Democratic National Convention
(August 26, 1996)The Arkansas Delegation breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel this morning was a whole new deal; the worst kept secret of the convention being an appearance by Hillary Clinton. Entering the room jammed with people speaking at deafening decibels, one passed beneath a phalanx of TV cameras guarding one wall like robotic sentinels, and beneath what must be the world's largest crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling in enormous, bunting-like folds. Mac McClarty, President Clinton's beloved ex-Chief of Staff was shaking hands and being treated as an old friend and hero, his departure from the White House generally regarded as a "casualty of politics."
The coffee is cold and the eggs gelid, but no one cares. This is a high voltage event where, like everything else in politics, the energy, the buzz, the glitter and the whammy are directly proportionate to the status of the presiding government official and one's personal proximity and access to that official. The President is the top-dog in this pack and the First Lady, a star in her own right, is just a dog's hair below him. I am tired and cranky this morning. People are still coming to stand behind my chair to have their pictures taken and I am by now such common Arkansas property that they are no longer asking permission. However, they are civilians, pleasant enough and can be forgiven for not noticing that I am eating while they twinkle and wave over my shoulder at the camera. When a baseball hatted pro with a hand-held flash, cranes over the table, suspends himself in front of me and fires off eight or ten shots, I catch his eye and demand, "Who the fuck are you?" His jaw drops and he disappears.
A speaker is exhorting the crowd from the podium like a faith-healer, promising them miraculous access to the heaven realms of politics, "If you're from Arkansas and have no credentials and no hope of credentials, put your name in the box." Have a snake son.
A surge of energy pulses through the room and everyone rises to their feet cheering. Hillary is hugging her way down the row of Party heavies toward the dais, patting each warmly on the back as she embraces them. She is tiny and illuminated, radiant and glamorous in a yellow dress with gold braid trim and a heavy, seamless gold chain at her throat. Her hair gleams, and her smile is incandescent.
"It's been an interesting four years hasn't it?", she says, spot on-target, and the crowd responds in full-throat. She reminds them that she's a Chicago native and an immigrant to Arkansas. She is perfect; hits the appropriate balance between formal and folksy; poised, without ever being distant or frosty. She appears to me like a seasoned combat vet who has exorcised fear. When she is done with her few remarks, she chastens the crowd good-humoredly, "Don't let me hear any stories about y'all" and the crowd eats it up. I have learned here that politicians love "stories", which are usually about some sort of political mischief. By losing the war (the big war) the South was exempted from adhering to Northern standards of politesse and behavior (We have our own thank yew) and among the Southern prototypes they relish are the good-little-girl who can be so bad, and the good ol-boy who can be kinda crazy. Hillary knows and genuinely likes these folk and it appears completely reciprocal.
After the event, I'm taken to the receiving line to meet the First Lady. I receive about three seconds of TOTAL concentration, and then she has clicked off, withdrawn whatever tenuous thread bound us a moment and fastened her attention onto the next person, tackling the impossible job of making hundreds of people feel special. Yet it is the nature of the event (or am I alone in this feeling?) that makes one feel that they've been short-changed. I have had the same experience appearing on a TV talk show promoting a film and the second one's allotted instants of quality time are over, a commercial obliterates your presence as if you had never existed.
Diane Feinstein gives a short stump speech and then a hapless fellow, called to introduce Congressional candidate Gray Davis, foolishly cuts the candidate off at the knees by stressing that "the most important thing he did as Lieutenant Governor was put the drawings of children on mailboxes." Great work, Gray.
