transformed herself into a seriously regarded syndicated columnist. Now, after writing a book that she says "radicalized" her, Huffington wants to kick-start a citizens crusade. It's a noble endeavor. Vroom, vroom, Comrade Huffington. Ride on!