Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Quote of the Day (Newt Gingrich, on Elites and Gun Violence)

“I want to say to the elite of this country – the elite news media, liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite – I accuse you in Littleton and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made and of being afraid to take responsibility for the things you have done and instead forcing on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”—Newt Gingrich, “I Accuse,” speech given by Newt Gingrich to the Republican Women Leaders Forum on May 12, 1999, quoted in Washington Times, May 21, 1999

Twenty years ago today, recently forced out of his post as Speaker of the House but still spouting divisive rhetoric, maybe just to stay in practice, Newt Gingrich waded into the gun-control debate swirling around the country in the wake of the Columbine massacre. 

A generation later, the question of “responsibility” and “the world you have created” weighs more heavily than ever, both in terms of the epidemic of gun violence in this country and in the toxic atmosphere of American politics. In more than a little bit of coincidence, STEM School Highlands Ranch, the site of the latest school shooting last week, is also in Colorado, like Columbine—for all those people who wanted a little more present-day reality with their Wild West. 

Although Gingrich was not solely responsible for both incidents, he cannot escape his culpability for what he said or did in worsening these situations. 

If there is anything “pathetic” in all of this, it lies in how an influential politician's dreams of higher office led him to abet an unceasing war on America’s children. The whole matter is so shameful not just because it was unnecessary in the first place, but also because, rather than being a heinous outlier, mass shootings have only become more common in American life.

Gingrich is a well-known animal lover. Maybe that’s why he earned a place in what I called Trump’s “Pig Sty.” In few instances have his swinish instincts been more apparent than in his longtime cultivation of the gun lobby. 

It bore fruit in 1994, when the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent $70 million on political action, helping swing an estimated 20 House seats from Democratic to Republican and ensuring that Gingrich would become Speaker. Gingrich assured the NRA he would use his post to block any further gun-control legislation, and was as good as his wood.

That electoral kitty had been eyed greedily by the Georgia Congressman even since he began plotting his rise into the party leadership. “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument,” he was quoted saying in David Beers” “Master of Disaster,” in the October 1989 issue of Mother Jones.

On the contrary, after being implored for their money—and assured that their concerns would be heeded—many contributors would regard a subsequent refusal to do their bidding as the height of ingratitude. An equivalent number would regard it as downright theft. Hardly a “socialist argument.”

But bounds of propriety and rationality have never restrained Gingrich in appeasing the gun lobby. In fact, in a little-noticed incident in the 2012 primaries, he said the NRA was being “too timid” in protecting its priorities. Instead, he called for protection of the Second Amendment around the globe.
 

Just think of that. A right to food around the world? No. Protection for the First Amendment? Please! Even students’ right to free computers, as he had advocated for American kids at one point? No.

But a right to own guns with no restrictions whatsoever on their licensing or possession, even if the weapons were used to kill innocent schoolchildren? Now we’re talking!

Let there be no doubt of the consequences of allowing the NRA to reign unfettered in the United States. At least 288 school shootings took place in the United States from January 1, 2009 to May 21, 2018, or 57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined, according to a CNN analysis of the numbers.

Shootings—particularly those involving multiple victims, as in those occurring in schools—breed depression and disorder among the survivors, friends and relatives of the victims. But not for Gingrich and the GOP he transformed in the 1990s. 

To understand why, you need only consider the statement by Ser Petyr Baelish in Game of Thrones: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” The chaos bred by these and other shootings represented an opportunity for the Gingrich Republicans: a chance to blame Democrats for the cultural unrest that allegedly lay behind it all.

Again, the buildup to the 1994 midterms that swept the GOP to power on Capitol Hill is instructive. Through GOPAC, a Republican (GOP) state and local political training organization, he distributed materials to candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt.” One such memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” proposed a set of words to describe Democrats: sick, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt, and—the one in our “Quote of the Day”—“pathetic.”

