Veeps 2008

I suppose looks are deceiving. My grandmother seemed harmless, but she used to lock my sisters in the basement if they screwed up their Acts of Contrition. And that was when she was in her bridge club and support hose years. Lord only knows what she was capable of  in her Joan Crawford/Aileen Wuornos prime. It’s a wonder my happy-go-lucky grandfather lived long enough to bury her.

I had to remember that last week when I watched Matt Lauer interview the adorable Sara Jane Moore. It’s become a cliché that the 1970s were “a very different time.” Indeed. I was in grade school, but I had two police citations and a few dozen drunks under my belt by the time I was nine, some recreational drug usage by eleven, my teenage sister dated her high school English teacher, and my best friend’s sister got pregnant at 13 by her 27-year-old cousin. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of gunplay at school, but on balance, it really was a very different time.

Still, even by the standards of an age where smoking was allowed in hospital rooms and a sandwich was something that occasionally accompanied one’s business lunch martinis, the thought of a matronly 45-year-old accountant and mother packing a .38 revolver and attempting a kill shot on the President Of The United States was fairly remarkable.

As a country, we weren’t used to our ladies being such public lunatics back then. It just wasn’t proper. The Sara Jane Moore-President Ford Assassination Attempt was one of the more extreme manifestations of this bizarre trend called “feminism,” to which Old School America was struggling to acclimate.

If this strange new breed of woman insisted on not being like our wives and mothers and sisters of yore–all gin and benzodiazepine during the day, and gin and tranquilizers at night when the husband and kids were home, and pliable and obedient all the time–then hopefully they’d limit this “Women’s Lib” thing to reading Cosmo and watching Maude on the black-and-white in their sewing rooms. We had certain expectations of our women of a certain age. It was hard enough listening to Bella Abzug or that mouthy Betty Friedan, but at least they looked like middle-aged women.

A traditionally masculine society wasn’t used to fearing its women. Men were still coming to grips with the surreal horrors of the next generation of the femme fatale–the Homicidal Sex Kitten. With the Patty Hearsts and Manson Girls of America, men were learning, if not to be utterly terrified of any woman under 25 who wasn’t Karen Carpenter, at least to recognize the warning signs that could save their lives. X carved in forehead = Stranger Danger. Beret and sub-machine gun? Sexy but smells like trouble, maybe.

In 1975, it was because of this perceptional evolution that none of us were all that surprised when waifish, crazy-eyed redhead Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme–herself a Manson Family alum–was arrested for dressing like a nun and drawing a Colt .45 on President Gerald Ford in a park in Sacramento.

But when a woman Time magazine described as “dumpy, determined” drew down on the President in San Francisco just a few weeks later (it was a rough September for Ford) it was a wake-up call that we really weren’t safe anywhere, from anyone. If a plump, middle-aged clone of your Aunt Lavelle could brazenly go after a President, then no man could be sure he was safe from any member of the fairer sex. Agnes from the checkout counter at the Piggly-Wiggly? Kindly Mrs. Farquar from your daughter’s Sunday School class? The widow Carnacky who sold handmade wind chimes for charity and read to the blind Wednesday afternoons at the VA hospital? Bets off. Suddenly, it was conceivable that any one of them was capable of planting a machete in your skull when you weren’t looking.

It’s not a widely-lauded event in the canon of women’s studies, but Ms. Moore’s attempt on the President’s life was a defining moment in female empowerment no less significant than Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs “Battle Of The Sexes.” That a member of society who only a little over a half-century before wouldn’t have been allowed to vote for a President could now attempt to kill one is an achievement that gets short shrift in the pantheon of feminist accomplishment. Women had fought long and hard to earn the respect of a male-dominated world. To be capable of inspiring fear as well was something that their mothers and grandmothers could only dream of.

