Take On the Talking Heads
The Double-Talk Express
by Garry Wills
March 9, 2000 -- "I will never take a poll as president of the United States." Any candidate who says that is a fool, or a liar, or both. A president would be derelict in his duty if he gave up the means of assessing attitudes toward his politics. A president must lead, but he needs to know what his followers are thinking in order to do that.
Actually, Senator McCain, who said that, has hired pollsters. Why? Why pay them money if he pays them no attention? And clearly he was paying them attention when he made his high-risk decision to write off hard-core Republicans in order to appeal to independents. His polls told him he had no chance with the hard right anyway.
His polls must also have told him he had no chance in California, leading him at first to give up the debate there. Then his handlers convinced him that he has to pretend to be in competition or it will demoralize his troops; so now he will debate, while still distancing himself enough (he will appear by telecast from out of the state) to say that he was not really in the race -- the excuse he gave for his Iowa loss.
Actually, it is McCain's use of polling results that has reduced his campaign to a bitter incoherence. On the one hand, he says he is a Reagan Republican, while at the same time he denounces the religious right that Reagan always praised and favored. Speaking to the Moral Majority, Reagan said, "I know you can't endorse me, but I endorse you."
Gumming things up even more, McCain says that he has nothing against the religious right in itself; he just does not like irresponsible spokesmen like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. To show he is just speaking about those two men, not about all leaders of the religious right, he goes on to praise Chuck Colson and James Dobson. Yet Dobson is as wacky as they come. In a book he co-authored with Gary Bauer, he made outrageous claims that he has refused, under many challenges, to back up -- for instance, that the White House mailed out instructions to schools for children to draw the largest penis they can imagine.
Dobson also, in the same book, said that humanism was to blame for the man who had his own daughter artificially inseminated with his semen so he could take the kidneys out of her 7-month-old fetus to get a compatible kidney implant for himself. This incest-and-murder story, from a man who calls himself "Doctor," supposes that a 7-month-old fetus kidney will support a grown man. Yet this is the "leader" McCain says he admires. Who is the supporter of the loony right now?
Gary Bauer, who is backing McCain, suggested that McCain put in the plug for Dobson, his old co-author and financial supporter -- and then Bauer wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times citing that mention of Dobson as proof that McCain is not opposed to the religious right as such. (This reminds me of Yale professor Willmoore Kendall, who publicly referred to a speech by Joseph McCarthy as proof that the senator was a pretty thoughtful person after all -- only to have someone reveal that Kendall had written McCarthy's speech.) Even Bauer had to admit that he considered it a bit too much for McCain to compare Pat Robertson with Louis Farrakhan. That was before McCain went further, calling the religious right an evil force he had to combat. McCain has let his Luke Skywalker delusion carry him away: "To stand up and take on the forces of evil, that's my job."
He has confused his Reagan references again. Reagan thought the Evil Empire was based in Russia, not Virginia. The Double-Talk Express runs backward and forward erratically these days, reflecting its engineer's confusion and desperation.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
