In Search of `Wild, Exotic Days'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

It was a week in which the press awarded the presidency to George W. Bush going gaga over all that money he has Raised. Will his dramatic early success carry him all the way?

The Economist wondered in its July 3 issue whether the presidential nominations were all sewn up. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah apparently doesn't think so, throwing his hat into the ring at such a late stage -- tardy, anyway, for the 2000 White House contest. Hatch's unexpected entrance into the GOP contest generated surprisingly little coverage from a press taken aback by Texas Gov. George W. Bush's phenomenal fund-raising success -- $36 million and still counting. Money speaks louder than words in the capital: Just read veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew's new book, The Corruption of American Politics, if you think ideas are preeminent here. And by virtue of his bulging campaign coffers, the Republican front-runner is seen by most pundits as having a pre-emptive lock on the GOP nomination. Hell, who needs voters and ballots or even to know where Bush stands on a plethora of issues? He has the cash; he has the nomination. That's the logic.

But it seems to have passed by Hatch. "Quixotic" is the word most Capitol Hill journalists are using to describe the Hatch challenge. Others are less literary and sniff "nutty." But just maybe they are wrong. The shrewd fourth-term senator has seen many a "foregone conclusion" come to naught in his long career. Just maybe he's positioning himself for a possible Bush mishap or is readying himself to pick up the pieces after a touch of Lone Star scandal. He doesn't lose anything by running. Even if the Texas governor trots all the way to the White House without a hitch, Hatch won't have hurt himself. Publicly, he has been most pleasant and respectful about the Wunderkid from Austin, and no doubt Hatch has worked into his calculations the possibility that a grateful Bush always could reward him with a nice Supreme Court appointment for dividing primary votes of hard-core Western conservatives.

"Upsets are not impossible, of course" the Economist opined. No, indeed not. Flash back to 1992. There were foregone conclusions then as well. A year or so out from the polls, and most pundits thought Junior's pop was going to saunter to postwar victory. Commentators talked of an anointment and of an election resembling a Wall Street ticker-tape parade. But with the help of insurgent Pat Buchanan, the vengeful Ross Perot and a lackluster Bush campaign, "King George" lost his head to a Democratic opponent most commentators were willing to write off in the snows of New Hampshire. Upsets? They are the meat and drink of White House races. Remember Edmund Sixtus Muskie crying in the snow? Or Gary Hart? Life has a nasty habit of monkeying around with business.

Certainly, when they can shake themselves free from being mesmerized by Bush's staggering fund-raising accomplishment, the scribes and dirt-diggers in the media hope -- a little like Charles Dickens' Mr. Micawaber -- that something will turn up to alter a primary race that seems all but over, bar the shouting. Their attitude: Ho-hum, how dull. And it is difficult not to sympathize. Are we really going to have to endure 14 months of centrist Bush vs. centrist Gore and of "compassionate conservatism" pitched in a life-and-death struggle against "practical idealism"? If so, by the end of it the History Channel will be able to boast higher ratings than MSNBC or CNBC. Better to move the election up a year to this November -- it would sure save us all from tedium.

In the meantime, as the money obsession wears off, Bush can expect the kind of scrutiny the media didn't give Bill Clinton. Bush knows it and is prepared for it. There already are early runners in that game. Investigators, journalists and private snoops are being drawn to Texas like moths to a porch light. In Washington the buzz in the first week of July was that NBC News was on to something Big. There was talk of David Bloom, that network's White House correspondent, being dispatched to Austin to front a major expose of something dark and terrible and ugly in the background of the Republican front-runner. The scuttlebutt was that the story would amount to a "catastrophe" for Bush. Wishful thinking? Who knows.

So far all the published Bush "exposes" have not even merited the description of "damp squibs." The Los Angeles Times had a go with a lame piece questioning how and why Bush entered the Texas National Guard as a fighter pilot. Shouldn't he have been off bombing North Vietnam with the Air Force? No evidence of string-pulling or the wielding of undue influence was presented. Place Bush's service against Clinton's extensive draft-dodging endeavors and it is clear who comes off better -- and Vice President Al Gore went to Vietnam as a uniformed journalist, for Pete's sake.

The American Spectator's recent exploration of how Bush made his money via sweetheart deals and family connections was more to the point. Was Bush backed financially at various times by people who wanted to connect with his dad and later with the Bush White House? Maybe so, but without proving that policy was altered or any wrongdoing occurred, what does it matter? Did the taxpayers of the Texas county of Arlington get short shrift in the cozy public-private deal to finance a new ballpark for the Bush-managed Texas Rangers baseball team? Probably, but taxpayers voted for it in a referendum.