Truth - Al Franken [7]
Slumping back in my chair, I switched on NPR’s Morning Edition and recognized the voice as Renee Montagne’s. “The President’s people are calling this a mandate. By any definition I think you could call this a mandate.”
Suddenly my despair turned to rage. My head was in greater danger of exploding than even Cheney’s heart. What the hell was going on?!
Bush had won in a squeaker. Predictably, he was trying to spin it as a landslide. But the press, instead of laughing and throwing beer bottles, or grabbing their crotches and saying, “Mandate?! I got your mandate right here!”, was going along with him. Bush said on November 4, “Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Not true, right? Obviously not true. But it was reported with a straight face. That’s where he got his political capital—from a spineless press corps that gave it to him.
How could Bush have actually won political capital? How could he have earned a mandate? Well, he could have won more states. He could have won more votes. But here’s the thing. He didn’t. He won by the skin of his teeth. (In 2000, he won by stealing the skin off Gore’s teeth.) It was like Karl Rove had picked up a fumble in the end zone and here George W. Bush was doing the Ickey Shuffle. The referees of the media—the Wolf Blitzers, the Renee Montagnes, the David Sangers—should have penalized him for excessive celebrating. But George W. Bush, the luckiest member of the luckiest family in the history of the world, had somehow managed to enlist the referees in his touchdown party. George W. Bush was claiming a sweeping mandate and, against all reason, he was getting away with it.
And what did he say his mandate was for? At the top of his list was Social Security and tax “reform.” Which in Bush-speak means Social Security privatization and more tax cuts for the rich. That wasn’t the agenda he had campaigned on. Sure, he’d mentioned those issues on the stump, in passing. But the headlines and the roars of the handpicked crowds came from his core message: Terrorists want to kill you, my opponent is a flip-flopper, and only I can protect you and your spouse from the menace of gay marriage. Or, in my preferred vernacular, rhyme: fear, smears, and queers.
So not only was Bush inventing a mandate, and not only were the right-wing media dutifully parroting it, and the mainstream media slavishly echoing it, but now George W. Bush, for the first time the duly elected President of the United States, was announcing to the nation that he intended to use his imaginary political capital to lay waste to the very pillars of middle-class prosperity that allowed his constituents to buy televisions on which to watch his darkly triumphant press conference. It was the ultimate irony. FDR giveth. And GWB taketh away.
I swore then and there, if memory serves, to fight this bastard every step of the way. Setting my jaw, I turned to Katherine.
“It’s time to do this,” I said.
“You’re right.” There was an unexpected softness to her voice. A weariness, laced with exhaustion, tinged with resignation, with an undercurrent of relief. “Time to give up. We’ve had a good run. We tried, and we . . . we failed.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Was this the Katherine Lanpher who had sat, and fought, by my side for these seven long months? Was this the Katherine Lanpher who had laughed at some of my jokes, even when Air America Radio was a hairsbreadth away from collapse?
No. No, it was not. This was a Katherine Lanpher badly in need of a bucking up.
“No, Katherine. If we quit now, they’ll have won.”
“But they have won.”
“Have they, Katherine? Have they really?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
There was a pause. Then I remembered the talking points that Democratic strategist Paul Begala had once slipped me after an especially dispiriting guest appearance on Crossfire: “Never stop fighting. Never stop believing. And don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”
“Katherine, we’re going to keep fighting. We’re going to keep believing. And no matter what happens, Katherine,