Mullings by Rich Galen | Issue for November 19, 1999

Click here for the Secret Decoder Ring to this issue!

Norman Rockwell, It's Not

Friday, November 19, 1999

According to NBC's Andrea Mitchell, senior Administration women are so upset at Clinton's budget deal which traded restrictions on family planning money in return for paying our UN dues they are lining up to pose for an updated Edvard Munch painting.

I still wonder why this "Geschrei" mentality didn't surface last year when it became known that President Clinton had lied to these very same senior Administration women regarding his relationship with Monica.

The House voted on the $385 billion dollar budget bill yesterday and pretty much did everything Senior AP Congressional Correspondent David Espo said they were going to do in an analysis he wrote three weeks ago. The White House got enough to crow about without forcing the House and Senate Republicans to eat crow.

The real loser in this whole Nang Yai play is House minority leader Dick Gephardt. Gephardt doesn't need front page photos of Speaker Dennis Hastert on the phone congratulating President Bill Clinton. Dick Gephardt needs photos of Newt Gingrich on the steps of the Capitol shutting down the government.

It's the old saw: Be careful what you wish for. The Democrats spent dozens of millions of dollars to get rid of Gingrich. They got what they wanted. But now, Gephardt realizes, in order to take back control of the House, the Democrats have to maintain the fiction that the House and Senate have been, and continue to be, controlled by right wing extremists unable or willing to work in a bipartisan manner.

Newt was the McDonald's Golden Arches of politics. If you drive past a red sign with two golden arches you know everything you need to know about that restaurant. In many locations the word "McDonald's" isn't even on the sign. All Gephardt needed to say for most of the last five years was that a given policy was a Gingrich idea or that Gingrich supported the idea. Instantly, 50 percent of the nation was against it. The fact that Newt favored a piece of legislation told half the nation everything they needed to know about that bill - they were opposed to it.

But without Newt, and without the brutal language which spewed out at him from the Well of the House for the four years he was Speaker, Gephardt and his troops are forced to explain their opposition to each piece of legislation on its merits. That is a much, much tougher job at a time when most of America seems to believe things in Washington are going pretty well - or, at a minimum, they don't hear much about it so they don't care much about it.

There has never been much love lost between Clinton and Gephardt since Gephardt - when he was still toying with the idea of running for President - said that Clinton's activities in the Oval Office had been "reprehensible." Not a word a President likes to hear coming from the lips of his own leader in the House.

Clinton, who has moved this penultimate year from being interested to eager to obsessed with leaving a positive legacy at the end of his term, was perfectly willing to pay lip service to Gephardt while leaving him to twist slowly, slowly in the political wind.

The Leonid meteor shower was at its height last night with as many as 5,000 meteors per hour showing the Earth's atmosphere. I read where the shower in 1966 reached a peak of some 144,000 meteors per hour. I was a sophomore in college in 1966. For more than 30 years I had thought something else, entirely, had caused all those flashing lights.

-- END --

Home | Secret Decoder Ring | Past Issues | Email Rich | Rich Who?