Old San Francisco pal, Michael Nolan sits down, bemused Irish wit leaking through his eyes as ever. Mike and I were CETA (Comprehensive Education and Training Act) workers in the Sixties, hired for a program that would be considered too far to the Left to exist today. We still share progressive inclinations and affiliations as well as a goodly chunk of personal history. He is now a self-employed operative whose last event, a conference called The Education of the New California Workforce, last December attracted six hundred interested parties to discuss readying California citizens for 21st Century employment by concentrating on education-to-career transitions, and then post-employment training to upgrade them. There was a concerted agreement at that conference to push government to provide jobs to wean people from welfare and thus train them and educate them for further and better employment. Discussing President Clinton's signing of the Welfare bill, Michael quoted William Julius Wilsons' article in the New York Times magazine last week, "The issue is not welfare reform, it's joblessness in the inner cities."
Lowell Finley from the Democratic Steering Committee, sits at my table and we are introduced. He is an expert on campaign finance law, and, in his own parlance something of a hired gun who explains to legislators precisely what they can and cannot do with money while running for reelection. I explain my dedication to finance reform, and give him thumbnail reviews of my ideas to see how they stand up to an expert and he kindly offers to brief me later on case law and precedent on the subject.
Retiring to the bar, I meet two Chicago police officers I've bumped into from time to time. They're standing before the very window the protesters were pushed through in 1968, watching contemporary protests in the cordoned off area sanitized for them across the street. They have a list of all such demonstrations put out by the Secret Service which assesses each in terms of potential for trouble. The two men, named are exceptionally laid back, as each and every Chicago policeman I've met this trip has been. It makes a difference. It makes you feel that you are being served by people who care about you; makes the streets feel less alienated, and contributes meaningfully to an atmosphere of goodwill and redemption which Chicago is honestly trying to promote. I don't care if it is for economic and/or imagistic purposes, the truth is that the scrubbing and cleaning, and the attitude adjustments have made Chicago feel like a very nice place to be.
I sit with a Democratic party pol and a major contributor awhile, and inquire what the minimum level of contribution must be to "get the attention" of the President and cabinet members, "1,000, 5,000?" I ask. They look at each other knowingly and chuckle. "Try a hundred grand", they say, and laugh at my expression of surprise.
The Womens Leadership Forum at The Sheraton maintains an awesome safety perimeter blockaded by parked earth-filled dump trucks. This is where the President and the vice-president, their families, and the heaviest financial contributors stay. In fact, my fellow-delegate, Suzy Tomkins, co- founder of Esprit clothing and a big Democratic contributor, has been whisked away and isolated from the rest of us by Democratic Finance Committee people and is probably staying here as well. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tipper Gore will both speak at this event titled Women Win 96, along with the female Senators, Carol Penski, National Women's Leadership Forum Chairperson and Ellen Malcolm founder of Emily's List, an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast Starting...the dough to rise, a women's fund-raising group which has raised 6 million dollars in the last three months pursuing their mandate to empower women and increase their participation in the political process.
The event is scheduled in a large room, sardined with at least 1500 people weaving to a plaintive disco with a commanding back-beat, under a rectangular pipe scaffolding suspending chromium theatrical lights. Women yip and ululate and something distinctly tribal which cannot be disguised by the urban clothes, Chanel's or Nikes, floats through the room palpable as the scent of cardamom.
I am feeling real power here, but what makes it unique and uncommon is that it contains no hint of violence. It is an unusual experience to perceive this quickening and congealing of raw force with no threat of destroying anything except perhaps ignorance and fear. There is something empowering about it and I can understand why anyone, female or not, would want to be connected to such energy.
The stars of the event enter, uniformly dressed in light summer colors, pale yellows and cool greys and it is a formidable group of polished women. Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily's List, looking like everyone's favorite field hockey coach, with her curly hair, cherubic face and rimless glasses, is the first speaker. Her style is folksy and evocative, "Baby you ain't seen nothing' yet" she says after listing the 21 new women Dems in the house and 5 in the Senate and the joint flips. Judging by the yips and trilling cries, it could be a camel race in Morocco. She's a serious player with a serious goal: to collect 10 million dollars to mobilize women voters by the year 2000.
