Democratic National Convention
(August 28, 1996)Exhaustion is cumulative. Each day I wake up feeling as if I've lost ten I.Q. points, which, granting myself above average numbers when I arrived, now places me somewhere around Downs syndrome capacity. I find my table. Jack and Kay Thymer are there as usual, merry and unperturbed. (Jack's convention experience is a different sporting event each day - today a baseball game.) Lowell Finlay, the tax lawyer at the moment I've gulped acidic coffee, snatched two bites of eggs delivered of a chicken at its last gasp and returned to my room to begin catching up with yesterday's notes.
I work until time to attend the James Carville luncheon at the Hyatt Plaza, but when I arrive and confront the crowds of people clotting the lobby to the Grand Ballroom, my nervous system rebels. I tell Martha Whetstone to give my ticket to Rachael Burstein, the young reporter from the Washington bureau of Mother Jones, and return to my hotel room to write and savor some solitude.
I post my report amidst countless interruption from the phone and try to nap. My son calls, troubled about a problem we have been laboring over for months. We have an argument when he refuses to end the conversation and free the phone and it becomes corrosive. I say things that I don't mean. I call to apologize and he refuses my apology and hangs up. I am sick at the sudden fury condensed between us. What am I doing here, writing and thinking about larger issues; the big picture, masses of humanity, while the space between me and people closest to me is fissured with pain and losing its integrity? I feel a fraud and pace my room in a desperation fueled by exhaustion. I am supposed to meet the President later today and cancel the invitation. I call the airport to find the earliest flight home; pack my bags, conscious of the fact that I have blundered terribly; that I do not belong here. I perceive politics like athletic competitions where people choose sides and fight to cross a goal line together, reveling in the victory of the group as if it was an individual win. I am not like that; am normally solitary, critically distanced from many National cultural premises and values and consequently as much an outsider as a wandering Jew. I claim allegiance only to the truth as I perceive it and have always given its demands precedence over the comforts of friendship. It is how I am constructed, but at this moment, feels abstract and insubstantial. My reward appears to be a form of perpetual banishment where I am never completely trusted by others who can sense this previous commitment and suspect my detachment from what they hold most dear.
Who am I, I wonder to myself , to criticize the Clinton's. I am aware that hind-sighting and second-guessing are national sports which offer ready balm to disenfranchised egos, but no one, and I really mean no one but the President fully understands the pressures and conflicts hemming his chair. Were he my personal friend, the benefit of the doubt would grant him an intelligence and goodwill equal to my own and assume that whatever decision he makes, he does the best he can with the forces constellating around him. If I want the man to change, I must change the forces surrounding him, but those forces are vaguely appreciable and often do not have the clarified identity of the Presidency.
To feel this way does not dictate abandoning my critical and analytic perspective or my commitment to fairer redistribution of National wealth and a safety net that guarantees decent access to goods and services to all citizens. The shift I am articulating is reminding myself, yet again, that not everyone shares my premises and predilections and nowhere is it written that they are universally held, or accepted as the starting point of argument.
Somehow this opens up the issue for deeper examination and makes me realize that the argument my son and I are having is a parallel system to my discomfort and pique at this convention, the party system and the faux political process as it manifests here. I am criticizing the President as if we had come to previous agreement that he has violated and I have not. My indignation is righteous. "We had an agreement", I shout in my inner ear, but the truth is that we did not. He never agreed to run the country according to my vision, and all I can actually dispute is what I perceive to be the distance between what he says he wants to do and the results his policies actually produce. The ground rules of democracy allow me maximum liberty in attempting to sway others to my point of view, but the generally accepted arena for such discourse is the political process; a process which I have chosen to stand beside. From the soapbox I have been offered, I am restive and cranky, railing against those who have thrown their hat in the ring and turned their backs on the bush leagues I suppose I represent. Is it this implicit diminution that fuels my pique, or is it truly, as I like to tell myself it is, that I feel that my cultural vision is more comprehensive and inclusive and I want it debated, whether or not I personally choose to be a politician or not? Somewhere in the process of preparing to go and sorting out these thoughts, I recover my balance. I have made a commitment to be here. My return home will solve nothing, and I can even say that my absence has crystallized a family dilemma and brought it into focus. I've played my card here, and for better or worse, will finish the hand.
At five p.m. I join Martha Whetstone and her sister, Ruth and husband Bill Wagner to travel to the baseball field at University of Illinois to greet the Presidential helicopter. We have received the perks of perks, permanent credentials and a car and driver and are whisked in comfort to the stadium where the inevitable panoply of videos and cameras are established to record the President's arrival.
We are ushered into a cordoned -off VIP area, and watch a small crowd of loyalists assemble and pass out their CLINTON/GORE 96 placards. A man behind me says, "In the Sixties, in Washington they used to say, if you need a friend, buy a dog. In the 90's they say, a true friend stabs you in the chest!"
