The Week - presidential candidates; Hillary Clinton's family background; other political news

National Review, August 30, 1999

A panel of professors evaluated how well Al Gore and George W. Bush deliver the Spanish sentences they stir into their stump speeches. They concluded that Bush had a good accent, but bad grammar. Isn't that how he talks conservative?

Hillary Clinton has a Jewish family connection (her grandmother's second husband, according to the Forward, was Jewish), and a black link as well. Ebony magazine revealed that her great-great-grandfather, Hemings Rodham, was one-eighth black. Like many people of not much color who escaped or were manumitted in the antebellum period, he came to the Midwest and joined the white community. Harvard professor Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates Jr. said that the connection shows that racial issues "are as multifaceted now as they were then." "Her genes riff, like her husband's politics," added critic Stanley Crouch. Psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, noting Mrs. Clinton's history of spousal abuse, said "the burdens of broken families, associated with slavery and 'blackness,' affect white America too." Ebony denied that Mrs. Clinton's senatorial campaign gave them any help with the story, although filmmaker Spike Lee was reportedly in discussions with the campaign about doing an ad.

According to recent reports, George W. Bush does a mean impression of Dr. Evil, the campy villain from the Austin Powers movies. Now it turns out that Bush can do a (not so) nice Karla Faye Tucker, too. Last year, Texas executed Tucker, a double murderer who became a Christian on death row and whose pleas for clemency gained national attention. Bush apparently hasn't yet forgiven her for the resulting bad PR. In discussing the case with reporter Tucker Carlson for Talk magazine, Bush mimics the late Karla Faye begging for mercy: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'" Bush makes much of his own religious conversion, but apparently Christian mercy doesn't keep him from holding a grudge against a woman whose death warrant he signed. More of this, and people may stop believing Bush's impression of a compassionate conservative.

In the same interview, Bush is asked whether abortions have gone up or down while he's been governor: "I don't know, probably down. Not because of anything we've done, though." Oh. Is it too much to ask that Bush at least feign interest in the question? Or is imitating a committed pro- lifer too far outside his range?

Bush, alone among Republican presidential candidates, refuses to say whether he has used cocaine. That the question is being asked, in the absence of any specific accusation, suggests the panic of his opponents, including the White House. But it also testifies to our confusion about drugs, and about privacy. When the public clamors for laws that impose draconian punishments it cannot bear to see imposed on anyone in particular, law and social practice have drifted too far apart. Who really considers the neighbor's kid a felon for snorting a line? At the same time, whether, and under what circumstances, a candidate has used cocaine is more relevant to his fitness to serve than whether he has had premarital or adulterous sex, two questions Bush has answered. A moral right to privacy implies a correlative duty not to publicize personal matters by, for example, discussing one's spiritual journey or advertising one's fine feelings too insistently on the campaign trail. If politicians want us to respect their privacy, they will first have to respect it themselves.

Who is the more reasonable and palatable Democratic candidate-Al Gore or Bill Bradley? Increasingly, we are tempted to give the nod to the vice president. Bradley continues to nauseate both in his policies and his rhetoric. On China, he has shown that he is hardly a figure of Churchillian resolve. Indeed, he is not even a figure of Clintonian resolve. Asked what he would do as president if the PRC invaded Taiwan, he took the opportunity to chew out the island republic for its impertinence: "The United States should say to the Taiwanese government that if they take steps toward independence, they cannot count on us for any help." Some days later, at a Jesse Jackson event, Bradley reprised his holier-than-thou number on race. "Racial unity," he said, "is not my position," but "my core." Demanding that the administration issue an executive order that prohibits "racial profiling" in police work, he huffed, "Mr. Vice President, walk down that hall where the president is seated, go up to him with the executive order, and say to him, 'Sign this now!'" If you think that nothing could be worse than a Gore administration-abolition of the automobile and all-think again.

We pause to record the extraordinary fact that the president of the United States was fined $90,686 for contempt of court. The judge said she was imposing the fine "to deter others who might consider emulating the president's misconduct." Extraordinary, we have said. But not in this administration; not with this president. Bill Clinton has forced a numbing in this country, a numbing that we ourselves work not to submit to. It is not normal for the president of the United States to be hit with-to deserve-such a fine. It is not normal for the president to have to pay almost a million-dollar settlement to a woman, a state employee, he harassed. These events, and so many more, are extraordinary; only, in the last seven years, they have come to seem ordinary. Very little in this country is more urgent than the restoration of right standards for the president.