Those instructions were all part of the blueprint for electoral control he began trumpeting in 1978, when, in his third, increasingly desperate attempt to move on from his job as a college instructor to Congress, he hit upon the formula for his eventual success that fall.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport in 1978. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

By the time he had gotten around to speaking to the Republican Women Leaders Forum in 1999, Gingrich was in full automatic pilot mode in speaking of the “pathetic banalities” voiced by Democrats. But in the two decades since he spoke, leading the list of “pathetic banalities” has been the mantra that victims of school violence would be in the GOP's “thoughts and prayers.”

When will the GOP spare Americans such pious cant? Once they are punished at the polls for the rancid rhetoric pioneered by Gingrich—now an ingrained element of what passes for American political discourse—which, for the last quarter century, has substituted for action to curtail violence against schoolchildren.

Quote of the Day (Henry Clay, on Rather Being ‘Right Than Be President’)

“I did not send for you to ask what might be the effect of the proposed movement on my prospects, but whether it was right; I had rather be right than be President.”—U.S. Senator (and perennial Presidential also-ran) Henry Clay, on the potential impact of a speech on slavery to be delivered Feb. 7, 1839, quoted in a speech by Sen. William C. Preston (to whom the remark was addressed), reported in Niles Register, Mar. 23, 1839

I had heard of this quote from Henry Clay (1777-1852)—as thousands of American schoolchildren have since it was first uttered—but always thought it came from a speech. But the words in question were uttered before the address, as Clay tested its argument and reception on Sen. Preston.

Much to his dismay, Clay not only never got to be President, but had to watch while other men of distinctly less skill reached the White House. He could only content himself with the thought that on three separate occasions—in 1820, 1833 and 1850—he had brokered compromises that enabled the Union he loved to remain intact for another 40 years, without immediately sundering over the issue of slavery. 

All of that occasioned costs: to the American conscience, which for the first half of the 19^th century resolutely avoided confronting and ending a system that degraded an entire class of human beings; to Clay’s own hopes for higher office (the February 1839 led Northern abolitionists to wash their hands of him); and, ultimately, to his place in history, as he lacked the ultimate, Presidential power to affect events. 

Clay deserves to be better remembered today, as he was throughout the 19^th century.  His impact is especially important in understanding two Republicans who very much wanted to become President: Abraham Lincoln and Newt Gingrich.

Let’s discuss first the inferior of these two. Upon becoming Speaker of the House in 1995, Gingrich had Clay as his model for a leader every bit as powerful as the President. 

But Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” announced with fanfare as a series of reform measures, lost traction the longer Gingrich was in power, and never possessed the overarching vision of Clay’s “American System” of economic development that would have tied the country together. Voters punished Gingrich’s push to impeach Bill Clinton by reducing the GOP’s edge in the House, and he lost power after when he was discovered to have committed the same offense \that he took exception to in Clinton’s case.

When all is said and done, Gingrich’s legacy will be the reverse of Clay’s: not preserving shards of unity and civility, but heightening the disorder and fury in American politics, according to an article by McKay Coppins in the November 2018 issue of The Atlantic:

“[F]ew figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.”

As for Lincoln, the influence of Clay was far more benign. An admirer of “The Great Compromiser” from his youth, Lincoln instinctively sought gradual change before being pushed toward more transformative measures. Much of his agenda in the White House—notably, legislation bringing about the transcontinental railroad—might be understood as an attempt to enact elements of Clay’s “American System.”

Above all, in his attitude toward slavery and the Union, Lincoln resembled his hero. Though a slaveholder during his lifetime, Clay manumitted his slaves in his will. Fearing that slaves could never be accepted into American society, he sought to colonize them back in Africa—a stance that Lincoln advocated, only to regretfully abandon it in office when he saw no possibility of it ever being legislated. Above all, his guiding principle was the preservation of the Union.

Trump’s Advisers: Kitchen Cabinet—or Pig Sty?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Tuesday night, speculation now turns to the informal advisers who might influence his decisions. In the past, this group of supporters, well-wishers and friends who had Presidents’ ears were known as the “kitchen cabinet.” (The term dates back to the quartet that Andrew Jackson consulted, often far more assiduously than his regular Cabinet.) Teddy Roosevelt’s similar group was nicknamed, in keeping with that President’s hyperactive physical fitness regimen, the “Tennis Cabinet.”

