Despite reelection, a lofty public approval rating, and discombobulated opponents, President Clinton is in a funk. He whines that the cynicism of the press has finally gotten to him, and that he has grown cynical too. Newt Gingrich is no better off. He can’t decide what the Republican agenda should be, or even if there should be one. Meanwhile, a prominent columnist and TV commentator says he wouldn’t know some of the new U.S. senators if they sat on his lap. He used to care about such things, but no more. Me? Like Bill Bennett says of Republicans, I’m suffering from a bad case of ennui.
I’m not alone. The truth is all Washington has been gripped by ennui. Lassitude and apathy reign. No one bristles with energy or enthusiasm or zip; nothing seems to matter very much. America isn’t threatened anymore. There’s nothing at stake. The big goals — banning abortion, reforming the tax system, taming entitlements — aren’t attainable any time soon. What’s achievable now is mostly small stuff like hooking up kids in the hospital to the Internet.
So what’s the problem? Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe after 60-plus years of turmoil and passion and alarm in Washington, we’ve returned to what Warren Harding promised: “normalcy.” And normalcy turns out to be pretty slow-paced and dreary. No depression, no New Deal, no world war, no Cold War, no civil rights movement, no Great Society, no Watergate, no Republican Revolution — all we’ve got is . . . sorry, the best I can come up with is Coffeegate.
What’s palpably missing in Washington is tension. Remember when George Bush described his square-off with Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News as ” tension city”? That was a howler, but at least people understood what he was getting at: a battle of importance between titans. In those days — it was 1988 when Bush and Rather clashed — there was a real struggle between America and the Soviet Union, and it produced real anxiety in Washington because there was something very large at stake, namely the survival of human freedom.
I’m glad we won the Cold War, but I miss the tension. For decades, the White House press dutifully maintained a “body watch” on the president. Wherever he went, they went (or tried to go). The reason was the president might be called upon at a moment’s notice to respond to a nuclear attack by the Soviets. A military aide carrying the “football,” a briefcase containing the nuclear codes, was always near the president.
All this was great for journalism.
It made stories from Washington about foreign policy or military affairs seem all the more significant. And if you actually went to the front of the Cold War to cover, say, the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua, your story might truly be important. In those days, when I drove home to Virginia each night, I’d notice the parking lot at the Pentagon. There were invariably plenty of cars. I’d imagine the war room in the Pentagon, brimming with officers assigned to track military movements and ominous events around the world, all through the night, every night. Now when I drive by, the parking lot is practically empty.
All politics in Washington today is either personal or about money. What, for example, do the prospects for a balanced budget agreement depend on? The efficacy of the relationship between Clinton and Senate majority leader Trent Lott. And what’s the most divisive issue facing Congress? Newt. Democrats still want to drive him from Congress, but I suspect their main motive isn’t ideological. They want to beat him, even as he tries to make himself more ideologically palatable to them. They just hate the guy.
Money is Washington’,s dirty little secret. Power, as Henry Kissinger said, may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, but money is the motivating force behind a lot of what happens, now more than ever. Journalists (that means me) want more money, so they fight their way onto TV and give paid speeches. Pols want money, so they quit and become lobbyists or write books. It was a book deal, remember, that initially got Gingrich in hot water. Clinton and the Democrats wanted money, so they did whatever it took to raise it. Hence, Coffeegate.
The last great moment in Washington was Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991. Then, decisions made at the White House and Pentagon and on Capitol Hill mattered. America’s survival wasn’t at stake, but our role in the world was. It was exciting to follow and write about. Every morning, I turned to the Washington Times to find out which anti-war wussies it had put in its Desert Storm Hall of Shame. Every press conference, I watched. Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about. My stories concentrated on President Bush’s heroic role in the war. As best I recall, he wasn’t in a funk, not even for a single fleeting moment.
FRED BARNES