She introduces Senator Barbara Mikulski, of Maryland, the first woman Senator elected without women's political machinery behind her. Senator Mikuslki bears as startling resemblance to actor Rick Moranis as if she were his mother. She's a feisty little fire-plug, exhorting the troops in the same manner Mayor Daley might have once employed. A trim and very stylishly suited blonde woman with the perfect features of a model (who I met when she apologized for kicking my leg as she took the seat next to me and laughed when I responded that " it was okay because abuse turned me on" ) murmurs to me about an incident where she encountered Senator Mikulski in Washington.
"Oh, you're Barbara Mikulski", she said, delighted to have seen her in person.
"SENATOR Mikulski", the Senator snapped and passed on without stopping. As I was pondering this breach of sisterhood, she confided again that she had once run for Congress in Arizona. "I'm not real fond of Emily's List", she said. "They told me that they were only going to fund incumbents. Sounds like a good ol' girls club to me."
Senator Feinstein spoke about Emily's list as the base of support in her 14 million dollar campaign against Huffington and quipped, "2% may be good fat content in milk, but it's not good for women representatives in the Senate." More cheers, ululations, and then curiously, she ended her speech with a nursery school-like litany,demanding of the audience of smart, accomplished, intelligent women a series of questions requiring one word, can't-fail answers.
Feinstein: "Which candidate?"
Crowd: "Clinton"
Feinstein: "Which Party"
Crowd:" Democrats". She repeated this procedure several times, until the audience of independent, autonomous, women was successfully melded into a solid mass of uncritical political support.Senator Patty Murray from Washington, resembles a serious young graduate student, with short carrot-red hair partially masking curiously sad eyes. This diminutive women took on the pesticide lobby in her state after her child was sprayed with poisons, and fought them for eight years until she got the strongest notification laws about pesticide spraying in the nation. She organized 5,000 mothers to defend pre-school programs, and before her honest dedication to, in her words, "Ordinary women and their daughters and their aunts and their grandmothers..", it was impossible for me to be cynical.
Senator Barbara Boxer followed her, fiery in a red suit, her sexy cheekbones and diminutive stature masking a steely will and scrappy combativeness. This is the woman who demanded open hearings of the Packwood affair, challenging the secret Senate hearings and preventing them from keeping Packwood's sexual assaults on women out of the light of day. Barbara Boxer is the woman who has gone toe to toe with Newt Gingrich and Dick Army; the woman Bob Dole has vowed to "eliminate" from the Senate.
She has "two little things" she wants to accomplish, she says, "re-elect Bill. Take back the Hill." She thanked all her sisters in the House of Representatives and acquainted the audience with their courage and pluck in tackling this particularly mean spirited batch of legislators. Her generosity wins her spirited applause.
Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the African American woman who forced Jesse Helms to remove the Confederate Flag, is a statuesque, highly articulate woman of grand bearing, with the easy casualness of a "home-girl" as she referred to herself and Hillary Clinton, both natives of Chicago. She reminds the audience that it is the anniversary of women's suffrage, passed on the 18th of August in 1920 and charms them with the tale of Tennessee Senator Henry Thomas Burn, once a stalwart anti-feminist who changed his position and cast the deciding vote in favor of the 19th amendment. When queried about why he changed his position, he grinned sheepishly and explained that his mother told him to.
These women are sleek as the best-of-breed of any species, and curiously, unlike their male counterparts, do not radiate the core insincerity of the professional politician. (Though Diane Feinstein's, out-of-the-side-of-her-mouth manner of speech, like Jimmy Hoffa, does give one pause for thought.) What sets them apart is the feeling of personal integration - their skills, their intelligence and their articulation makes them rarefied and special, and yet their address is so consistently inclusive of others: mothers, children, the helpless; fundamentals of education and health. Their ascendance in this realm feels like a sea-change to me, and some voice in my consciousness begins iterating, "Give it to them. Let's see what they make of things." Even though I am chastened by thoughts of Indira Ghandi, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, women I could imagine personally dispatching an opponent with an ice-pick, some part of me is eager to see what adjustments they will demand of the political system when they assume the power they are so assiduously hunting.