Released from prison in late 2007, a little over a year after the passing of Gerald Ford, Ms. Moore says she’s glad that she didn’t kill the President and concedes that attempting to murder the leader of the largest country in the free world was probably “wrong,” and attributes her action to “the tenor of the times.” (It’s a puzzle to imagine that it could be anything else. An accidental President and generally lovable bumbler, Gerald Ford was not a man who inspired any extreme degree of emotion, much less blood hatred, and two assassination attempts in a single month. To plan to stalk and slay this affable, soft-spoken President would be like setting out to murder Tom Bosley.)

Still, Ms. Moore says she has no regrets; that if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. White haired and bespectacled, she is as pleasant and benign as one would expect from a woman entering her ninth decade. She accepts her notoriety, and save for an ill-fated escape attempt in 1979 (”If I’d known I was going to be caught so fast I would have stopped somewhere for a burger and a beer”), she served her sentence without complaint.

As a society, though, we tend to frown on things like attempted murder, especially the kind that get the Secret Service involved. So while Ms. Moore has earned her paragraph in the history books, that shout-out from Helen Reddy might not come in her lifetime. If they took a poll, though, she’d probably be America’s favorite female would-be Presidential assassin.

FUN FACT: Had Ms. Moore succeeded in murdering the President, she would have been responsible for a milestone in Vice Presidential history—Nelson Rockefeller would have have been the third consecutive President who had a stint as VP on his resume.

As much of an empathetic posture he managed to present, no one really expected him to spend his retirement building houses with Jimmy Carter, but after the bypass it was hard to see him chasing poon again. Elective office was probably out of the question, Hillary lost the nomination, and the only cooter he was going to get from now on would have to be under heavy medical supervision and promise a greater-than-average chance of a state funeral and decades-long rumors of a 25-year-old secretary with no secretarial skills getting a lifetime stipend from the Clinton Estate.

So what to do with a randy ex-President in his pasture years–too old for stud but still too young for the glue factory, and that last, glorious Preakness so far behind him that people recall it in the grainy Super-8 film of their memories? What is the passion, the life force that’s going to sustain him in the decades to come, where his posterity, his library, his grandchildren, and his national monuments await?

Anger, perhaps. Targeted, committed, methodic anger.

It’s a mood that once seemed ill suited to the notoriously smooth and seemingly imperturbable Clinton, from his days as baby-faced party wunderkind to 42nd President of the United States to much-beloved elder statesman. That unruffled countenance burst into flames mid-air about the time that the aftereffects of his heart surgery began and, presumably, the extra-marital blowjobs ended.

The new volatile Bill wasn’t widely noted at first. There was a nearly bottomless reservoir of goodwill the ex-President could draw on. When he pulled away from Washington, D.C. that bleak January day in 2001 was the last anyone could remember of peace and prosperity. His Republican successor was daily turning a once proud and generally well-liked country into an emotional, political, and diplomatic Superfund site. Two Democratic standard bearers would have been better with Marcia Clark and Chris Darden running their campaigns, turning two elections that should have been home run derbies into an embarrassing series of flaccid ground balls easily fielded by a small posse of angry pretend Christians with big bank accounts, an egomaniacal consumer advocate 30 years past his prime, and a nation taught to be terrified of a cave-dwelling diabetic its leaders were too disinterested to catch.

Clinton nostalgia was all the rage in 2004, and there was even wistful debate about whether John Kerry could appoint Clinton as his running mate. The fantasy baseball scenario was even more tantalizing to Bill Partisans with the added hypothetical of Kerry resigning on January 22, 2005 and handing the reins back to the Man from Hope. (Technically, it would probably have been Constitutional, but the Republicans would have been literally apoplectic, and a GOP body count of 1,000 Jonestowns might have given the Dems a numbers advantage in the mid-terms but would have started the kind of blood feud that has brought down entire civilizations).

