Misanthrope's Corner - presidential campaign - humor - Column - Brief Article

National Review, Oct 9, 2000 by Florence King

I am writing this in bed, where I am recovering by proxy from Al Gore's 28-hour nonstop Labor Day campaign marathon, "Sleepless in Wherever." Somebody has to rest and since he isn't about to, I'm doing it for him in my capacity as a veteran of the next worst thing to political campaigns: book tours.

The Constitution sets the minimum age for presidents at 35, but the candidates we end up with are nearly always in their 50s-the heart-attack age. Never mind all the Diet Cokes, it's still the heart-attack age, which makes Gore a candidate in more ways than one.

Pols used to enter a hall by walking up the aisle and waving decorously. Now the aisle has turned into a ragged serpentine with crowds on opposite rope lines. Gore runs in smiling maniacally and zigzags from one rope line to the other like an infantryman dodging bullets. At one stop he and Lieberman staged what appeared to be a modern-dance recital, entering from opposite ends of the hall and loping toward one another in a wide arc, meeting in the middle like an ecstatic Daphnis and Chloe. All that was missing were the diaphanous chitons.

In his round-the-clock trial by ordeal, Gore marched in a Pittsburgh parade, visited a truck factory in Michigan, watched football in a Philadelphia pub, ate breakfast with firefighters, ate lunch with construction workers (buying 100 cheesesteak sandwiches), and drove Louisville's Motor Speedway in his limo. Afterward, he made a point of rubbing it in to groggy reporters during a night flight on Air Force Two. "I can't believe that you guys are sleeping back here," he gloated, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. "I'm loving it."

Some sensible advance man scheduled his final campaign stop at a 911 emergency center where he signed autographs, but he probably wished he could wind it up by going a few rounds with Tipper. They couldn't do it publicly, of course, but he could have picked her up and thrown her on a gurney in the back of an ambulance and climbed in after her. It would have looked like Emma and Leon making out in the swaying coach in Madame Bovary. This way, if he had had a heart attack, the rescue squad wouldn't have needed to go and get him because he was already there.

Never mind campaign-finance reform, we need to reform campaigning itself before some candidate drops dead or causes a calamity. The possibilities are endless. Suppose a punch-drunk Gore tries to slap high fives, misses, and hits a little old lady in the head and kills her? Or, working a diner at 4 a.m., he reaches across a table to shake hands and knocks a woman's coffee in her lap. He grabs a napkin and tries to pat her dry, but just then her husband returns from the men's room, misconstrues the scene, and socks Gore in the nose. The Secret Service agents panic and shoot the husband, rumors spread that citizens are being executed, riots erupt nationwide, and Clinton declares martial law, cancels the election, and stays in office for the duration of Civil War II.

Gore's insane Labor Day marathon was supposed to show how hard he will work for the American people, but to me it hinted darkly of a taste for self-punishment that could make a Gore presidency perilous in a way that a Clinton presidency is not and never could be.

Despite his libido, Clinton is cerebral rather than physical; lazy, self-protective, and soft. He never went out for sports in school, and now that his jogging regimen seems to be on hold, only golf interrupts the flow of his inactivity. JFK's obsession with "vigor" is one aspect of his hero that he hasn't copied, as when he told Monica that intercourse would be too risky. True, he had an ulterior motive, but the result was the same: He avoided exertion and took his pleasure the easy way.

Nor does he follow JFK's lead in going coatless to prove that he can "take it." Clinton has a heavy, unusually long black overcoat that makes him look like an undertaker, but he wears it anyway for the sensible purpose of keeping warm. Like all true voluptuaries, he is a finicky indoorsman who loves his precious, pasty-white self too much to place any demands on it. He hurls himself into campaigning because it gives him pleasure, but Gore does it because it gives him pain. Given the choice of a Sybarite or a Spartan in the White House, I'll take the Sybarite every time.

Next to Gore on the scale of neurotic campaigning is Lieberman, not because he's a Spartan but because he is so eager to please that he would sing "I'm a Little Teapot" in 50 kindergartens a day if that's what it takes. As for W., he's a casual campaigner, but for the wrong reasons: He's lazy and diffident without having the excuse of being a reader. Ironically, the only confident, psychologically healthy candidate is the man described by the Washington Post's David Von Drehle as "grouchy," "snippy," "taciturn," "shy," and "visibly irritated." The man who enters a room with downcast eyes, trails off in a mumble, and "smiles as if his lips were sewn shut."

Dick Cheney on a campaign is like me on a book tour. When we say what a pleasure it is to be wherever the hell we are, it comes out sounding like Dorothy Parker's monologue: "Would I like to waltz with you? Would I like to be caught in a storm at sea?" W. would advise that you gotta let 'em look in your heart, but that, in my case at least, would only compound the problem.