The Nation & Alterman

Just like In These Times, The Nation has been sounding the tocsin for Gore. The magazine that endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988 is now on the side of the man who put out the most vicious slanders against Jackson that year. In the October 16 edition of The Nation, Eric Alterman huffed and puffed for more than 7,000 words, straining to prove the unprovable: namely, that the policy gulf dividing Bush from Gore is profound and that the election of Gore will save the country from a nosedive into fascism. Alterman's harangue was preceded by an entire issue of The Nation devoted to scaremongering about the threat Bush poses to a "delicately balanced" Supreme Court. Both are part of The Nation's formal endorsement of Gore, in an unctuous drizzle of prose arguing wanly that "if Gore manages to win the White House, despite his weaknesses, the center-right moves a little bit our way and, in any case, becomes the object of purposeful leveraging."

Alterman cranks out three arguments for electing Gore: executive orders, the veto, and the courts. All of these are cast in the negative. In other words, it's not that Gore is good on any issue the Left cares about. It's just that Bush would be worse. Much worse, Alterman trembles. The evidence he marshals forth is not compelling.

On matters of sexual politics, Alterman suggests that Gore is a real hero and that Bush is a villain who is itching to overturn Roe v. Wade and attack gays. There's not much substance to these charges. Even Susan Estrich, Dukakis's former campaign manager, writing in an earlier edition of The Nation, predicts that Bush won't seek to overturn Roe. In fact, abortion is already beyond the effective reach of many women in this country and Gore is most certainly among those to blame for this state of affairs. Unsurprisingly, Alterman sidesteps Gore's own record on abortion. During his congressional career, Gore had an 84% pro-Life record. Gore voted against federal funding of abortions for poor women and wrote to constituents in Tennessee that he believed abortion was "immoral." You think this guy is someone to rely on? On gays, Alterman conjures up an image of Bush as a vengeful homophobe. But his running mate, Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, has laid out a libertarian attitude towards gay rights that must make Pat Robertson and James Dobson cringe. Contrast this to Gore, whose record on gay issues is abysmal.

Since the election of Clinton and Gore, industrial jobs have continued to flee the country, in large measure due to the more than 200 trade pacts brokered since 1993. Alterman doesn't mention NAFTA, GATT, the China deal, or the African trade agreement.

Take the military. "On missile defense, Gore's most appalling cave-in to right-wing hysteria, the Vice President cravenly favors 'developing the technology for a national missile defense system to protect against ballistic-missile attacks from rogue states.'" Alterman writes. "But Bush says he would deploy a much more extensive defense right away, whether it works or not." Actually, Gore supports a portable missile defense system that can be shipped off to the Middle East or the Straits of Taiwan. In other words, the system would be designed to be used as part of Gore's "forward engagement" military strategy, a gameplan for accelerated interventionism. Bush's plan is nuttier, but less malign. He talks about a global missile defense system that would be shared with Russia and even China. And it goes hand-in-hand with Bush's plan to unilaterally dismantle a large stockpile of nuclear missiles. Star Wars, which has been going strong through administrations stretching back to the early 1960s, will never work. If Republicans, for whom the whole mad enterprise has become an article of quasi-religious faith, use it as a rationale for cuts in weapons that represent a greater threat, why spurn the bargain? Every time a Star Wars test shot goes awry, it sinks the Pentagon yet further into welcome disrepute.

Alterman weirdly asserts that Gore's backing of Star Wars represents "his most appalling cave-in to the right-wing." To our knowledge, the Star Wars scheme is typical defense pork-barrel, the kind of big ticket handouts that have always enjoyed bipartisan backing in Washington. The scheme hasn't caused anyone to go hungry, sleep on the streets, or die. It would be tough to pick Gore's worst act as a politician, but a top five list might look something like this: the dismantling of welfare, the expansion of the federal death penalty, the assault on habeas corpus, the bombing of Yugoslavia, and the genocidal sanctions against Iraq that have starved and killed more than one million children. Nothing from Alterman on such matters.

Alterman resurrects that old canard that liberal presidents (read any Democrat) give legitimacy to progressive causes. This is top-down thinking of the most frigid kind and it is devastatingly wrong. The Democratic Party can more accurately be defined as the graveyard of social movements. Progressive causes are infused with legitimacy by the power of popular movements, not by the liberality or graciousness of leaders. An elitist like Alterman can't suppress his excitement over the very notion of the executive office, as if he were part of the parlor cabinet in the court of the Sun King. Alterman's prose become moist with excitement about the president's "awesome ability to make things happen just by saying so," as if the President were a medieval king who could cure scrofula with a touch of his hand. Who but Clinton, Alterman effuses, would have awarded John Kenneth Galbraith and George McGovern the presidential medal of freedom?: We're pretty sure that Galbraith and McGovern, both loyal Democrats, are behind Gore/Lieberman, but both men also have a fine sense of irony. We think they would both be highly amused by the idea that the quality of executive power in America can be assayed by the recipients of presidential medals.