Tipper Gore is next, and somehow this woman I'm prepared to like least; who I remember only as a censor of rock and roll records, becomes my favorite. She has a boarding school coif and perky, slightly wacked manner and humor of Meg Ryan. She is the only woman on the dais who has not and is not running for office. Perhaps this is why I feel an element of risk about her missing from the others. She climbs out on limbs and one is never quite sure whether or not she can find her way back from the hinterlands of the sentence she has begun. Yet her hesitations, occasional blush, and the sudden blurting of an unpolished phrase, "I mean, it's like a waste of time!" are endearing. She means what she says, (not that the others do not, but that her unpolished spontaneity makes her appear more incapable of artifice.) She has the courage, before these other women and the ubiquitous media, to appear uncertain at times, searching, and occasionally unsure. My heart goes out to her and no matter how much I disagreed with her top-down solution to content in records, I must admit it took courage to say, "Hey guys, something is wrong here. Our children are being marketed products which are blatantly sexual, violent, and anti-social. Are we just going to abandon them to the machinations of unsavory people, or try and do something?"
It is difficult not to agree with her intention and while I would not have pursued it the same way, her approach was so blatantly contrary to political correctness that it felt authentically inspired by genuine concern for children - a subject about which I am prepared to cut generous slack for people I deem to be serious.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is next, and as she stands there, basking in the applause and approbation of the crowd, she struggles to maintain her composure; struggles to keep their enthusiasm (and her own) within dignified bounds, but it continues, washing over her in waves of cheers and cries, and "go girl", fanned by the air from waving hands. All the love and respect these women can muster; all their personal and pent-up frustrations and hopes are exemplified by this fiercely independent and intelligent woman before them who has been tested in ways which would have broken myself and most people I know. As the applause anoints her continuously, it happens, and forgive me for speaking this way about the First Lady of the United States of America, but Hillary's face succumbs to joy and breaks out into what would be described on anyone else, as a huge shit-eating grin. She is happy! And proud! And it shines through her face like light and the crowd sees it and up-shifts into tumult-mode.
Hillary recites a list of why it matters who is in the White House. She cites 10 million new jobs, lowest unemployment and inflation in 27 years; explosive opportunities for women in business and women entrepreneurs. She reminds us of the increased minimum wage and how 10 million of the nation's poorest employed (2/3 of whom are women) will get sorely needed raises, due to her husband's efforts.She cites the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Care Reform Bill and the investments in Head Start, better public schools, Family and Medical Leave Act. People are reeling, and I'm thinking, "My God, what could be wrong in a Nation run by these people? ", but she's continuing, reminding us of the President's stand against NRA attempts to defeat the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban and his signature of the Violence Against Women Act. At list's end she reprises the list backwards, asking us to consider what we would have lost had Clinton not been there, and citing the consequences in each case.
Except for personal disappointment at her having made absolutely no mention about the environment (my greatest personal criticism of the Clinton Presidency- I mean how can you raise healthy children on fouled air and water, with dangerous chemicals percolating into the food and environment? ) I don't for a moment intend my flippancy about her husband's accomplishments to suggest that she was ever, for one moment glib or insincere. This woman is a beacon and appears to be truly illuminated. Her voice pierces the air with trumpet-like clarity and reflects a psyche that is 100% dedicated to its task. I was stirred, despite my best attempts to remain detached.
When the event is over, I go to the Democratic headquarters at The Sheraton with Martha Whetstone to claim VIP credentials for the evening, and meet Sheila Kuehl, who people of the right age and sensibilities will remember as "Zelda" on Gilligan's Island. She is a small, feisty woman with clipped coppery hair and very bright eyes, wearing a bold striped jacket. I take to her immediately. At the height of her fame, when her own personal pilot, a spin-off of Gilligan's Island, was being highly touted, word leaked out that she was gay, and Jim Aubrey then President of her network dispatched her with a casual, "I think she's a little too butch." Her career ended that day.
