A Pilgrim’s Digression

Part One
Part Two
Part Four

In Februrary 1999, having been impeached in the House of Representatives, Bill Clinton was facing impeachment in the Senate. Meanwhile, in the former Yugoslavia, a war that had lasted for much of the nineteen-nineties was about to draw America, via NATO, into the conflict in Kosovo.

In retrospect, Republican involvement in both events seem to me representative of what Republicans had become over the decade just past. Perhaps they had always been this way and I didn’t see it, but what I learned about the party to which I belonged was that Republicans had no other object but obtaining power by whatever means necessary. Democrats, of course, have the same object; they just rarely achieve it. I would also say that I do not believe Democrats use nefarious means to achieve power to the same extent as Republicans.

Though I supported it at the time and like a lot of Republicans was disappointed that the Senate seemed to get cold feet at the last minute, the impeachment of Bill Clinton now seems to me to reflect worse on the Republicans than on Bill Clinton. Republicans had tried, again and again throughout the nineties, to convict the Clintons in court, and in the court of public opinion, as common criminals, even murderers. Some people may have forgotten—some may never have known—that on conservative talk radio, there was a long-running conspiracy theory in which White House lawyer Vince Foster did not commit suicide, but was murdered by Clinton thugs for having an affair with Hillary. Or if he did commit suicide, it was because he was having an affair with Hillary and she broke it off. Whatever the theory, the common thread was always that Foster and Hillary were having an affair. This was before conservatives decided Hillary was in fact a lesbian. The murder of Vince Foster, among many other theories, was nonetheless seriously entertained in conservative circles.

Whitewater, “Filegate,” Paula Jones … investigation after investigation. Finally, in 1998, the Republicans big break came in the form of Monica Lewinsky. If you ask a Republican politician or conservative pundit, if they even still talk about an incident rendered totally inconseqential by history, they will tell you the impeachment was about perjury and the need to uphold the much-vaunted “rule of law.” It was about nothing so moral as that. Even they themselves knew it at the time. It was only about “getting” Bill Clinton, as they had failed to do time and time again.

The great irony is that, having lived now four years under another controversial and (by Democrats) much-despised President, by the way they treated Clinton Republicans prove themselves by far the most politically venal, partisan, uncooperative, power-hungry party in the two-party system. Democrats have certainly made some clumsy attempts at opposing George Bush, but the sheer number of investigations of Bill Clinton that came to nothing prove to my mind that Republicans occupied themselves for eight years mainly in attempting to destroy the President.

Republicans are proud of their “steadfastness,” they are proud of their “values,” but in practice Republicans have been as willing to sacrifice values and principles for the purposes of either getting and maintaining power, or taking power away from the “other guy,” whether that be Clinton or the Democrats generally.

The Kosovo war and the Iraq war are good examples of this, in terms of the ways Republicans justified (or opposed) military action in each of these cases. In March of 1999, and continuing through June, NATO began a long-distance air war against the forces of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Republicans and conservative talk show hosts offered generous criticism of this war. Limbaugh invoked the “Powell Doctrine,” which asserts that before war is engaged, the United States must have an exit strategy; we must also use overwhelming force to achieve our ends, and we must not stop until the enemy is totally defeated. Limbaugh and others found the Kosovo war to be lacking in all of these respects. It was half-heartedly waged from the air, not a single boot on the ground. There was no exit strategy. And the bombing ended too soon. There was also talk among conservatives about the possibility of a quagmire in Kosovo. Conservatives asserted the war could not be won by air power alone, and once troops were on the ground the war would spread. After all, the Balkans is where World War I began, conservatives warned. Furthermore, we could not be the policeman of the world, conservatives complained; a complaint George Bush repeated in the 2000 campaign. Of course, 9/11 “changed everything,” Republicans like to say.

This “conservative” caution sounds all the more remarkable when one considers the throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude Republicans took in 2003, when we invaded Iraq. Exit strategy? Pshaw. We’ll leave when the job is done. Overwhelming force? Pshaw. This is a “new kind of war” (how many times did we hear that?), and we can achieve our objectives with a “smaller, lighter” force. Besides, Colin Powell is no longer relevant.

Indeed, throughout the build-up to war in Iraq, Colin Powell was as consistently derided and denigrated by Conservative pundits with all the contempt they usually reserve for the most liberal of Democrats. Republicans are not above cannibalizing their own, when necessary.

As the fight over who would be the next President of the United States began in 1999, the Republican primaries in winter 2000 would illustrate this lack of scruples perfectly. In 2000, John McCain would inadvertantly find himself on the Republicans’ menu. McCain made the mistake of thinking that Republican voters choose candidates for office, rather than party elders, and he dared oppose The Appointed One, George W. Bush.

The Republican primary campaign in 2000 was the real eye-opener for me. The Clinton impeachment, the Kosovo War, now seem to me illustrative of how Republicans “play politics,” but at the time of these two events, I did not question the party or my allegiance to it. The Republcian primary season of 2000 would push me over the line from an unquestioning conservative Republican to someone at odds with my party.

The way that George Bush was elevated above all the other Republican candidates absolutley sickened me. It was clear to me that Bush was just a name to them. By that I mean, if erasing the Clinton years was your goal, what better way to do it than with a Bush? Electing a Bush would be an utter repudiation of the nineties and everything that Bill Clinton had done and represented. There was no real thought about what would be best for the country, no concern that the man Republicans were proposing to lead the free world was not much interested in being a statesman. Before winning the governorship of Texas in the mid-nineties, George W. Bush had expressed little interest in running for office. He had worked on his Dad’s 1992 campaign mainly because he needed a job. Thus I had to laugh recently, just before the 2004 election, when George Bush was said to be waxing nostalgic because this would be his last campaign, no matter the outcome. Bush has run for office exactly five times: once for Congress in the seventies (a campaign he lost), twice for Governor of Texas (which he won), and twice for President which he also won. This is hardly the resumé of a veteran politician; it’s the record of someone with a connected family who can help him rise to the top without going through the intermediate ranks.