I can’t imagine, however, given how little interest our President-elect has in history, that he will recall these nicknames. Nor do they adequately convey the nature of  his shameless surrogates at the tail-end of the primary season and throughout the general election.

Historian Ken Burns has called the full assembly of GOP officials who threw in their lot with Donald Trump “Vichy Republicans,” and though this captures the sense of their collaboration with evil and madness, it is neither pungent nor precise enough to describe the particular men (and it is all men) who came to cling to him as a way of keeping their hand in the political game when their fortunes were on the wane. No, only one name will do for this group: The Pig Sty.

That name evokes more than merely disgust over their opportunistic loyalty to a reality-show star manifestly unsuited to the Presidency. It also describes their treatment of women—starting with those in their personal and professional orbits, and proceeding to the Democratic candidate. No surprise in that: Like their candidate, they all belong (psychologically if not chronologically) to the era of Mad Men, when political and business leaders regarded women as playthings rather than people.

You might notice that they all have developed a noticeable stoop. This is not simply a function of their age (ranging from middle age to senior citizen), but because they carried so much water for Trump throughout his scorched-earth campaign.

Let’s examine what each brings to the table, shall we?

Chris Christie: Leading off with the governor of New Jersey was a no-brainer, considering that his photo—of noticeably porcine proportions—embodies literally, not just metaphorically, the inhabitants of this pig pen. Millions of Americans watched him at the Republican Convention, inciting the rabid crowd to chant “Lock her up!” against Ms. Clinton. More recently, many New Jerseyans wanted to shout the same thing at him when virtually the only point of agreement between prosecution and defense during the Bridgegate trial was that he’d approved the mad scheme to close two of three Fort Lee access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. Nor did it escape the nearly 80% of his state’s residents who now disapproved of his performance that he’d heaped all kinds of abuse on his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly—first (according to her uncontested testimony at the trial) by hurling a water bottle and cursing her out on one occasion, then by hiring—at state expense—a Republican-connected law firm that, before exonerating Christie of wrongdoing, accused her of orchestrating the bridge closures—and including the gratuitous detail that the single mother of four had been involved in an affair with former Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien. That last episode constitutes what a Daily Beast article has slammed as “Slut-Shaming.”

Newt Gingrich: The former Speaker of the House and GOP Presidential candidate earned Trump’s gratitude toward the end of last month when he angrily dismissed questions from Fox News' Megyn Kelly about multiple sexual misconduct charges against Trump by claiming that she was “fascinated by sex.” More than a few viewers of the exchange observed that it was Gingrich, not Kelly, who was “fascinated by sex.” How else to explain how he married second wife Marianne only six months after divorcing his high-school geometry teacher, amid acknowledgement from congressional staffers that he’d been conducting an affair; or how, 19 years later—amid impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton that Gingrich had initiated related to the Monica Lewinsky affair—the now-ex-Speaker broke with wife #2 to make way for a “breakfast companion” 23 years his junior. (See this Washington Post article about his messy marital history.)

Rudy Giuliani: His descent since hooking up with Trump has been the most frightening to behold of all these figures. Even close aides from his days as a crusading U.S. District Attorney and Mayor of New York have admitted to dismay over his vein-popping, bug-eyed appearances before the GOP convention and on cable news shows, with one quoted in a New York Times article as finding his old boss to be "painful to watch." He ranted on and on about Clinton, so eager to wound her that he couldn’t see the collateral damage to his own reputation. While stating that Mrs. Clinton could only have been a fool not to have suspected her husband of cheating on her, he never saw the natural rejoinder: Was his own ex-wife, Donna Hanover, also being a “fool” for trusting him? Similarly, in fanning rumors, offered up with only the flimsiest of evidence, that Ms. Clinton might be suffering from Parkinson’s, he suggested that listeners Google “Hillary Clinton” and “health”—totally oblivious to the idea that many were finding far more substantiated information by searching for “Rudy Giuliani” and health. Altogether, he seems to have dragged into the sunlight something monstrous from the darkest recesses of his soul.

