RIP; Business as Usual

I can add nothing to the Sept. 11 tributes that will take up the next few days. Other than to say that I couldn't forget that day if I wanted to. Nor do I want to. May all the dead of that day rest in peace.

Last Refuge of A Scoundrel

There are now several hundred candidates and party organizations obeying a voluntary moratorium on Sept. 11 political advertising. I assume their primary motivation is a belief that ads during that time would be ineffective. Certainly the duty of remembering the tragedy has done nothing to prevent candidates and their operatives from exploiting it.

Let's take former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander. Having spent every hour of the last decade nursing a perennial presidential campaign, Alexander has set his sights one notch lower this year, and is running for the Senate out of Tennessee. He squeaked through his primary last month. So now his rival, Democratic Congressman Bob Clement, is doing what anyone would have done in the presidential races if Lamar's poll numbers had risen about 2 percent for more than an hour and a half. Clement is asking how it is that Lamar's career in politics has made him so frickin' rich.

Clement is focusing on a $236,000 golden parachute Alexander got after serving on the board of directors of the defense and public works contractor Martin Marietta between 1989 and 1995 (with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it hiatus to do his patriotic duty as ed secretary). What Clement professes to be cheesed off about is that, by law, a third of the Martin Marietta global settlement package?of which Alexander's deal was a part?was paid by the U.S. taxpayer.

But really, that is only the tip of Alexander's sweetheart iceberg. When I last wrote a major article on Alexander (in 1996), he was impressively honest and forthcoming about opening up his financial books. But what those open books revealed was jaw-dropping. First, in 1981, he, Howard Baker and other Tennessee notables were given the chance to exercise a one-dollar (that's $1) option to buy the Knoxville Journal, an option that Alexander later traded in for $620,000 worth of Gannett stock. Second, with help from Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate Jack Massey, his $8900 investment in a private prison company in 1984 made him $142,000 five years later. Third, there was Corporate Childcare Inc., which Lamar founded with Bob Keeshan. (Ring a bell? Keeshan was famous in 1960s kids' tv as Captain Kangaroo.) Between 1993, when Alexander left Washington, and 1996, his stake in the company rose from an initial investment of $6600 to $1.1 million. And that is only the beginning of the Alexander windfalls, which, collectively, mount to Hillary Clintonesque levels of implausibility.

So you might think Alexander got off lightly when Clement raised only Martin Marietta, but Alexander's campaign didn't think so. Alexander's campaign responded that Clement should have had "the decency to wait until after Sept. 11 to begin negative personal attacks." Sept. 11, 2002?last refuge of a scoundrel.

Currying Disfavor

You don't have to be a genius to note that there was, in fact, absolutely nothing personal about the attacks Clement made on Alexander. But modern politicians have taken the old feminist adage and reversed it: The political is personal. Witness what's been happening in the Connecticut governor's race. For the past two weeks, the Democratic candidate, state comptroller and former Clinton White House aide Bill Curry, has been airing the following ad against Republican incumbent John Rowland:

Hi, I'm Bill Curry. Here's the question at the heart of this race. Governor Rowland, you inherited all the revenue from a new income tax, two new casinos, billions in a tobacco settlement and the Wall Street boom of the century. Now Connecticut faces a billion-dollar deficit, and we are the most indebted state in the nation. What did you do with all that money?

By any criterion you choose to apply?its straightforwardness, its unwillingness to resort to euphemism and innuendo, its hewing to real, factually verifiable issues?this is a model campaign advertisement. It is purely political. Maybe Rowland can mount a defense against these questions and maybe he can't?but Rowland didn't seem inclined to answer them in any way whatsoever. He responded not with answers but with an ad of his own, which basically consisted of the Defense By Whining. "Isn't it sad," a narrator intoned, "that all Bill Curry can do is personally attack Governor John Rowland in Connecticut?"

Note that you cannot, by definition, "personally attack Governor John Rowland." If it's a personal attack, then it's an attack on John Rowland?the guy. If it's an attack on "Governor" John Rowland, then it's a political attack. You can't whine about your personal vulnerability to meanies while at the same time vaunting your gubernatorial magisterium. There is something wall-to-wall disingenuous about Rowland's approach, all of it done in the vocabulary of Gingrichery ("Isn't it sad?"). It's not just the blindness to the distinction between the personal and the political. It's the authoritarian desire to define what's personal and what's political in the first place.

The Mighty Fall

Two political campaign consultants made big mistakes recently. One (the one who made the personal mistake) was ruined, and one (the one who made the political mistake) was exalted. The first is Bob Beckel, the veritable Sword of Clintonism during impeachment and the brass-knuckles specialist (although "scumbag" is a term more likely to be used by his political opponents) who tried to get members of the Electoral College to renege on their votes in the 2000 presidential election in order to finagle Al Gore into the White House.

Beckel's divorce has led him into a rough patch. On several occasions, he made the mistake of purchasing evening companionship, and one morning he walked out to his car to find he'd got into a nocturnal business relationship with an extortionist. The woman had scribbled a note warning him that unless he forked over $50,000, she'd share information about their transaction with both the media and his family. (Beckel has small children. Real nice chick.) Beckel told the police, and there have been three arrests in the case. But the Montgomery County state's attorney's office wound up being a bit less circumspect than Beckel might have wished, and all last week The Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove has been regaling back-biting Washingtonians with tales of Whoremongering in High Places.

This means Beckel is finished. Not that his conduct has anything to do with his ability to run a decent campaign. It's just that in any district in the country, Candidate A will snort, "Candidate B is taking advice on how to run the country from a guy who seems to take his advice from ladies of the evening!" That'll take 2 points in the polls away from Candidate B in any coastal district, and 10 points in any Bible Belt one. That's why Beckel is now talking seriously about trying to find work as a garage mechanic. I wish him well.

But not every consultant gets punished this way for his mistakes. Take Sal Russo?a superb California consultant. Russo is running a fire-and-brimstone gubernatorial campaign for Republican Bill Simon against incumbent Gray Davis. Davis' consultant, Garry South, is a negative campaigner so ferocious he makes Tim McVeigh look like a Teletubby. After getting pounded on issue after issue all summer long, Simon is in freefall. According to a Field Poll, in fact, he is now running third in a two-man race, behind a hypothetical write-in candidacy for former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, whom Simon defeated in the primary.

The biggest blunder Simon has made thus far was to assure the gay Log Cabin Republicans, in an answer to a questionnaire, that he would support a Gay Pride Day in California. This won Simon exactly zero votes among gays, and led to calumny, resignations and canceled campaign checks from his social-conservative base. So how did Simon explain his bad judgment? It wasn't me! It was Sal!

Russo took full responsibility for the blunder. "I looked at it hastily and never caught the Gay Pride Day questions," he said. "It was solely my mistake in letting it go out." Will this "mistake" hurt Russo? Absolutely not. In fact, he'll be rewarded, because other candidates will think he's lying. That shows him as a particularly selfless operative?the kind of guy who'll even take a fall for you.

So Russo will thrive. He may from time to time even pick Bob Beckel's brain for advice. He may call up Beckel and say, "Hey, is that knock on the left side of my Rolls coming from the distributor or the carburetor?"