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Voting: progressives have two valid choices tomorrow -- either back the vice-president, or protest the system entirely by voting for a left-wing extremist. this whole idea of bill bradley as some sort of crusading reformer is just weird, and it doesn't jibe with what we new jersey residents know about him from his tenure in the senate. it doesn't even qualify as a token protest to vote for bradley over gore, because you'll just be privileging the agenda of one insurgent -- and not particularly ideological -- branch of the democratic party over another. if you're looking for symbolic value, try jello biafra. many of you have strong personal objections to vice-president gore, and believe me, i respect that. i, too, felt that gore's pit-bull act in the debates was repulsive. and it's absolutely true that he's surrounded himself with sleazebag campaign managers like tony coelho and chris lehane and intellectual buffoons like naomi wolf. those choices reduce my respect for albert gore the human being. but i fail to see how those choices deligitimize him, or, in fact exactly what the brutally exacting and calculating decisions made by *candidate* gore tell us about what *president* gore would be like. senator bradley has spent the last few weeks looking to label the vice-president a "conservative democrat"; unearthing gore's pro-life record from the early eighties, and calling for justifications of votes cast back in the stone age. besides being an ineffective and shrewish tactic, it's played directly into gore's claims that he's grown and adapted on the job. of course, that's not exactly true, either -- gore's position has altered in time with his constituency. that makes him no different than most other politicians, including many of the most effective in american history. putting that all aside, let's assume the worst -- that gore hides conservative sympathies behind his mildly progressive exterior. (nothing, incidentally, over the past eight years would indicate that this is true, but let's continue anyway.) now this manchurian candidate has been elected president. how does he translate these secret, buried conservative ideals -- in this case, a softness on abortion rights -- into national policy? here's the short answer: he doesn't. as the leader of the executive party -- a party that has built an electoral majority, in part, on guaranteeing abortion rights, he's simply not going to go to the head of the class and suddenly encourage the rest of the leadership faction to reverse course. a national executive doesn't do things like that; certainly not out of a secret preference. (unless you want to argue that gore is insane, has been lying for sixteen years, and, once elected, will suddenly make the repeal of roe vs. wade a priority. but now we're back in seventh grade, hypothesizing that ronald reagan is a secret alien invader.) the national executive engages, whether he wants to or not, in coalition building and compromise. the president has a difficult enough job effecting *any* kind of change in the face of legislative wrangling; only the worst andrew johnson level chief executive would make things harder on himself by reneging on popular promises and screwing over his most adamant supporters (naral has backed the vice-president, a good sign). see, americans still don't realize they're living in a highly bureaucratized state. they go to the polls every four years thinking they're electing a king. they look for the candidate whose views on "issues" most closely match their own, on the assumption that once elected, those views become law of the land by royal decree. but the president isn't even a *legislator*, for god's sake. at best, his gravitational force as de facto party leader has great influence over legislation. but if the president has no skill at working out practical compromises with legislative leaders from both parties, nothing is going to get passed. you westchester residents: next time you see bill clinton on the golf course at chappaqua, ask him about the health care reform bill in '92-'93. as he bludgeons you repeatedly with his nine iron, he will, if honest, explain to you that he didn't know what the hell he was doing when he first took office. he didn't know how to use his party as an instrument, and he didn't know how to make compromises with republicans. it took him awhile to realize he wasn't in little rock anymore. once he woke up and understood he was an executive and not a pontiff, it was too late to salvage the health care reform act, and the republicans had seized control of the house of representatives. when progressives go to the polls to help elect a president, they should be asking themselves these questions: who is the candidate best equipped to point his party apparatus in a beneficial direction? who is the candidate best equipped to avoid a repeat of the health care bill fiasco, i.e., the one who knows how washington operates, and won't founder all chances to make a positive difference through simple ignorance? who is the candidate with a chance of actually *passing* some of the initiatives he's promising? in 2000, that answer to all of those questions is albert gore. bill bradley doesn't come close to measuring up. bradley's candidacy is best understood as the last gasp of the small group of democratic party leaders -- most of whom, incidentally, are retiring or leaving office -- who never accepted clinton's ascendancy, and see election 2000 as their final chance to get a in parting shot at the president. d. p. moynihan, legislator/philosopher, is the most notable and visible of these figures, but make no mistake about it, bradley was always one, too. many of you know how i feel about senator moynihan -- he's great if you want to have a theoretical discussion about the nature of "welfare", but when it comes to filling the potholes on the west side highway, he's nowhere to be found. bradley had a similar record when he was representing new jersey; both senators clearly believe that politics is an arena for big, lofty ideas, and that the president's policy wonking and public emoting dragged the ambitions of the party into a particularizing gutter. (the fact that they saw clinton as a fat, no-class philanderer from the dirty south didn't help any, either.) hence, all of bradley's