Roger Ailes: He might have been forced out of his longtime perch at Fox News, but not before performing significant service at the conservative network. He created the echo chamber that would broadcast such dubious stories as Clinton’s imminent indictment for violations relating to the Clinton Foundation. The same network exec whose creation lashed Bill Clinton in the 1990s for sexual harassment has himself now been accused of the same offense by considerably more women (more than 20, if you’re keeping count, according to this piece from the Huffington Post). Naturally, the candidate who talked about “grabbing p---y” made this same disgraced TV executive part of the team preparing him for the debates against Mrs. Clinton.

Roger Stone: A political black arts operative par excellence, he “confirmed” Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK. He also peddled the phony National Enquirer story that the U.S. Senator from Texas had engaged in extramarital affairs. Of course, this was the same operative fired from Bob Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign after news broke that Stone and his wife had placed ads seeking swinging partners. (Elizabeth Preza's article from Alternet this past May had all the dirty details about this dirty trickster.)

Corey Lewandowski: During primary season, Trump’s first campaign manager ran into trouble because of a scuffle with a female reporter. This was not the first time he got in-your-face with a woman: In one dispute while he was at the Koch-funded super PAC “Americans for Prosperity,” he called one the “C” word. (See Francis Langum's article from the blog "Crooks and Liars" about this "big guy henchman" who's more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon's H.R. Haldeman.)

In a May 2016 article in The Atlantic that answered the question, “What Is the Greatest Prank of All Time?”, Candid Camera host Peter Funt nominated Trump’s Presidential campaign—“the 2016 reality-TV show that has convinced many people that Martians have taken over the GOP.” The Trump Pig Sty befouled the atmosphere enough that, if Funt were to consider it now, he’d have to write, “taken over America.”

Flashback, November 1995: GOP Forces Government Shutdown

Twenty years ago this month, the Republican Party, given the upper hand in the prior year’s midterm elections, did something it would resort to repeatedly in the following two decades: badly overplay its hand. In refusing to come to terms with President Bill Clinton, they forced the U.S. federal government to shut down.

Americans in prior generations would have been astounded that for five days starting November 13, approximately 40% of the nondefense workforce went on “furlough”—the inevitable result when Congress sent Clinton a continuing resolution that would have raised Medicare premiums, forced him to balance the budget within seven years, and curtailed environmental regulations, among other provisions. The President, backed into a corner, came out swinging. His veto triggered the shutdown.

But even that wasn’t the truly amazing part.

This was: the GOP, having decided they had not really gotten the better of the President (even though he had agreed to their demand for a seven-year target for a balanced budget), refused to compromise again in December. Their continuing resolution passed in November to keep the government going lasted only a month. Their insistence that the President use budget projections by the Congressional Budget Office rather than the more optimistic Office of Management and Budget forced another shutdown.

Only this time, the mad act of destruction lasted 21 days, not just a weekend, as had occurred other times in the past. Unless someone was deemed “essential,” no government worker would pick up a phone or receive visitors at offices. This had immediate consequences, as Social Security checks weren’t mailed and national parks and landmarks couldn’t be toured.

(This threw a bit of a monkey wrench for my own plans for vacation in San Antonio that month. Although I was pleased that the Alamo—operated by the “Daughters of the Texas Revolution” rather than the federal government—would remain open, several of the San Antonio Missions founded in the Spanish colonial period were unavailable for touring.)

When the dust cleared, the party discovered that the American public blamed them, not the Democrats, for the disarray and disruption.

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had held the threat of a shutdown like a cudgel over the President’s head since the spring, was forced to back down. His capitulation damaged the GOP leadership in two ways.

First was the impact on Gingrich, who, as a bumptious back-bencher five years before, had helped trash a budget deal that many in the administration of George H.W. Bush were sure he had agreed to. That act of perfidy might have made him persona non grata with the Bush White House, but it had surely raised his stock among restless party members.