Anyway, it seems to me the only reason he ran for Governor of texas was with an eye to the Presidency in 2000, and it may not even have been his eye on that ball. It may well have been others within the party who put him on that road to the White House. Everything I’ve read about Bush has said that he was happiest when he was owner of the Texas Rangers, and I tend to believe that.

During the 2000 primary season, on the radio Rush Limbaugh spent the better part of his program attacking John McCain. I could not believe what I was hearing. Other Republicans aparently felt the same way, because some McCain supporters would call in and argue with Rush about the way he was treating McCain. Limbaugh basically asserted every single day that McCain was off his rocker. He implied that McCain was mentally deranged from his years in captivity in Vietnam. He repeated the assertion, not explicitly put on the market of ideas by the Bush campaign, but certainly helping their campaign, that McCain had given in to north Vietnamese torture and given propagandist statements to his captors to use against other POWs. Republicans, with Limbaugh at the head of the parade, waged a vile war of defamation against a man who had spent the better part of the sixties in captivity in North Vietnam, while Limbaugh, Cheney, George Bush, and so many others,had been home pursuing their “other priorities’ (to quote Dick Cheney).

My first impression of George W. Bush, therefore, did not incline me in his favor. After losing the New Hampshire primary to McCain, he appeared on TV as a peevish, disgruntled man clearly irked that anyone dare oppose his ascension. He and McCain went on Larry King for a televised debate, and he withered under McCain’s outrage over the attacks on his service. Underneath the cheerful persona, I believe George Bush is at heart a selfish and self-absorbed man, every bit as much so as Clinton, who cannot bear setbacks of any kind. Perhaps this personality tic, which we saw again in the debates wth John Kerry, is the result of a life of priviledge in which there is no success that money cannot buy. Who knows. All I know is, a man’s quality is best judged when he is under fire, and George Bush was not cool under fire. He was sullen and plain old pissy.

McCain was the better man and the better candidate and I voted for him in the 2000 primary, for all the good it did. When McCain finally bowed out, I was left with quite a dilemma, for on the one hand I was still under the sway of conservative hatred of Bill Clinton, a hatred which transferred quite easily to Al Gore. But I had a deep dislike for Bush as well.

As the campaign proceeded and opposition to Bush within his party melted away, Bush began smiling again, and he didn’t look so bad. I began to give him serious consideration. But I could not get out of my mind what had happened to McCain. I felt like I had glimpsed a bit of the true George W. Bush in that first part of the campaign, and the pleasant, optimistic, “regular guy” I was seeing now was just a facade.

For my wife, who had also voted for McCain, there was no question she would vote for Gore now. I thought about it. I watched the debates, and for all his sighing, I began to give Gore some credit for trying to be his own person, independent of Clinton. Gore was not a voluble, likable guy. Democrats rarely seem able to field those kind of candidates who can make personal connections the way Bush and Clinton can. In the end, though, my vote came down to one thing: I did not like George Bush. Is that a bad reason to vote for Al Gore? Well, sometimes elections work that way. You choose the candidate you like least, and issues go out the window. At least in 2004, my vote against Bush would be accompanied by a vote for John Kerry, in that by voting for Kerry I was genuinely voting for a foreign policy change. In 2000, I was just voting against Bush.

I voted for Al Gore in 2000, and Al Gore lost. My streak of voting for losers remained unbroken still.

Again in the post-election squabble over Florida, we saw a glimpse of what I feel is the real George W. Bush, a man who does not brook any delay in his assumption of power. I’ll never forget seeing a news conference with Bush and Cheney towards the end of that whole debacle. Nothing was decided yet, but Bush held a news conference in which he announced his cabinet. He and Cheney sat in chairs on opposite sides of a fireplace; it reminded me of images I had seen so many times before of President Clinton with an advisor or foreign dignitary, sitting one on each side of a fieplace in the White House. The whole news conference, from the anouncement of the cabinet to the Oval Office-like backdrop, was carefully staged for one purpose: to make it clear, by inference if not in fact, that George Bush was the winner of the 2000 election. Gore was outraged; he came out on TV not long after to remind Bush that nothing was decided yet, but it was too late. Bush had hit upon a strategy he would use again and again in the next four years: declare victory, even if you haven’t achieved it; give the appearance of strength and assurance, even if your position is actually pretty tenuous. Say something is true enough, and soon people will believe it.

What had happened to the Republican party I joined in 1992? Had it changed with the decision to make George Bush the head of the party? Or had I changed? I thought I had joined a party with a coherent, consistent philosophy of small government, lower taxes, greater freedom and less government regulation; I thought I had joined a party of reason over politics and emotion, with simple, Christianity-based values; I thought I was joining a party that held as a goal the liberating of the American people from the restraints that prevented them from pursuing their God-given right to happiness. In retrospect, I probably thought I was joining the Libertarian party.

Tomorrow, I will try to conclude this series with some reflection on how I have finally become totally estranged from the Republican party as it is ruled by George Bush. You can probably guess that the war on terror and the war in Iraq figure somewhat prominently into that estrangement. Look for the fourth and final installment in this series sometime tomorrow.

Continue to [Part Four]