discourse about a new kind of politics; a high-minded politics of big schemes and grand plans. well, sure. to paraphrase my favorite gary carter commercial, big schemes are the fun part of the job of governing. getting them passed through two legislative chambers is the tough, sweaty part. if bill bradley was some charismatic firebrand -- some galvanizing insurgent, like a particular arizona senator who won't be named just yet -- you almost might be convinced to go along with him here; that by sheer force of personality he could make his imprint on the legislature and drag the american civic sphere toward his personal vision. but now the rest of the country has realized what new jerseyans have always known about bradley's charisma: he hasn't got any. always a celebrity-politician, bradley has never had to work hard to make his name known -- the one time he was seriously challenged in an election, in 1990, he almost lost it when he essentially refused to campaign. his notoriety has bought him the luxury of remaining above machine politics, and he now trumpets this as if it's a cardinal quality of his, that he passed a test between vice and virtue that other, lesser men failed. hey, bill -- you never *had* to cut deals with ward heelers to get your name known. you never *had* to make compromises and promises the way most politicians do. you were able to inhabit the lofty sphere of ideas because you were *privileged*, not because you're a better manner of man. because of his jump-shot, bill bradley didn't have to knock on bob janiczewski's door and promise sewage projects for union city; he got the party backing anyway. it's not oversimplifying to say that's why he never felt it was incumbent upon him to work hard for his constituency. quid-pro-quo serves a practical egalitarian purpose in a democratic system. look, american politics *isn't* lofty -- it's about thousands of overlapping appropriations measures, each targeted toward their own set of local circumstances and concerns. big, overarching issues *do* emerge from time to time, but it's an open argument whether the state, or even the so-called public sector, is in the best position to address them. but even on the big, lofty issues, bradley's senate record is not good -- he has always been something of a loner, and he refused to get his hands dirty by doing the sort of practical politicking that could get grandiose measures passed. i can't square that with the sort of coalition building he'd have to do in the white house; he's disengaged, almost as a rule. he'd make an extremely ineffective president. ********************** a few words about the other side of the aisle. i've always liked john mc cain; i think he's been a fun presence in the senate. he's also been a strong, important counterweight when our government has tended toward geopolitical isolationism. but john mc cain as president is another matter altogether. i would feel *much* more comfortable with george w. bush in the white house than i would with mc cain there, and i'd strongly suggest you would, too. america hasn't had a truly hawkish president in decades, and now is *not* the time to re-start. make no mistake -- in a mc cain administration, american troops would be up to their waists in conflict all over the world faster than you can say "speak softly and carry a big stick". mc cain was absolutely correct when he said that it was unconscionable that u.s. bombing of yugoslavia was so imprecise, because the administration feared american casualties. that military policy was arrogant, cowardly and murderous, and it epitomized the very worst about the clinton administration. yet it was mc cain, the alleged military expert, who went on every talk show that would have him last year, claiming the war in yugoslavia was unwinnable without a ground troop commitment. where is his plate of crow, i ask you? where is the critique of his trigger-happy tendencies, on bold display in his senate voting record and any transcript of any of his speeches? it's nice, really, that baby boomers have stopped worrying about vietnam, and begun to understand that the united states has international obligations, but guys, this is ridiculous. by no means should john mc cain's finger be anywhere near the "button", metaphorical or otherwise. i hate him, too, but i don't think four years of a bush administration would be an unmitigated disaster. first of all, the democratic party would easily recapture the federal legislature in 2002. concordantly, some of the bigger state houses would start to swing back to the democrats, too. it's almost worth relinquishing four years of federal executive power in order to re-establish control over state governments, not to mention the house of representatives. and governor bush (though, notably, not *candidate* bush) has shown himself to be a willing, if somewhat dimwitted, compromiser. i think he'd make an extremely non-ideological president, and preside over the federal government much the way whitman and pataki have run their state-houses. that said, haven't you had enough of that awful frat-boy smirk already? could you really stand to watch him bob up and down for the next four years? it'd be like electing leo mazzone president. ********************** one final note: in my sixteen years of following national politics closely, i've never seen a federal election conducted in such an unseemly manner. watching al gore's persnickety debate style was a revolting experience, and he managed to do something which i heretofore considered impossible -- he made me have sympathy for bill bradley. now bradley's poll numbers are falling so fast, i blacked out momentarily. at least some of that is attributable to the viciousness of gore's campaign rhetoric, and that's regrettable; there's plenty of legitimate reasons to keep bradley out of the white house. don't even get me started on the republican side, where "consistent" is just about the best thing that can be said about the kind of campaign bush has run since getting upset in new hampshire. i am a jersey cat, and, perhaps to keep the circus out of town, we never hold our primary until everything's already settled. but you guys in new york, massachusetts, and california have a choice to make. i'm curious to know how -- and if -- you vote. don't even waste your medals on me, tris mc call back |