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So we declined. We hope we were polite, but we couldn't resist saying that Mr. Irving was a Democrat and his wife wasn't a U.S. citizen, and that, furthermore, we were both alive. If that doesn't disqualify us from the Republican Inner Circle, nothing will.
My Dinner at the White House (1992)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
For reasons I can't remember -- possibly I developed a compelling interest in a moral showdown between two men of wavering principles -- I kept a kind of election diary in the months leading up to and including the 1992 presidential election. Here's an excerpt from that diary: "With only 12 days to go before the election, President Bush was photographed walking toward his helicopter in Atlantic City. The picture, which appeared on the front page of The New York Times, shows the President walking backward; we presume he's giving one last wave to his supporters. The white of his raincoat stands out against the gray of the tarmac. Six Secret Servicemen surround him, all in dark suits, all walking forward, but -- in Secret Service fashion -- two of the men are looking over their shoulders. The shadows of the men are slanted to the left, as if giving further evidence to the President's allegations that the press is biased in a liberal direction -- against him."
Well, this is old news -- as we know now, the other waverer won. I voted for him; I would do so again. Contrary to accusations you may have heard, Bill Clinton is no liberal; as a lifelong Democrat, I consider President Clinton to most resemble a moderate, decent-minded Republican -- he's not nearly as dangerous and deceitful as those Republicans who most virulently oppose him -- but he is a waverer (and not because he didn't go to Vietnam). Nevertheless, I enjoyed keeping my '92 election diary; there were so many stupid things to keep track of--for example, it was in Ridgefield, New Jersey, where President Bush suffered a memorable slip of the tongue. He told a crowd of 15,000 that he appreciated their "lovely recession." Of course he'd meant to say "reception," but he was exhausted. "Character counts," Mr. Bush kept saying. "Character matters."
It is only necessary to remember that Mr. Bush was also the candidate who ran against Ronald Reagan for the nomination of the Republican party in 1980, and who (at the time) was pro-choice; he was also opposed to giving any aid to Mr. Reagan's beloved "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua -- and it was George Bush who first called Mr. Reagan's supply-side economics "voodoo." Had being Reagan's Vice President changed him? Now firmly anti-abortion, and a born-again convert to the trickle-down economic theories of the former actor, Mr. Bush suffered no loss of face in delivering one of the most egregious lies of the '92 election. Bush actually urged Clinton to "come clean" about his student trip to Moscow -- "just as I have [come clean] about Iran-Contra." But if George Bush had "come clean" about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, then Bill Clinton could tell everyone that he'd fought in Vietnam.
I know -- more old news. It may be of greater interest to my readers to learn if I have been invited to President Clinton's White House. Yes -- in fact, twice. Both times I was unable to accept: the first time I'd made plans to take a trip with my children, the second time I was in Europe. I hope the Clintons ask me again. (It seems increasingly unlikely.) President Bush never invited me, but I wasn't surprised; I was only surprised to hear the reason -- and from no less an authority on dinner invitations to the White House than Mrs. Bush.
I ran into Barbara Bush at a black-tie event in New York City, following her husband's return to private life. Mrs. Bush and my wife (the Canadian) were talking; Mrs. Bush was surprised to learn that I was an American. Because I was one of her favorite authors, Barbara assured me, she had tried to have me invited to dinner at the White House; someone on George's staff had told her that it wouldn't be appropriate to invite me to dine at the taxpayers' expense-- because I was a Canadian! (Apparently, the same someone on George's staff failed to convey this misinformation to Dan Quayle; poor Dan was of the opinion that I was fair game for the Republican Inner Circle.)
After this little misunderstanding was cleared up, Barbara told me that she and George would be happy to have Janet and me to dinner; and that, vaguely, was how the matter was left. Janet and I are still wondering if Mrs. Bush meant Maine or Texas. (We still haven't been asked.)
