“Now it was there. Now it grew out of me like a tumor, like a second head and it was part of me, though it could not belong to me at all, because it was so big. It was there like a huge, dead beast, that had once, when it was still alive, been my hand or my arm. And my blood flowed both through me and through it, as if through one and the same body. And my heart had to make a great effort to drive the blood into the Big Thing; there was hardly enough blood. And the blood entered the Big Thing unwillingly and came back sick and tainted. But the Big Thing swelled and grew over my face like a warm bluish boil and grew over my mouth, and already the shadow of its edge lay upon my remaining eye.
—Rainer Maria Rilke from Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual
According to a 1978 report by the now-defunct Presidential Commission on Mental Health, which was put on bookstore remainder lists immediately after it was published—“there are as many schizophrenics in America as there are people in Oregon, Mississippi and Kansas, or in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware and Hawaii combined.”
That was 10 years ago, more or less, and the numbers are still rising. There has not been a lot of talk about mental health in the White House since Reagan took over, but studies by the Democratic National Committee indicate that there are now more functioning, street-level schizophrenics loose in the nation than the combined populations of Florida, Ohio and Texas.
None of these are “Democratic states,” according to DNC figures— with the possible exception of Hawaii, and that will presumably end in 1988 if the party nominates its current front-runner, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, of Chicago and Greenville, S.C.
Jackson is a black man, and the country is not ready for that. Not even in Hilo ... It is a problem for The Party, which has not been doing well lately. In the last five presidential elections the Democrats have lost the cumulative electoral vote by a hideous margin of 77 percent to 21 percent . . . and that was when they had white people on the ballot.
American politics is a profoundly atavistic sport, and the odds are that a black man will not be president of the United States until long after Oral Roberts dies and “comes back,” like he swears he will, “to rule the world, with Jesus.”
TV has changed our perceptions, but not much else. If Warren Harding “came back” today, with a high-tech organization, he would probably carry 44 states and appoint four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nixon did four, and now Reagan will have done four more before he gets carried off by polyps, and that will define the nature of the court for the rest of our generation.
Jimmy Carter, as it happened, made no Supreme Court appointments. He was saving that move for his second term, according to people who worked with him.
Jimmy is gone now, and so is Gary Hart. . . . Lust and craziness croaked both of them. Hart, the Democratic front-runner until six weeks ago, was a known sex fiend who drank beer in the morning and wanted to scrap the whole U.S. Navy—but he was doing well enough in the polls until his picture turned up on the front page of the National Enquirer wearing a rayon jock strap and eyes like squashed grapes.
That was too much for the electorate, apparently—although nobody ever really checked it out—and Hart dropped out of the race in a blaze of shame, for reasons that wouldn’t have raised eyebrows in a Rotary Club between Pittsburgh and Harlingen, Texas
The schizophrenia vote was not polled, despite its mushrooming numbers. Hart was an odds-on favorite to win both the Democratic nomination and the presidency before he got his picture in the papers with a bimbo from Miami—and even after the scandal broke and the dust settled he was running ahead of every Democrat in Iowa except Jesse Jackson.
The schizoid vote is about all that is left to the Democrats these days. They are about to self-destruct again, almost a year ahead of schedule.
Two months ago they had a nationally popular front-runner who was running 16 to 20 points ahead of George Bush—and now on this bottomless Fourth of July they are scrambling around like unborn rats and confronting the voters with a cage-full of nondescript presidential candidates called “The Seven Dwarfs.”
The Republican Party is on trial on TV for crimes worse than anything Richard Nixon or Boss Tweed ever committed. The president is about to be impeached, and his closest advisers from the glory days of his first term are going to jail for greed and corruption. . . . The attorney general and the vice president are too dirty to appear in public unless they’re subpoenaed.
Despite all this, current GOP vice president and former CIA Chief George Bush is currently a three-to-one favorite among professional gamblers to be the next president of the United States, adding another four years of rampant greed and blundering to the seven that Ronald Reagan has already racked up.
Oliver North and Adm. Poindexter will end up taking the rap for most of Reagan’s crimes, but it will not be a long-term problem for either Bush or the future of the beleaguered GOP.
The party of Grant, Harding, Hoover and Richard Nixon will open the 1988 campaign knowing that 23 states have voted Republican in all five presidential elections since 1968 and 13 others have gone GOP in four of the five. That is 36 states out of 50, with a massive, overripe nut of 354 electoral votes.
Only 270 are needed to win.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, can count on a power base of no states at all. Only the District of Columbia, with three electoral votes, has voted consistently Democratic in the last five presidential elections.
The Whig party abandoned all hopes and disappeared from the face of the earth in 1852 on the basis of better numbers than the Democrats can muster today. . . . The Whigs actually elected a president, the ill-fated Zachary Taylor in 1848, only four years before they went belly up and quit politics forever.
The real miracle of American politics in the ’80s is that the Democratic Party still exists. It is the “majority party” numerically—but in truth the Democrats have not done anything except bitch and whine and fight savagely among themselves since Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944.
June 29, 1987