SEE DUBYA'S HALLOWEEN COSTUME

POLITEX: "MUGWUMPS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!" "We have nothing to gain but to get rid of these sons-of-bitches, but that is everything! " So says New York Observer rabbel-rouser Michael Thomas in his review of David Tucker's Mugwumps. Mugwumps were "genuinely good men [who] once took up the cudgels against the corrupt holders of entrenched power and on behalf of an idea of political virtue which, a century later, still looks virtuous. It was perhaps the only time in American history since the founding of the Republic that the entanglement of politics and virtue was not fatally tainted with tendentiousness and self-interest," wrote James Bowman in a Times Literary Supplement review of the book last month.

New Yorker Thomas observes that Mugwumps author Tucker believes " the moral foundation of Mugwumpery was laid at college. Relative to the population as a whole, college-educated people were comparatively small in number then. As indeed, they are today, although college-educated no longer means educated, as five minutes’ conversation with any recent Brown graduate will quickly illustrate. Education—learning, the use of learning to illuminate past, present and future—is no longer the point." Unfortunately, Bush watchers know that Dubya is not a Mugwump. His undergradute years, sad to say, were not devoted to intellectual pursuit, and he looked upon his Harvard MBA as certification from a trade school. No, fear, Thomas assures us: "Nowadays, a college education seems to be essentially beside the point, period. No longer the dominant signpost on the road to success. Longtime readers will recall this column’s characterization of the 80’s view that college was 'an agreeable way to fill up the inconvenient gap between puberty and Goldman Sachs.' By then, the 'education' part of going to college had been all but hollowed out. Content eroded until, like the Cheshire Cat, only the grin remained: in the form of the diploma itself, that credential essential to securing lucrative Den of Thieves employment."

In their day Mugwumps, who attacked the monied status quo, were termed narrow-minded "conservatives," far out of the mainstream of American life and politics. This idea allows Thomas to update the movement. "Moral idealism about public life in this country," he writes, " need not be exclusively identified with what we in our time think of as 'liberalism,' any more than vice or moral ugliness are exclusively the province of money-grubbing 'conservatives.' The two most disgraceful figures in American public life, the Donald and the President, each of whom incarnates the American gospel that the key to success in this country is the capacity to welsh without a second thought on one’s financial, familial and moral obligations and commitments, respectively epitomize the conventional view of what a conservative is, and what a liberal is."

Aside from Dubya's lack of intellectual curiosity and achievement, one might suspect that Thomas would be willing to consider the Texas contender as a Mugwump on the basis of his appeals to the spiritual side of the Wall Street money grubbers who are often characterized as Republican stalwarts, but, alas, that dog doesn't hunt. "The first election upon which the Mugwumps actually had any measurable influence," Thomas opines, "was that of 1884. Oddly enough, this fell some 20 years into the span of the First Gilded Age, just as next year’s election will fall approximately two decades into the life of the Second Gilded Age. Just as the first generation of Mugwumps found their man in Grover Cleveland, we Modern Mugwumps may have our candidate in Bill Bradley. In an admirable column in the Sunday, Oct. 24, Newsday, Prof. Robert Westbrook identified Mr. Bradley as the standard-bearer for 'Heartland Progressivism,' which is what Mugwumpery evolved into."

So there you have it. If you consider yourself a Mugwump, Bill Bradley, not George Bush, is your man. But one question remains. How will Big Bill be able to get from his East Coast backers to his roots in the heartland? Thomas has an answer: "The money and mouths may be here, but the 250 million Americans who live outside the Four Seasons, outside the Beltway, and outside the Santa Monica Freeway no longer give a merry screw about what Media Central thinks, and they pay scant attention to those masturbatory concentricities of babble that we flatter ourselves into calling 'conversation' or 'dialogue.' These are the 250 million people who are not buying Talk, and not buying it by the hundreds of thousands of copies. They are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the little old lady in Dubuque."

While we're hesitant to rain on Mr. Thomas's parade, we feel obligated to remind him that Tina Brown, the editor of Talk, previously edited The New Yorker, home of the little old lady in Dubuque. Does Ms. Brown know something about today's electorate that Mr. Thomas would rather not think about? 10/27/99

BUSH WATCH DEBATE: WHICH DUBYA IS DUMBER?