She took work as an assistant dean at UCLA, and was so motivated by her student's drive and inspiration that she applied to UCLA Law school, was refused admittance and had to settle for Harvard. She is now a member of the California State Assembly, unbowed and unrepentant, and I felt better leaving her company than I had in some time.
David Leopulous eavesdrops on our conversation a bit. He is a sweet, tender man who has been friends with President Clinton since they were ten. He shows me a picture of the two of them as kids, made into a campaign button. Dave is personally wounded by attacks on the President; considers them scurrilous and false, and takes his own personal time off from producing CD-ROMS for lawyers, to make himself available to anyone who will listen, to inform them of the true "specialness" of his childhood friend.
I barely have time to return to my hotel, change, and arrive for the evening's events at the Convention Center in the Chicago Sports Arena, an appropriately American amalgam of pitch, product, and politics. Signs for GM, Xerox, and various sportswears compete with stands hawking sports memorabilia and Democratic Party logos. (Politics is the ultimate team sport) In the lobby, someone has decided that immense rubbery red, white, and blue inflated tubes threaded through the architecture are political and consequently somehow exempted from being unsightly and ridiculous.
The Arena is vast, and resembles precisely what it has been transformed into: a huge television studio set. Networks are advertising their presence with illuminated signs winking in the background. The majors like ABC and NBC NEWS have large, illuminated displays and their Peacocks and `96 logos are as familiar to National audiences as the 2 News, Uni-Vision, and CBN signs are to their partisans, congregating on the floor from around the Nation.
Flows of people move along the Convention floor like magma. No one listens to the speakers or bother to stop talking. Expensive promotional movies are paying back political figures, each of whom is given a moment in the sun, to address the crowd, which apparently could care less. Except for occasional applause, it keeps right on caucusing, networking, chatting, jiving, soliciting, and conning one another in a variety of ways.
Media people are ubiquitous. Some walk through the crowd carrying bizarre antennae like religious artifacts; others stand blankly before TV cameras waiting for their live feeds. It is curious to see how lifeless they appear when severed from their electronic connections to the world. I meet a slick young lawyer from LA in a whiz-bang double-breasted suit. When I ask him what he does, he informs me, "I handle the challenges."
Michael Rankin, a Bay Area physician who I have met once before at a dinner in San Francisco, says hello. In 1978 was been living in Menlo Park when someone brought an ad in Little Rock, Arkansas newspaper to his attention which was seeking a Mental Health Commissioner. Since Michael was a native of Arkansas, his friend suggested that he "go for it" and so, in August of that year, Michael found himself in an audience with the Governor of the state, Bill Clinton. The interview appeared to be going very well, and it looked as if Michael was a shoo-in, but his personal integrity forced him to "`fess up" and so he volunteered, "Mr. Governor, I don't feel that you can offer me this post sir. You see I'm gay."
Governor Clinton's quizzical., "Yes?", suggested to Michael that perhaps he had not understood him.
"I'm gay", Michael repeated, with added emphasis, to indicate how politically difficult and embarrassing this would be should the Governor consider making the appointment.
When the Governor said, "Yes" again with the same, "what-the-hell-are-you-driving-at" tone of voice, Michael edged into a delicate exasperation with his lack of sophistication and said as bluntly as he could, "Sir, I am a homosexual."
"I figured if you were gay you were probably homosexual", Clinton responded. "Most are."
"Clinton never broke stride," Michael says, smiling at the memory, "and I became a fan for life. As we speak in the swollen corridor, someone repeats the phrase, "Senator coming through, Senator coming through" loudly and formally, like an old English ritual, and a mustachioed functionary in a shiny suit parts the crowd so that Senator Paul Simon can pass unimpeded. He is in political high gear, following a manic little beauty clutching a microphone, who is smiling at him as if everything he says is provoking her sexual pleasure. He is paying her minimal attention, speechifying for her microphone, while walking forward, and simultaneously scanning the crowd to see who may be noting his passage. In this his element, he exudes none of the folksy, professorial persona so familiar to TV viewers; but presses forward with the undoubting, and brook-no-impediment assurance of a lord.