As the 2008 elections drew near and the Bush Administration was running out of America to break, when it looked as if the Democrats couldn’t lose unless they nominated Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, the country seemed ready to stencil “The Clintons” back on the White House mail box. Of course, they couldn’t have Bill back, but with a term and change in the Senate under her belt, Hillary was newly beloved, and with Bill tagging along the country would be getting, again, “two for the price of one.”

But then that scrawny upstart from Chicago had to go and ruin everything. So recently adored, Bill Clinton was suddenly the favorite uncle letting the kids see him drunk for the first time. “Managing Bill” became a recurring, nearly daily theme on a mortally wounded Hillary campaign that for months refused to accept last rites. The once rock-solid President who endured years of battering at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Richard Melon Scaife, Kenneth Starr, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and a million fellow travelers with an ever wink and a smile, was suddenly lashing out at the slightest provocation–the media, Hillary’s staff, Barack Obama. Some say he even cost Hillary the VP nomination because the last thing Barack Obama wanted to find in his office the first thing every morning was a stack of hectoring, second-guessing emails and text messages from Bill.

With a confused Democratic electorate grasping for answers of why their beloved Babe Ruth had turned into Ty Cobb, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum issued a scathing prognosis in a 10,000 VF piece last year that Clinton’s 2004 bypass surgery changed him irreparably, manifesting itself first in a sort of “post-partum depression” common among bypass recipients, and exacerbated by the powerful repertoire of mood-altering medications that ruled the President’s days.

In an effort to refute Purdum’s thesis about the former President’s anger issues, Clinton offered an immediate rebuttal–a spitting, livid rebuttal.

For a nation of erstwhile fans desperate for answers that weren’t there, it was easy, albeit heartbreaking, to resign themselves to the reality of their once-revered President beset with ever-worsening fits of distemper, sure to devolve, into seething hatred, paroxysms of rage, and finally, madness and death.

What no one really considered, though, was that this might not be self-destruction, but reconstruction. Where many saw a downward spiral, few saw a man in flux, adjustment, learning to live with the New Him like any other man, woman, or child who has been confronted with a life-altering condition. The President was simply trying to find his new level.

To anyone really paying attention, it seems like his years of unmanaged fury are behind him. Don’t believe pie-eyed Pollyanna jobs like Peter Baker’s upcoming New York Times magazine profile on the former President, “The Mellowing of Bill Clinton.” Read between the lines and you’ll see that this isn’t a man mellowed, but a man recalibrated and rejuvenated. Bill Richardson has already been put on notice that his disloyalty in endorsing Barack Obama in last year’s primary will not be forgotten–ever. And Ted Kennedy? He’s going to have to do a lot better than a brain tumor to win any sympathy from the former President after the knife he planted between the Clinton shoulder blades with his own Obama endorsement.

To the uneducated, anger seems contra-indicated to living a long and healthy life after a very real episode of heart trauma, but there is a school of thought that says anger, properly managed, can be a force as restorative, enriching, and life-giving as tai chi, yoga, reiki, or any of the so-called “healing arts.”

Regardless of what the many psychologists and cardiologists say, it’s not a bad way to live, really. Buddy Rich carried a rage that caused miscarriages and ear-bleeding headaches within a four-county radius, and he practically achieved the male life expectancy of his day. Imagine if he’d learned how to tap that seething hatred and use it for good.

It’s not an easy haul, of course. It’s still a nascent science. Due to time constraints in posting this piece, I was unable to solicit the opinion of the former President or his staff on my own assessments of the President’s dispositive turnaround. I can only appreciate what I observe and what I know of the President’s hardscrabble political underpinnings.

Of course, it’s highly improbable that he’ll take his grudge with Ted Kennedy to a physical extreme, but it’s unfashionable, impolitic, and even of questionable humanity to speak ill of the lion of the Senate, the last stalwart of Camelot. With his upcoming comments in the Baker NYT piece, the President has crossed a verboten line with restraint but resolve, and is demonstrably in control of his bile in a way that he wasn’t on the campaign trail last year. Yet by that very control, he’s clearly indicated that not only does he have no intention of mellowing, but he’s going to take his anger and make it his cudgel.