BILL BRASIN: Jerry Politex, I contend that the Dubya who reads to kids when he visits schools around the country is dumber than the Dubya who reads his speeches to adults. He's always reading "The Hungry Caterpillar" to them. Do his aides carry the book around the country in a black attache case handcuffed to a wrist and slip it onto the library shelves when nobody's looking? Then Dubya comes in and says, "Oh, 'The Hungry Caterpillar,' think I'll just read that sucker to you kids." You'd think he'd memorized the book by now!
JERRY POLITEX: Listen, Bill Brasin, that's nothing! At least he knows that by reading the same kid's book over and over, he'll be able to pronounce the words. What about his speeches? Listen to this: " Bush squints into the teleprompter, sounding out the words streaming by as if encountering them for the first time. In his education speech, he tripped over the term 'exemplary,' which came out of his mouth as 'exemplarary,' and he referred to the Walter Sisulu Children's Academy, a charter school named after the late ANC leader, as 'Sizzle-oo.' He called the Manhattan Institute, one of the more influential conservative think tanks, simply 'Manhattan Institute,' without the definite article, a minor-seeming mistake that suggests he doesn't fully grasp what he's saying."
BRASIN: Yeh, I read that Jacob Weisbert story in "Slate." And one of Dubya's speech writers, Bill Bennett, appeared on "Meet the Press" last Sunday and pretty much absolved Bush from taking responsibility for the content of his speeches. He said the negative reference in Dubya's speech to Robert Borke's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" was "unfortunate" and went on to say that he had read the speech in advance and "will take some responsibility for not seeing that....I think notes are going to Bob Bork, saying, you know, 'It wasn't about you, Bob Bork, it was about a certain line of thinking.'"
POLITEX: Uh-huh, and this freaked Weisbert out: "Bennett assumes Bush himself wouldn't know--and couldn't be expected to know--that someone named Bork wrote the book that Bush referred to. He makes it sound as if Bush has no more responsibility for what he says in a speech than Tom Brokaw does for a report he delivers on the nightly news. Bennett doesn't even think Bush is the one who owes Bork an apology!"
BRASIN: I agree, Jerry, that's a pretty good indication of the depths of Dubya's dumbness, but what about the dumbness of Dubya's arrogance. He was in Seattle this past week and really rubbed parents the wrong way at Kimball elementary school, according to the "Houston Chronicle's" Clay Robinson. One parent who just happened to be in the school helping out, Doctor Richard Kovar, "said he did not even know that Bush was going to visit Kimball and was surprised when the Republican presidential front-runner showed up as Kovar was stapling homework assignments for his son's first-grade class. 'He said, `Hiya, fella,' like a frat guy,' Kovar said later. He said he told Bush that Kimball needed more federal help but that Bush dismissed his plea. The federal government contributes about 7 percent of a school district's budget. 'He told me to call my state legislator. He said the real problem is federal meddling,' Kovar added. 'That tells me more about that man than anything else I can imagine.'"
POLITEX: At least the book's author wasn't present at the school to hear the reading. When Dubya delivered his gubernatorial speeches, chief spinner Karen Hughes stood off to the side, mouthing the words. Think of chief speechwriter and senior policy adviser Mike Gerson who now stands off to the side, thinking Dubya's ideas. Weisbert says "Gerson is an evangelical Christian and one of the original champions of "faith-based social programs," an idea he promoted when he worked for Indiana Senator Dan Coats. Gerson's--I mean Coats'--idea, was to allow tax credits (and not just a deduction) for contributions to charities. Speechwriter Gerson is also credited with Bob Dole's attack on Hollywood in 1996 as well as the address Steve Forbes gave to the Christian Coalition in 1997, the one that convinced the religious right to accept Forbes' conversion from the supply side to the Lord's side. After a stint working as a journalist for U.S. News, he joined the Bush campaign this year. Gerson didn't return my phone calls, but the assumption that he is responsible for most of the intellectual and historical references in Bush's speeches... is widespread among conservative insiders."
BRASIN: With such conservative credentials, no one can accuse Gerson of being a "whore," like Bush was accused of being by a parent in Seattle. If that visit is any indication, parents around the nation are beginning to get wise to what Dubya's doing. Bush visits a school, knowing nothing about the school's problems, then offers his rhetorical answers to their problems and gets a freee photo-op at their expense. This led parent Mary Austin to conclude, "I feel like we were being used as his whore." The school has a funding problem and a high student-teacher ration, then Dubya "added insult to injury by turning a student walk-a-thon -- a major fund-raising event for school supplies -- into a photo opportunity and then contributing only $20." Then he tells them their problem is Washington. Those who spoke out seemed to consider Bush to be their more immediate problem.
POLITEX: Seems like what we've been discussing, here, is Dubya's version of "triangulation." He make conservatives unhappy, he makes the parents unhappy, and he makes his speechwriters unhappy. That's pretty dumb!
BRASIN: Want more? Now, Dubya say's he doesn't know what "triangulation' means, although the idea of appealing to both sides of the political spectrum has been heavily discussed with respect to him for the last two weeks in the national media and the term's been around with respect to Clinton's politics for years. We know he reads "The Hungry Caterpillar," but doesn't he read the newspapers? Not even news summaries put together by his staff? Yet, Richard Berke reports that last week Bush "bristled" and said, ""I don't know what it means. This is some invented word. I don't know what triangulation stands for. It's new in the political jargon. What does it mean? Triangulation? Seriously." Given an explanation, he "impatiently" said, "Sounds like somebody trying to insult me then." As you can see, Jerry, the insult is self-inflicted.
POLITEX: On that note, Bill, I think we had better call this debate a draw. Dubya's dumbness is even more pervasive than I thought. 10/17/99