His prestige with the incoming GOP “Class of ’95” Congress was enormous: his political action committee had fed them favorite buzzwords like (e.g., "sick," "pathetic," "cheat," "corrupt," "radical," "traitor"--you get the idea), returning the GOP to power on Capitol Hill for the first time in 40 years. His “Contract With America” not only provided these candidates with a coherent national platform, but also invited comparison, as a blueprint for legislative governing, with the “American System” proposed in the 19^th century by Henry Clay, another Speaker with ambitions for higher office.

All of this was catnip to Gingrich, who thought of himself as a conservative revolutionary. "A president who knows how to use the media is in fact President of the World,'' he had told Bush’s surprised OMB Director, Richard Darman, back in 1990. That arrogance came out again as he posed for Time Magazine’s KING OF THE HILL cover story in January 1995.

The 1995 government shutdown demonstrated that, when it came to undermining established leaders, he was not quite the Newt Guevara he saw in the mirror. He made three mistakes:

1) He predicted that Medicare would “wither on the vine,” allowing Clinton to claim that eliminating this popular program was part of the GOP’s real agenda;

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      2) He guessed that Clinton would roll over without a fight, not understanding that the President was far better politically attuned to what the public wanted in this instance than he was; and,

      3)  He complained that, on a 25-hour plane flight aboard Air Force One for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Clinton had not talked to him about a possible solution to the shutdown—sparking a famous New York Daily News front-page cartoon of the Speaker in diapers, wailing, with the headline, “CRY BABY: NEWT'S TANTRUM: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.” The image made Gingrich a national laughingstock.

While he survived in his post for another three years after his disastrous shutdown miscalculation, Gingrich was forced to bank on residual credit from the party rank and file for returning them to power. In the meantime, he made Clinton—who had been forced to argue to a skeptical White House press corps after the midterms that as President he remained “relevant”—look like a giant killer, boosting his reelection campaign the following year. Gingrich’s own aspirations for the Oval Office were checked—as it happened, we now see, permanently.

The second way that the shutdown damaged the Republicans was the immediate fallout for the Presidential hopes of  Robert Dole. In vain did the Senate Majority Leader argue privately with Gingrich and the House leaders that a prolonged shutdown was not a desirable “endgame.” Before long, the Democratic Party was assailing the presumptive GOP nominee in devastating “Dole-Gingrich Monster” ads.

In the shutdown battle, the President employed the political version of Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy against George Foreman in Zaire two decades before. Declining poll numbers had left Clinton metaphorically against the ropes. The GOP, like Foreman against Ali, believed that there was no way he could endure the full pressure of a government at a standstill, not to mention their own constant threats and unconcealed contempt (House Majority Leader Richard Armey and Senator Don Nickels simply didn’t want to deal with Clinton in meetings at the White House, press secretary Mike McCurry recalled in Michael Tariff’s oral biography of the President, A Complicated Man). 

Clinton’s endurance of the GOP’s game of budget chicken marked the beginning of the turnaround in his fortunes. That, and an opportune lift from the economy, proved decisive in his triumph over Dole the following November.

(Clinton being Clinton, though, he squandered the advantage given him by the Capitol Hill Republicans. With paid staff sidelined during the shutdown, only volunteer interns could man White House phones and staff functions. On the second day of the November shutdown, one of them. Monica Lewinsky, flashed her thong at the President. To his dying day, Clinton will rue that he reacted positively to the sight.)

Capitol Hill Republicans learned nothing from their 1995 shutdown debacle. Two years ago, they shut down the government again, for 16 days, over Obamacare. This year, the Department of Homeland Security was almost forced to close because the GOP wanted to have it out with Obama over his immigration policies.

Now, the Senator who infuriated the GOP establishment—in much the same way that Gingrich did in the 1990s—with his grandstanding in the 2013 budget standoff has been rising in the GOP Presidential polls. But it wasn’t until I saw an exhibit over a week ago on Bob Hope and political satire at the Library of Congress that I saw a character similar to Ted Cruz. It was the vicious wildcat Simple J. Malarkey of Walt Kelly’s midcentury comic strip “Pogo.”