And he’s only teed off on the terminally ill Kennedy and doughy but benign turncoat Richardson. Imagine what he has percolating for the likes of Starr, Gingrich, and company.

“Mellow”? Hardly. Surly to bed, surly to rise, and sleeping with the enmity all the while have reinvented Bill Clinton.

“This is a sad day for Illinois government. Governor Blagejovich has taken us to a truly new low.”

That was U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (of Scooter Libby fame) decrying the corruption that’s rendered the unpronounceable governor’s office a political SuperFund site that may just have to be fenced off behind a thicket of barbed wire and yellow tape instead of cleaned up. Oh, I don’t know that seems something of a hyperbolic statement. The Governor’s hair might be a new low–honestly, it’s even worse than Donald Trump’s–but his corruption? Please. This is Illinois we’re talking about.

From a strictly academic point-of-view, I suppose we should all be upset about this. Corruption, influence peddling, general wrongdoing. It’s terrible. And tragic, also.

Okay, I tried. I can’t do the Rick From Casablanca moment and pronounce myself, shocked, shocked. This is Illinois politics, and if it weren’t as dirty as Burning Man, that would be news. This is the state that is the Midwestern field office for American political corruption. Hell, since they took down Tammany Hall and Boss Predergast, it’s the undisputed Washington, D.C. of graft. This is a city where columnist Mike Royko once wrote of a particularly crooked police officer whose own friends said of him “He(’ll) steal a hot stove, and go back inside for the smoke.”

It’s a damned shame that Mike Royko isn’t around to witness the core meltdown of Governor Rod Blagejovich. He would have had such fun. But he wouldn’t have been surprised.

In a 1978 article in the Chicago Sun-Times, Royko noted with amused exasperation the naivete of an ERA lobbyist who was frustrated that their bundle of money that they were pouring into advertising and lobbyist fees wasn’t guaranteeing the votes that she wanted. She was aghast at Royko’s suggestion that a smartly-placed $5,000 in the right palm could give the EPA ratification effort at least a little traction.

She didn’t get it. In case the rest of the world didn’t get it either, Royko elaborated, “That’s the problem with the ERA and most do-gooders. They are earnest, diligent, and energetic, but they don’t have much sense.

“Throughout the history of this state, sly people have been getting what they want out of Springfield. They haven’t done it by being honest, earnest, diligent, and energetic…They have done it by throwing a shoebox full of money throgh the transom of a Springfield hotel room.”

She was still incredulous, so just to ram the point home, he consulted a lobbyist friend and told him about the Pollyannaish nature of the woman from the ERA lobby, and their massive $200,000 war chest that they had devoted to Illinois alone. The lobbyist was practically wistful, “For $200,000,” he said. “We’d not only get her the ERA ratified, we could get her a highway.”

I think we’re missing the issue in our indignation over the Governor’s transgressions. (Yes, it’s reprehensible that he’d hold the construction of a children’s hospital hostage until he received proper tribute.) A goldfish is going to swim and a cat is going to lie around and claw the furniture when you aren’t looking. A politician, while hired by the voters to take care of the public’s business, is probably going to prioiritize the business he or she takes care of based on the level of influence exerted upon or inducements offered to them. If their job or their winter trips to Majorca are jeopardized if they don’t act, then they are going to act.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to also do the things within their purview for which they don’t receive anything above and beyond their daily pay.  They just aren’t going to address them with as much urgency.

As much as we want to believe in the purity model of public service, if that’s what you’re really expecting from your government, you’ll sooner get a straight answer about the Kennedy or Allende assassinations.

No. The real problem with Rod Blagejovich is that he broke the compact. He could have done his job quietly, taken his money quietly, accepted his tribute quietly. That wasn’t enough.

