Four years and five months ago, I was supporting Jerry Brown for President. I had become convinced that any constructive approach to the major problems confronting the country, -- health reform, balancing the budget, reforming entitlements, growing the economy -- was impossible until the political process itself was reformed completely from the ground up. At that very point along came Governor Brown. As I saw it, he cut through all the chaff, and squarely called it as he saw it, -- that most campaigns were bought-and-paid-for charades, with candidates performing their wind-up routines as prescribed by the special interests who financed their campaigns, and that nothing meaningful was being done or would be done as long as the governance of this country was held hostage by a powerful, financially endowed few controlling the purse-strings of our political process.
And so when the time came for us to acknowledge that Bill Clinton had defeated us for the nomination, we went, hat in hand, to the Clinton campaign, and to Democratic party head Ron Brown, to find out what room there was in the Clinton campaign for our concerns, and for any of our platform planks.
I shall never forget that experience. For a candidate who appeared to be about to lead the most united Democratic party in decades, you would have thought that both Clinton and the Democratic party would have been eager to have Jerry Brown on the platform with him, joining the show of unity. We were, oh, so ready to take any wretched crumb to give us the feeling that we at least had not lost everything. One political reform plank, one universal coverage plank, that was all it would have taken. But they wouldn't even give us that. We were exiles in our own party.
And it was at this point, following the Clinton stonewall in New York, that I found and read Ross Perot's United We Stand. And there it was, the whole Jerry Brown political reform platform, the weekend elections, the free TV, -- it was all there. Ross Perot, a man who had always struck me as an utterer of platitudes and an evader of truths suddenly had changed roles and had become a boat-rocker and a beard-plucker, my favorite kind of politician.
And so it went from there. There were two candidates who dared to utter unpleasant truths during the early part of the 1992 campaign. Paul Tsongas dared to utter the truths about those entitlement policy issues where the political establishment found itself gripped by unbelievable cowardice, and Jerry Brown dared to utter the truths about those political process issues where the political establishment found itself gripped by unbelievable avarice. And Ross Perot had picked up the gauntlet on both of those issues and was running with them. I joined his campaign the next day.
And so for the next four years I watched as Bill Clinton avoided what I felt then and feel now are the litmus test issues of our time. I watched as Bill Clinton spoke half-heartedly about political reform, and then watched as our president in 1993 and 1994 sat back as Dick Gephardt, xenophobe extraordinaire in the 1988 campaign, proceeded to bury such reforms deeper than did any plummet sound.
I watched as my president shook hands with Newt Gingrich in 1995, and said he would support a commission to reform the political process "in a heartbeat." What I and the camera did not catch was the wink and the nod that must have passed between them on that occasion, for their words were mendacious and their handshake perfidious.
I watched as Bill Cohen, Pete Domenici, Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter, among others, valiantly strove to lead their new majority party in the direction of a balanced budget and modest entitlement reform, hoping against hope to create a moderate bipartisan coalition with Bill Clinton that would win the day for courageous leadership over short-term politicking, only to be stiff-armed by William Jefferson Clinton's demagogic Mediscare campaign, which successfully drove the Republican party into the arms of the right-wing tax-cut-for-the-rich-yahoos led by the Great Salamander himself, Newt Gingrich.
And I watched as John McCain and Russell Feingold submitted their modest, common-sense campaign finance reform package, and rejoiced as Bill Clinton announced his support for that legislation. And then I watched with a combination of disillusion and disbelief as President Clinton made no phone calls, twisted no arms, held no meetings, and let Bob Dole, Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership filibuster this reasonable consensus legislation to a painful and undeserved death.
And now the wheel has come full circle. Once again, Bill Clinton has been elected our President. During the campaign, he would have had nothing to lose and everything to gain by addressing this issue of political and campaign finance reform. Yet even as a Republican party now revealed as the party of confrontation, extremism, shutdowns, and the religious right, and not the party of reform, battled to retain control of Congress, control which seemed again within their grasp due to Clinton's and the Donkey's corrupt political practices, even as a President was losing his precious fifty percent plus mandate in the polls, Bill Clinton had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to utter a few, lonely words in one lousy speech in Santa Barbara concerning this issue. He cocooned himself in a wall of sentimentalism, flesh-pressing, and spinners' double-talk to avoid answering the questions the answers to which we all had a right to hear. Stonewall Clinton was back; and my understanding of the reasons for my intense distrust and disapproval of this man had never been greater.
And of course in the end Bill Clinton saved his political hide, but at the expense of his own party. In a transparent attempt to shield his sugar daddies, the incumbent holed up in his rhetorical fortress with the result being the return of a Republican majority, and the second repudiation in a row of his own party in Congress.
And this was so unnecessary. If the President had seized the initiative, added an articulate set of specifics concerning reform of the political process to his stump speech EVERY DAY, and passed the word to his subordinates as well as his allies in the power structure of the Democratic Party that a full court press on this issue was in order along with full disclosure, and, in addition, had made clear the Republicans' own unclean hands in this regard, I believe we would today be looking forward to a 105th Congress with a split decision, Republican control in the Senate and Democratic control in the House.
Instead, the Democratic Party tried to evade its traditional responsibility to disclose fully the sources of their political contributions. And once again our President tried to stay on top of the political curve, rather than stay ahead of it. I have had occasion before to remark how frequently he falls into this trap. Whenever he's riding high, enjoying a clear political advantage, his immediate instinct is to protect that lead, almost as if he is behind the curve, rather than take advantage of his good fortune and consolidate his position through some exercise of principle and/or rhetoric. His failure to seize the initiative on this particular issue of campaign finance is a particularly disastrous example of that paranoid tendency, and almost certainly cost him that precious 50% plus mandate that he so fondly desired. Well, serve him right.
And what an opportunity missed, -- an issue which lies at the core of the nascent third-party movement in this country, a political coup which would have, perhaps permanently, altered the political landscape. Think about it: liberal Perotistas like myself would have cheered, and the Democratic Party would have picked up a precious 10 to 15 percent, not necessary perhaps in the Presidential race, but enough to more than make the difference in the race for the House. But the fact remains that the Democratic Party is a sleazy and decadent institution, far more rooted in a system of corrupt political privilege than in a quest for improvement in the lot of the average citizen, despite their occasionally lofty humanitarian rhetoric. And never was that more apparent than in their craven conduct during this past campaign.
Yet for all that, there may actually be a glimmer of hope. The Democratic Party knows extremely well what they lost, and how they lost it. Now, an angry group of House Democrats, an incredibly huge 90 strong, have called for immediate action on this issue, the issue which cost them the leadership. They are determined that it will not cost them the leadership again. And perhaps, just perhaps, the miracle will finally happen, and campaign finance reform will actually become reality after all. Yet the fact remains that all of this newfound fervor has the sad look of a door closing on a robbed and bare stable. I hope I am wrong about that.
What do you think? Did Clinton's cowardice cost the Dems the House? Will we finally see campaign finance reform in our lifetime? Let me know how you feel; you are cordially invited to fill out the boxes below and express yourself. Bear in mind that I reserve the right to quote statements sent to me in this manner, in whole or in part, in subsequent Musings. Also, be sure to indicate in the Title of your Message the name of the Musings, "It's Deja Vu All Over Again," to which you are responding. Thank you.
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