Well, at least we know what Jay Leno will be joking about for the next few
nights: George W. Bush's inability to name the leaders of Chechnya, India,
or Pakistan during an interview with a Boston tv station on Wednesday.
This whole mini-controversy is unfair to Bush, an unfortunate example of
"gotcha" journalism by an interviewer who, as Bush exposed through his own
return-fire questioning, can't name the foreign minister of Mexico.
(Neither can we.) At the next Republican primary debate, will the
candidates' podiums be rigged with buzzers so they can engage in a
Jeopardy-like game show featuring foreign-policy trivia? ("I'll take
Chinese dissident movements for $200, Alex.")
Still, a battle-hardened pol would have deflected this line of
interrogation with a simple, "I'm not here to take a quiz, but to explain
where I want to lead the country." A non-answer like that would at least
keep the interview off the front page and out of the late-night
monologues. This is why Bush's current strategy of disengagement is so
risky - he hasn't honed the skills he will need in a national race. During
the interview yesterday, Bush let four questions go by, and missed three
of them, before he realized he was in free-fall.
The Bush campaign should have seen this one coming, ever since their man
mixed up Slovakia and Slovenia this summer (and also referred to the
Grecians, Kosovarians, and East Timorians rather than the Greeks,
Kosovars, and East Timorese). "Just because I mispronounce the name of a
country doesn't mean I don't know how to lead," complained Bush back then.
"You caught me."
There will be no excuse if he gets caught again. Bush's ignorance of world
affairs is going to be a theme of the campaign coverage for the next
twelve months. The campaign can explain that you don't have to know
anything about the world as long as you have a "vision" only so many times
before people get unnerved. It's time to draw up some flashcards and pull
out a world map. Bush may as well make sure he knows the price of a gallon
of milk and a dozen eggs, too.
The inevitable backlash has begun, with both the
Washington Post and
Slate
running defenses of Gore adviser Naomi Wolf as a woman wronged. Both
articles argue that notwithstanding her suggestion that women liberate
their "shadow sluts," she's no radical; as the
Post's Ann Gerhart puts it,
"some of her thinking could be heartily embraced by the religious right."
William Saletan points out in
Slate that when Wolf advocated encouraging
mutual masturbation and oral sex among teenagers, her "idea was to let
teens satisfy themselves without resorting to intercourse." Actually,
though, this idea is hardly original. It's orthodoxy in the sex-ed
establishment led by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of
the United States (SIECUS). Trouble is, it's never been shown to work; and
the idea is pretty far-fetched for anyone who's actually been a teenager.
That Wolf is a moderate among feminists says more about them than about
her.
As for us, we're less troubled by Wolf's psychological profundities than
by Al Gore's Clintonian evasiveness about her. On This Week, Sam
Donaldson asked him if he were really paying Wolf $15,000 a month, and he
answered with a flat "No," followed by "it's a third of that." This was
true. But Gore couldn't have said that if Donaldson had used a different
verb tense: e.g., "Have you been paying Wolf $15,000 a month until now?"
Right after the Lewinsky story broke, Bill Clinton kept using the present
tense — he was denying that there "is" a sexual relationship. Has Gore
picked up bad habits from running with the wrong crowd?
It will be interesting to see, however, if Al Gore adopts a Wolfean
rhetoric on abortion. Wolf made a bit of a splash in 1995, when she wrote
a long essay in the New Republic arguing that the pro-choice movement's
"dehumanization" of the fetus was leading it to "hardness of heart, lying
and political failure." She goes on to make the heretical point that not
every woman who gets an abortion does so because she wants to be a good
mother: There are also "the repeat abortions — at least 43 percent of the
total; the suburban summer country-club rite-of-passage abortions; the 'I
don't know what came over me, it was such good Chardonnay' abortions."
Whatever else one thinks of Wolf's position — one take can be found in
"The New Abortion Debate," available at
www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9604/opinion.html — it's at least honest.
It might not go down too well at a NARAL fundraiser, though.