Even worse than that, his behavior the last several weeks has suggested that there might be something to the murmurs floating around Springfield and greater Illinois and now the country: That the Governor has gone insane.

How else to explain it? He could have accepted a modest fifty or sixty large under the table, or a $300,000-a-year job for his wife, six steps removed from his actual part of the transaction. He could have tossed the expected bone–and hidden a fat steak around the corner, out of view of the judgmental eye of the media, and around another two corners from that sent his aide-de-camp to pick up the nondescript brown bag left on top of the garbage can, left their explicitly but discretely for his honor the Governor.

That is what the sane and careful public servant would have done. But even the sober and responsible in Illinois are saying it: He hasn’t gone dirty–he was always dirty. This is different. He’s actually lost his mind.

If it was a secret to anyone, it was the worst-kept secret in American politics since the fact that Richard Nixon had jowls that Governor Blagojevich has been under investigation since by federal authorities since 2003. Wiretaps, office surveillance, potential state’s witnesses–these aren’t new arrows in American justice’s investigatory quiver. It’s equal parts hubris, greed, and stupidity that, with the knowledge that your office has been under investigation for nearly six years, that you would actually use your office space, including your phones, to stamp and shout and call the President-elect a “motherfucker” and insist that the new President’s gratitude for his desired appointement of his Senate replacement wasn’t enough.

“They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. fuck them….I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

I understand gubernatorial leadership is a demanding job, but if this is going to be your agenda, at least set aside a few hours to catch an episode of two of The Sopranos when Tony visits Uncle Junior at his doctor’s appointments, because he knows that it’s the one place that there won’t be wiretaps.

In a state notorious for stupid corruption, this is stupidity on a grand scale. If they awarded gold medals for this kind of behavior, there would be no Wheaties box for Michael Phelps.

It was escpecially poetic that the Governor got his bracelets on December 9th, which was designated by UN General Assembly Resolution 58/4, on October 31, 2003, to become “International Anti-Corruption Day.” That Blagejovich’s arrest landed this past Tuesday wasn’t an accident, nor was the fact that Wednesday was his birthday. As dour and driven as he seems, Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t without a mischievous sense of humor.

Life is going to go on as usual in Illinois and in Illinois politics. But Blagojevich, in his deranged overreach of the dark but lucrative powers that the governorship of Illinois affords any electee, Republican or Democrat, has queered the patch for his party for the next 25 years. And it’s worse than that for his successor. Any upstart who wins the next gubernatorial race in Illinois who thinks he can exercise his implied institutional right to fill his shoebox with the tribute of patronage and legislative favors is going to be holding an empty cup, and if they have the sense that God gave your average mule, they won’t make a stink about it, but they don’t, so they will.

And Illinois will lather, rinse, and repeat, and the state penal system will have a very solid argument for a special wing for its homegrown elected officials, finally, because one of their own–after a storied legacy of public servants brazenly stealing hot stoves–went one step too far and filed a medical claim because his hands got burned.

Many have talked starry-eyed about Barack Obama’s alleged brilliance. That remains to be proven, but to date the smartest thing he’s ever done for his ethical legacy, is to carry himself as far away from Illinois as possible. Not that he should forget the power of a well-placed $20 bill, though. Discretion really is the better part of valor.

It wasn’t long ago that Rod had dreams of the White House–he might still; he’s that far off the rails. But he’s not going to get close to Washington anytime soon. Rod is going to jail. It’s surely not the legacy he was after, but a legacy is a legacy, right? Unfortunately, he will be the third man to hold his seat in the last 35 years to also take up residence in the Illinois correctional system.

While that distinction is out of play, he can at least take pride in that he’s the most dimly-lit Illinois chief executive ever to get his marching orders to the big house. Consider it Witness Protection, though, because the magnifying glasses are going to be focusing on the Windy City, thanks to his hubris, and changing the way everyone from his day forward does business. He might find his place in history yet.