David Corn
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
SCENE: A PRAIRIE FARMHOUSE. There’s a knock at the door. A woman stands
in the cold. She smiles. “Hi, my name is Naomi. I’m a volunteer—well,
not exactly—for the Gore campaign, and I’m taking time off from writing
books on female empowerment to go door-to-door here in Iowa. Can I talk
to you a moment? Do you feel an absence of power in your life? Is there
a greater strength, an external strength, that you desire? After all, in
this age of poll-driven, blow-dried, feel-your-pain politicians,
wouldn’t you like to see a candidate demonstrate he—and I do mean he—is
a real man? Wouldn’t you want to vote for a man who seems like a son you
can trust and a brute who had the might to kill his father? I don’t mean
that literally. But let’s say he could, if he wanted to. Wouldn’t you
feel more secure in your home here, if we had in the White House a
president who really is the king of the tribe? And one who wears earth
tones. Here’s a flier for Al Gore. And, let me ask you one more
question. It’s for further campaign research. How do you feel about
angels?”
There are moments in presidential campaigns that we later look back upon
and say: That was when it became obvious that candidate such-and-such
had no chance of becoming the nation’s top dog. Recall Massachusetts
Gov. Michael Dukakis helmeted and riding in a tank. Uncomfortable smile.
Looked like Snoopy. The election could have been canceled the moment
that photo hit. Then there was President George Bush in 1992 checking
his watch during the debate with Bill Clinton. The nation was still
shaking free of a traumatizing recession, but Mr. Gulf War was worrying
about his next appointment. The voters have no time for you.
There’s a chance the Naomi Wolf eruption—which dominated political chat
last week—will be the we-knew-it-then moment for Al Gore’s campaign. The
news that Gore was paying Wolf $15,000 a month (later cut back to $5000)
for advice on how he could transform himself from beta to alpha male
reinforced the notion, true or not, that Gore is lost within himself,
that he is not sure who or what he is, that he has to pay someone to
help him develop not a campaign strategy (we’re used to that sort of
political consulting) but a personality.
I have no problem with Gore picking her brain. She’s a quirky thinker
and, no doubt, might toss out a high concept (The Protective Daddy, The
Respected Big Brother, The Resourceful Cousin) that could trigger a
useful idea for Gore. But could those nuggets be worth $180,000 a year?
As described in the press, one of her missions was to guide Gore in the
journey from loyal-buddy beta male to big-ape alpha male—a process in
which he would have to challenge our current commander-in-chief to prove
himself. There was an inherent problem in this project. An alpha male
shouldn’t need advice—certainly not from a female!—on how to be an alpha
man. It’s as if Gore had contracted with a consultant for guts lessons.
For her part, Wolf maintains that she barely mentioned alphas and betas
to Gore and that the advice she provided—for which she was paid through
a cutout—focused on the concerns of women.
Wolf has a point about Gore’s image problem, but you don’t need new-age
mumbo jumbo to describe it. Forget the Greek letters. Gore’s trouble can
be explained by the Geek Theory of Presidential Politics. Rule #1: Geeks
lose. Rule #2: When the contest is between two geeks, the geekier one
loses.
Look at recent history: Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson in
1952. A general who had won the biggest war in history against an
egghead governor. No contest. Stevenson proved he was truly a geek by
running against Ike again in 1956—and losing by a larger margin. Then it
was John Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, who established the
modern-day precedent of the veep-geek. Only Kennedy’s Catholicsm made
this contest a squeaker. Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater in 1964?
Admittedly, neither stood out as a geek, but Goldwater did wear those
thick-frame eyeglasses. The next race poses trouble for the theory:
Nixon running against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. There is no clear
geek gap in Nixon’s favor. But the Vietnam War played badly for
Humphrey. Moreover, Humphrey, not Nixon, was now veep, making Humphrey
the geek by default. Next came Nixon and George McGovern. The Democrat
was a former fighter pilot and no geek. But in an era of rage and
protest, the Nixon campaign succeeded in depicting McGovern as a fringe
candidate. The politics of fear trumped the geek theory that time out.
Jimmy Carter and stand-in President Gerald Ford: the faux-President was
ridiculed for his haplessness—a geek trait—and lost to the earnest
Southerner who hid his geekness behind that huge smile. When Carter
turned out to be a geek-president—remember the photo of him collapsing
while jogging?—Ronald Reagan bounced him out of office. Former Vice
President Walter Mondale was the geekiest Democratic nominee since
Stevenson. He had no chance in 1984 against Reagan, the brush-clearing
horseman. The Dukakis-Bush contest was a geek faceoff (Bush even had to
deny he was a “wimp”) that proved Rule #2. Four years later, Bush was
challenged by Clinton—whose geeky policy-wonk tendencies were trumped by
his much-too-healthy Bubba side—and Bush joined one of the most
exclusive geek societies in the world: incumbent presidents who didn’t
get reelected. There was no geek in the Clinton-Dole duel of 1996: a
rascally BMOC defeated a past-his-prime grump.
