Enough Already of the 'Creep' and 'Moron' Talk

On Sunday I walked down First Avenue as tens of thousands of runners came gasping past — panting, bedraggled, heading toward the finish of the New York Marathon. They looked awful — basket cases pounding along in their underwear. They looked like Jimmy Carter that time he marathoned himself to a frazzle in the Catoctin Mountains near Camp David and had to be helped off by Secret Service agents.

American politics looks just about as seedy and exhausted as it comes baying toward the finish of the presidential race. I had a nasty flash of self-awareness (seeing us as others see us) on the car radio heading away from the marathon when I tuned in an Irish-American station. It quoted a Dublin political columnist who remarked that the American presidential race amounted to a choice between a creep and a moron. It's OK when WE say it, Paddy, but watch yourself. I found myself feeling almost protective about Gore and Bush. That's OUR creep you're talking about. That's OUR imbecile.

Let's think good thoughts from here to Wednesday. Why speak ill of the merely imperfect? Al Gore and George W. Bush are not the Children of the Corn. From here on in, I intend to take the high horse.

Casey Stengel used to commit terrible atrocities against the English language, and he had lots of winning seasons. If George W. Bush becomes president, we may come to look forward to presidential press conferences in a sporting kind of way, hoping for another of those endearing malaprops or manglings. That thought should "resignate" with you. Let me sew you to your sheets. Whatever.

If Gore wins, let us hope to be similarly charmed. Mr. Toad in the Oval Office. He can tell lies about how magnificent his administration is, in the way that Soviet blowhards used to say they invented the electric light and the designated hitter.

The only comfort to be taken from this race is the knowledge that what happens in presidential campaigns almost never has the slightest bearing on the history that occurs thereafter. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, campaigned in 1940 on the promise that America would not get involved in the European war. Nixon told campaign audiences in 1968 that he had a secret plan for getting out of Vietnam. George Bush Senior went across the American landscape shouting "READ MY LIPS, NO NEW TAXES." Henry Ford said, "All history is more or less bunk." All campaign promises are more or less bunk. Every presidential campaign is noisy and ruinously expensive piffle. And the candidates you think you see are not necessarily the presidents they become. (But that can break either way, for better or for worse).

Take, for example, Al Gore's nonsense about how he will "keep the prosperity going." This is akin to the airline passenger's illusion that by gripping the armrests tightly, he is keeping the 747 aloft. No. The Clinton-Gore administration had the luck to be born at the takeoff of an immense technological revolution. The idea that Clinton-Gore created the fruits and abundance thereof is magic thinking of a childish kind. It seems especially silly considering the billions and billions in All-Daddy, big-state promises that Gore has made — the chicken in every pot, the government in every wallet. Why, I heard the other day that Gore intends to MAKE SOCIAL SECURITY A FEDERAL PROGRAM!

But there I go again, getting negative. Can't have that. Think positive. Vote early and often.