"My Dinner at the White House," which in an earlier draft contained about 50 pages of my election-year diary, was originally published in Canada -- in the February 1993 issue of Saturday Night. (Neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush would want to have dinner with me if they read the Saturday Night version.)
It was for the benefit of Canadian readers that I included a small geography lesson in the original essay. I wrote: "My wife and I live in the low mountains of southern Vermont; we are a four-hour drive from New York City, which is directly south of us, and a four-hour drive from Montreal, Quebec, which is directly north of us. Both our Canadian and our American friends would be inclined to describe our location as 'nowhere,' or 'the wilderness,' but you would be mistaken to think that we are at all shut off from the world. Why? Because here is what you do if you live in Vermont: you find a pretty piece of land, you build a tasteful house, and then you stick a giant TV satellite dish in a prominent position -- such as in your nearest neighbor's face. Our dish is black, resembling the giant ear of a dinosaur species of bat. That's what you need, if you want 75 channels of sex and violence and sports -- and we do."
In an essay for a Canadian audience, it was also necessary for me to explain the American passion for bumper stickers, which is always exacerbated in an election year. In Vermont, I LIKE IKE was a prominent bumper sticker in the '92 election -- an expression either of nostalgia or of general displeasure with the choice between Clinton or Bush, or both. In my diary I noted: "Bumper-sticker lovers must regret the passing of President Bush's occasion to vomit in Japan. Even in Vermont, there were UPCHUCK IN ASIA! bumper stickers for a while -- they didn't last -- and many local wits subscribed to the theory that this moment of sudden illness was the most decisive, most strai
ghtforward foreign policy that Mr. Bush had enacted since taking office. Democrats hoped that this brief barf might be the only thing we would remember about George Bush, but -- to judge the passing importance of the event by the speed with which it vanished from Vermont bumper stickers -- the barfing episode was quickly forgotten. Perhaps the prospect of a President who travels to foreign countries and vomits on their leaders is an idea ahead of its time, although suggestions spring readily to mind. ... I mean, regarding where Mr. Bush should have traveled next. Anyway, the puking-related bumper stickers simply disappeared, whereas the President's ill-fated READ MY LIPS was still very visible on car bumpers, and still hurting him, in November."
Naturally, no diary of incidents contributing to the '92 election could be complete without a modest anthology of Dan Quayle jokes. By June of '92, about the only group Quayle could address -- if he wanted to be free of hecklers -- was an anti-abortion meeting where he followed up his attack on Murphy Brown, the fictional character in the television series, with more hot-blooded rhetoric. (An unwed mother was a poor role model for our society, Quayle had said.) He would press his case, the Vice President declared, "even though the cultural elites in some of our newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges may not like it." This was the same level of anti-intellectual buffoonery that had been used to portray Governor Dukakis (in the 1988 election) as a creation of the "Harvard boutique." But in June of '92, Clinton sent the signal that he would not be baited to discuss abortion or other "family values" on this level; to the disappointment of many Democrats, Clinton would fail to mention abortion sufficiently on any level, yet his cool response to Quayle set a tone. "I'm getting tired of people who have the responsibility for the American people -- like the Vice President -- pretending that the only problem we have is the absence of values," Clinton said.
Not even Ross Perot would bother to fight with Dan Quayle. "If anybody in the world should be able to understand the Murphy Brown story, it's the Republican party in the White House, because their whole lives are driven by ratings," Mr. Perot declared. "Murphy Brown had the baby the way she had it to get ratings"
President Bush, after agreeing with Quayle's negative response to Murphy Brown -- for having a baby when she wasn't married -- added only that "having a child out of wedlock is a better choice than having an abortion." But the big news was, no one really cared.
It is rare in American politics when a belligerent fool can't manage to stir up a hornet's nest by making an insensitive remark or two. Yet Dan Quayle went on and on being insensitive, and all he inspired was a plethora of political cartoons.
"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure," the Vice President had said in November of '89.
