It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and you could prove it by Bill Clinton. The hurricane that threatens to blow Gray Davis from Sacramento to Samarkand is a breeze from heaven for the scheme to restore the Clintons to the White House.
A windfall, you might say, and for next year, not aught-eight. The future is now, or probably never.
The pieces are falling neatly into place. The ex-prez is finishing his book, ready for a splash in the spring, and then it will be down to Little Rock for the opening of his splashy presidential library in Murky Bottoms. Lots of good ink, and by then the panic in the Democratic Party will be total, with McGovernite disaster looming and nobody but Bill and Hillary big enough to save the day.
The seven dwarfs (plus Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun) will be lying in a large pool of their collective blood, having slain each other en route to Boston and the Democratic National Convention, with the French-looking John Kerry and the tired-looking Dick Gephardt having gone down in Iowa and New Hampshire and the evil Dr. Doom having come a cropper in the Confederate primaries. Hillary will have secured New York and Bill will have pocketed California, and from there the convention should be easy pickings.
Wesley Clark, the retired general from Little Rock, will be waiting in the wings as Hillary’s veep, standing by to give her cover for the mean and malicious things she and the mister have been saying (and thinking) about anyone in the uniform for lo, these many years. When you’re married to the world’s most famous draft dodger, you’ll need all the brass courage a distinguished four-star general can bring.
That’s the plan, anyway.
To that end, the former president, who is almost as addicted to big-stakes political campaigns as to big-haired women, jumped into the California recall circus this week, ready to fish Gray Davis out of a boiling sea just as everyone else was conniving to fit him with concrete wingtips.
Here, at last, is an election campaign that Bill Clinton can actually lend a little dignity, decorum and gravitas. The California secretary of state yesterday certified 135 candidates for the ballot. The field includes 50 Democrats, 42 Republicans, 32 Independents, four Greens, three Libertarians, two Natural Law men, an American Independent and one Peacenik-Freedomite, but not a single Vegetarian, Prohibitionist or Whig.
This is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s race to lose, which is how pundits trying to be clever say the Terminator can’t lose. Bill Clinton obviously thinks he and Hillary can win, even if Gray Davis can’t. He portrays his help for the governor as a citizen’s duty and a Christian obligation to feel the pain of a fellow pilgrim, but Bill Clinton has never done an unselfish deed in his life. He learned the Hot Springs catechism at his mama’s knee, that only a sucker gives the customer an even break.
He reckons that the Terminator has nowhere to go but down. Like all celebrity candidates, “Ahh-nold” will never look as good tomorrow as he does today. His strategy is to stay above the battle, avoid questions, speak in platitudes of as few syllables as possible, and show off the pecs. Time usually works against this strategy.
Republican pandering to the Schwarzenegger phenomenon will become more transparent each day. The Terminator would be the target of conservative contempt and partisan bile if he were running as a Democrat — a candidate who proposes homosexual rights far beyond anything the gay blades or the Episcopal Church have dreamed up, expansion of abortion rights and restrictions on the citizen’s right to own a gun. Here’s the man who proclaimed himself “ashamed” of his party for impeaching Bill Clinton for mocking the law and the courts.
Bill Clinton, the king of chutzpah, knows just how to exploit such contradictions, and in the 56 days and 56 nights between now and Election Day, we can expect a spectacular display of exploitation from the man who wrote the book on making crime pay.
Gray Davis is already working from the Clinton script. He deflects questions with answers copied from Clinton replies to questions about playtime in the Oval Office pantry. “I have an obligation to the 8 million people who went to the polls last November,” the governor replied to a reporter who asked whether he had considered stepping aside for the sake of the party. “I’m not going to give up on those 8 million people who went to the polls.”
To succeed, the ex-prez doesn’t have to save Gray Davis, or even the office, for the Democrats. He’ll earn the gratitude of Democrats all across California, who will redeem the IOUs held by Hillary next August in Boston. The prize the Clintons seek is bigger, much bigger, than Sacramento.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
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