Paul Berry, greets me, attaching himself to Lucia Wyman a slender blonde woman with a pixie cut who is special assistant to the President for Legislative affairs. Her soft southern accent and vaguely distracted air seem at minor odds with her responsibility to track and trail legislation for the President. Crosby, Stills, and Nash are playing on loudspeakers, and someone informs me that music is played at Presidential arrivals to drown out protest. Hell, I thought it was a party. Berry, a true music aficionado hates the music. He favors blues singer Jimmy McCracklen, or something kick-ass like the Allman Brothers, or anything but the Seventies pop which follows CSN.
Time passes, the crowd swells. The President is late. "Stopped for a burger", Berry confides. The crowd is festive, waving placards, sipping coffee, and apparently unbothered by delay. Dusk arrives, and the President is still not there. I pass the time speaking with Lee Williams and David Lambert, respectively Senator William Fullbright's administrative assistant and legislative assistant, who fill me in on how Fullbright was lied to by President Johnson and tricked into supporting the Tonkin amendment, securing the President emergency powers he wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam. They recounted gaining access to the log of the boat supposedly attacked at Tonkin; having to track down someone who could read the Navy code and discovering that their President, and more critically, their Commander-in-Chief, had lied to them. It was a stroke of luck for me to step through this little window of my personal history to retrieve this little nugget, and consequently it was a few moments after most everyone else that I felt rather than heard the thrumming whumping of helicopters approaching. I turned.
"It doesn't get any closer than this," Paul Berry chuckled, as three helicopters circle the field. One peeled off from the pack, and illuminated a battery of lights on its under belly, as bright as the lights at a night ball-game. This ship was enormous. as an aircraft carrier settling out of the sky, and it's bulk and menace was awesome. Remarks simmered through the crowd, "Starship Enterprise", "Close Encounters". A woman grabbed my arm, "It's E.T." she said.
A blood-red, full moon appeared on the opposite side of the field, resting in the tree-tops like a gigantic balloon flagging the President's arrival. The gleaming helicopter settled down behind a ring of trees in the parking lot. "That's the decoy" someone said. Another one circled with the lights out. "There's some serious shit on these boys," Berry said dryly, referring to the weaponry they carry.
They circled like black sharks in deep water, illuminated only by tiny red running lights, and then from the center of the ballet, an unseen third, the Presidential helicopter descended to the field , olive drab and white, wind from the blades whipping leaves and grass, flapping the signs the people held overhead like cards in the spokes of a bicycle as people whistled and cheered their President.
A man in front of me is wearing a T-Shirt showing a dog with a gun held to its head. Under the picture are the words, "If you don't drink at the bar, we'll kill this dog" I nudge Berry to bring it to his attention. He chuckles and says, "Profile of a Clinton voter." He knows the President well enough to be forgiven such irreverence, and to be truthful, even if he didn't. Berry possesses the not-wrapped-too-tight crazy sense that would risk banishment to honor a good line.
A small protocol party goes to greet the President. "He knows everyone of them by name." Berry tells me. "I don't know how he does it. Its fuckin' awesome. He's always been that way. Hell, I've talked to him while he was doing a cross-word puzzle full speed, and keeping his place in the conversation. It's scary man."
I watch the crowd cheering him, and remember my perception about politics and sports. This is Clinton's team. They love him. I muse to myself what it must feel like to be part of such a team; partisan with such commitment; family to an abstract idea like a Nation. Is it my identification with 5,000 years of Jews, all of whom had suitcases packed and ready under the bed in preparation of what they had come to expect as inevitable national expulsion? Many of the people around me are among the President's deepest inner circle; friends who go back to grade school with him and I can understand their loyalty and pride that one of their own has reached the pinnacle of power and prestige in the United States. As for the others, standing and waving as ardently and passionately, well I guess that it is William Clinton's gift to make them too feel that he is one of their own, and in the final analysis that is the mark of a great politician and the evidence of his genius.
It is dark by the time the President has left and the Secret Service allows us to leave. Our small party forgoes the last half hour of the Convention and Gore's speech (seen later, more clearly and powerfully on television in my hotel room) for a quiet dinner. We are joined by an old Clinton operative from the political wing, and I eavesdrop on a conversation about the slash and burn policies of the young financial hustlers with no political overview to whom a $25,000 donor is small potatoes, barely worth any effort to protect from insult.
Stories about power struggles between competing realms in the White House are dropped on the table like small change, and like every other realm, the President's office is a complete universe with its own heaven and hell realms, dictators, angels, traitors and saints. Some of the names are familiar to me and some are not, but the dynamics are familiar to anyone who has ever tasted human nature, and serves to remind me why I have chosen not to cast my bread on those waters.
We polish off the last bottle of wine, and leave. The others are going to the California bash, but I am not in the mood to party and return to my room. Bob Dylan's line, "I say good-bye to the haunted beast on the borderline separating you from me", runs through my mind as I calibrate the distance between my personal life and the public life I am chronicling. I spend the remainder of my evening pondering what manner of creatures and demons inhabit the space between.