In a Hardee's restaurant in Chicago, in August of '90, Quayle had greeted a woman and tried to shake her hand. "I'm Dan Quayle. Who are you?" the Vice President had asked. "I'm your Secret Service agent," the woman had replied.
That same year, in California, the Vice President had announced: "I love California. I grew up in Phoenix. A lot of people forget that."
But Quayle could be more mystifyingly stupid than that. "I have made good judgments in the past," he'd once said. "I have made good judgments in the future," the Vice President had added.
As for family-oriented issues, nothing he would say about Murphy Brown could compete with this classic Quayle remark in December of '91: "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between mother and child," the Vice President had informed us. (And we thought Henry Kissinger spoke English as a second language!)
And so, when Quayle attacked a fictional character for being an unwed mother, nothing really happened except that the media went wild for a week. When the flap died down, nobody's mind had been changed -- least of all, Dan Quayle's.
At the time, however, Quayle's bullying idiocy about "family values" affected me more than the polls, for it occurred not long after Dan had invited me to dine with the Republican Inner Circle and I'd declined the invitation. I had developed the habit of pacing in my office, mumbling "I have made good judgments in the future." Clearly I was beginning to regret that I hadn't gone to the White House to eat with Dan and his friends.
I remember, too, that a kind of melancholy attended the week before the election. Janet and I were in New York one night when something triggered the security system in our Vermont house; the alarm sounded. A policeman searched the house for an intruder but found only a partially deflated helium balloon. The balloon said HAPPY BIRTHDAY! and the motion detector had responded to its errant behavior in the rising hot air from the furnace. We came home to find the balloon weighted down to the floor; for this purpose, the policeman had used our one-year-old's favorite toy -- a three-foot-tall version of Big Bird, the Sesame Street character. (Television is the source of so much American life.) The helium balloon was tied around Big Bird's neck. Was this an omen? Was Big Bird a Republican or a Democrat? He looked like an Independent to me. ("Which one of the three candidates as young men would you want your daughter to marry?" Ross Perot had asked. "Ears and all," he'd added -- definitely a Big Bird kind of character.)
Another night, when we were back home from New York, the phone rang at 5:00 in the morning and a man from the alarm company informed me that the heat detector in my security system indicated that the temperature was below freezing in my house. I told him I was perfectly comfortable, and that the house was adequately heated -- the security system was screwed up, I said. But when I couldn't fall back to sleep, I went downstairs and discovered that an outside door had blown open in the wind. The thermostat for the heat detector had been exposed to the cold air, and the front hall was full of dead leaves. A gray squirrel was sitting on the threshold of the open door; it looked uncertain -- trying to make up its mind whether or not to come inside.
This was disconcerting enough to compel me to watch the early-morning news. At a rally in Michigan, President Bush called Al Gore "crazy" -- and Bush had this to say for the Clinton-Gore ticket: "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos!" Later, a "news analyst" (I think this means a journalist) was whining about Bush's calling Clinton and Gore "bozos"; the issue was whether or not the demeaning word ("bozos") was Presidential. "Presidential" is an adjective we suffer over -- thankfully, only every four years. If the President said it, whatever it was, I say it's Presidential.
Thus inspired, I kept the following election-day diary.
"I wake up at 6:00 to the sound of hail on the roof, and on the slate terrace; the trees are completely shrouded in ice -- very ominous. I go back to bed and hear two or three thuds against the north wall -- also very ominous. This usually means that grouse have been flushed from the woods and have failed to clear the house, which is three floors high, with a steep roof. The sound of the birds killing themselves also wakes up our one-year-old.
"The three of us get up. I make coffee and watch the All-News channel, then CNN. Am informed that the polls open at 7:00. Drink one cup of coffee, then drive off to the elementary school -- our local voting place. We live on a mountain; there's a dirt driveway and two dirt roads before you get to the paved road. On the mountain, it's sleeting; in the valley, it's raining -- there's no ice on the trees in the valley.