There’s a good reason why Americans don’t like geeks in the Oval Office.
The president is the symbolic leader of the nation, as well as the
manager of the executive branch, though the two jobs don’t necessarily
require the same talents. (Most West European nations sensibly leave the
symbolism to royalty or ceremonial presidencies.) Gore fell into the
geek category early in the Clinton years—and he fell hard. His advocacy
of the Internet—a plastic-pocket-protector issue if there ever was
one—didn’t help. His stiffness, which is not apparent in one-on-one
meetings, became an overmilked joke. He became a caricature: the classic
overachieving nerd.
Despite Naomi Wolf’s ministrations, it’s probably too late for Gore to
go from geek to non-geek. Fortunately for him, his Democratic opponent,
Bill Bradley, displays several prime geek characteristics: he obsesses
over obscure issues, he ponders on his own and not with others, he can
be boring. But an athletic legend is never a geek. Still, what Gore has
going for him is that the Geek Theory does not apply to primary
contests. In such races, the electorate is small enough to allow a geek
to succeed. Remember, primary voters did nominate Bush, Dukakis and
Mondale (Steve Forbes, take heart). But should Gore survive the Bradley
assault, he will likely find himself facing either George W. Bush, for
whom the geek-gene has apparently skipped a generation, or John McCain,
a former POW and, consequently, an automatic non-geek. Gore can’t
out-alpha these males. The Wolf hoo-hah makes that clear.
The Wrath Of Jude
Two weeks ago, I reported on my visit to Pat Buchanan’s book party at a
fancy Washington steakhouse and detailed an encounter with Jude
Wanniski, the supply-side evangelist who now says he is informally
advising Buchanan. I noted that Wanniski was praising Farrakhan as a
sincere “man of G-d”—much to the chagrin of his conversation partner,
John Lofton, a religious-right columnist. I also related that Wanniski,
after I asked him why he wasn’t on the Forbes bandwagon, explained that
those running the Forbes show were “white supremacists,” adding that
he—Wanniski—believed most white people to be benign white supremacists
(Wanniski is white).
Wanniski did not enjoy my account of our conversation. He sent an e-mail
to several heavies in the media business—John McLaughlin, The Washington
Post’s Howard Kurtz, Bob Novak—decrying me as an “incompetent
journalist” and a “slimeball.” He did not challenge any of the quotes,
nor did he defend his positions. He resorted to that all-too common
defense of one who is quoted accurately but inconveniently: he said his
remarks were taken out of context. But what mitigating context can there
be for his praise of Farrakhan or his remarks about the “white
supremacists” of the Forbes campaign?
Wanniski’s attack prompted me to check out a file on him that a reader
had sent me after the initial column. It offered many reasons why one
should not take offense at being slurred by this false prophet. For
years, Wanniski, who has a firm that monitors political and economic
trends for money managers, has been courting Farrakhan. The New Republic
reported in 1997 that he recruited Farrakhan for an annual client
conference in Boca Raton, FL. Regarding Farrakhan’s reputation as an
anti-Semite, Wanniski told the magazine: “Farrakhan has every reason to
be disturbed at being on that inferior side of the [racial] divide. On
the white side, there is of course little doubt that pound for pound
American Jews are the most powerful and influential of all segments of
our society—in every professional field of endeavor. In addition, their
history asserts a claim of superiority that has made Jews of all people
the most resistant to inter-marriage with non-Jews.”
Routinely, articles depict Wanniski as a relentless and crazed
self-promoter who champions one hobbyhorse after another and who
barrages friends and foes with faxes. One infamous June 1992 fax to his
clients proclaimed, “We can now confidently predict H. Ross Perot will
be elected President of the United States, probably by a landslide.”
(Will his advice to Buchanan be as valuable as this prognostication?) A
1996 profile of Wanniski by Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard
summed him up this way: “Forward-looking. Optimistic. Delusional.” He
long ago became an embarrassment to Republicans. George Will, for what
it’s worth, called him a “crackpot.”
To be slimed by a fellow who cozied
up to Farrakhan—not to mention conspiracy-crank Lyndon LaRouche—and who
perpetuated an economic fraud on this nation with his groundless
supply-side theory is an
JWR contributor David Corn, Washington Editor of The
Nation, writes the "Loyal Opposition" column for The New York Press. His latest book is Deep Background.