Don Fowler, chair of the Democratic party appears on-stage with the family of Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce recently killed in a plane crash; three extremely handsome African-Americans: a young man, his son I assume, a daughter, and his stunningly beautiful wife, Alma. The crowd snaps to attention and during the sustained and moving applause, memory retrieves the convention I watched on television as a boy, when the all-white Mississippi delegation was challenged by black civil rights workers. This African-American woman and her children are being embraced by this crowd, no doubt about it, and I must say, that for all the manifold flaws and imperfections, the stupidities and missteps, the misery concocted by our corporate-capitalist, grind-em-down system, things have changed at least to the degree that African-American people (admittedly, African-American people of wealth, wit ,charm and genius) have not only managed to fight their way into the room but into the heart of the political system. As she accepts the gavel, and position of Honorary Chair of the Convention from Don Fowler, Alma Brown gives a short speech, in a tiny, barely amplified voice. She reminds those who knew and loved her husband, that even now, he is "looking down", covering the convention, "taking care of us in his plans and dreams". I think her elevation of her husband to the status of a God was unconscious, but not inaccurate. In ancient Greece he would have been so regarded, and the knowledge that he has entered the pantheon signifies a minuscule press forward, that I will not allow the most cynical notes of my consciousness to sully. It is quite clear to me, that it is Ron Brown's humanity which this crowd is celebrating, and I choose to concur with it, and again, am moved in spite of myself.
Kenny G. is introduced to play some nutless tribute and I leave the room at that point to preserve my own thoughts in the face of his relentless sappiness. I take the elevator upstairs , flash my coveted pass to the PENTHOUSE LOUNGE, the one other delegates have been eyeing covetously all night, with the words, GUEST OF THE PRESIDENT AND MRS. CLINTON printed on it in bold blue.
All power here radiates from proximity to the President. It is the source of all jealousy and back-biting, the source of all juice and the frame of reference from which banishment is measured. My mentor here, Martha Whetstone is a real FOB friend of Bill's...a problem busting, go-getting woman who delivers loyally for the Big Guy and is rewarded, among other things by being publicly tendered affection by him, raising her status immeasurably and makings her the target for treacherous back-biting and obfuscations by those who would have her fail. I imagine that things were little different in the court of Louis XIV.
In the VIP room, I grab a beer and am introduced to a man who immediately becomes a friend. His name is Paul Berry, an old friend of Levon Helm's. Levon is someone I knew and liked in the past, an actor, writer and most famous as the drummer and wondrously nasal, down and dirty singer for The Band. Soon, Paul and I are laughing trading Sixties' stories of near-lethal excesses which would have foundered numerous political careers. Paul is a volunteer, an old friend of everyone's here, and is the type of man who could not care. We talk and drink our way out of that room and into the fund-raiser at the hotel for Senator Barbara Boxer, where I am one of the celebrity guest along with actress Julie Light and Billy Baldwin, with a "do" fuzzy as a Calvin Klein model, but bright as a lightbulb, articulate, and naturally and spontaneously political. The evening ends with more talk, more introduction, more invitations, more networking, more cards exchanged, more handshakes, more introductions, and as I leave, exhausted and still facing a mountain of notes to ordered, I stop in the empty hallway before the elevators and collect myself. I am transfixed thinking about the relationship between all this noisy roiling fol-de-rol and the dented-car people; the I passed among in the Northwest. I know there is a connection, between public policy and the man on the street, but at this moment, past midnight, in the gilded glitz of a ritzy hotel, it is, for the moment threadbare, strained at the seams, and not so readily apparent.