My daughter Alison called me, crying. It was December 13, 2000. She had just finished watching presidential hopeful Al Gore’s concession speech. The outrage and disillusionment of my newly political, idealist daughter were no greater than those of people who’d been voting for years. In the thirty-six days since the election, the nation had gotten a crash course in partisan politics. And it wasn’t pretty. Underneath all the talk of butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and future career plans of Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state, lurked a really inconvenient truth: Al Gore had won the popular vote and quite possibly the election, but George W. Bush was going to be our next president.
The weeks following the election found us all riveted to the news as teams of high-profile lawyers flocked to key Florida counties. At stake: the right to a manual recount of ballots in counties where voting irregularities and confusion might have skewed the outcome. Shouting matches, shuffles, cries of foul play punctuated the legal proceedings. Two weeks into the fast-developing web of suits and countersuits, Florida’s high court ruled in favor of the Democrats by allowing the hand counts to continue. Then came the staggering news: the U.S. Supreme Court, throwing states’ rights to the wind, agreed to hear Bush’s appeal of the Florida decision.
History will decide if the Supreme Court ruling—ordering a halt to the recount—ranks “as the single most corrupt decision in . . . [its] history,” as famed constitutional lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz charged. The way the justices’ votes split along partisan lines, and the tiny size of Bush’s lead over Gore—some 286 votes out of more than 5.8 million cast, according to estimates by the Associated Press (other sources judged the lead to have been nine hundred votes or slightly higher)—shocked a nation that believed in the detached impartiality of our courts. But looking at the decision in the context of the presidential campaign, it shouldn’t have been unexpected.
The Republican candidate, George W. Bush, was generally considered a nice, if not particularly bright, guy. His handlers had tried to create a steadfast cowboy persona out of the former frat boy. Like Reagan’s advisers had done, Karl Rove had seen to it that the requisite ranch, in this case in Crawford, Texas, was purchased before the election. But aside from the Photoshopped Marlboro man image, Bush didn’t have much to recommend him or give him an edge over Gore. Luckily for him, he didn’t need much. He had the press.
The “mediathon” is New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s term for the 24/7 barrage of what passes as news these days. The consolidation of the news industry in the 1990s put about 90 percent of what most of us see and read into the hands of some eleven companies, entertainment biggies like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. Over the past few decades, two thirds of independent newspapers in this country have disappeared, while one whale of a company, Clear Channel Communications, has swallowed up more than one thousand radio stations.
As corporations vie with each other—and the Internet—for an audience, journalists leapfrog over facts, scattering hard-nosed reporting and critical analysis to the wind. In their mania to saturate the airways with round-the-clock cable and talk shows, the media latches onto a snippet of information and spins it into a sensational story, instantly morphing into the story of the day, often of the week. Instead of communicating news, the press, with a sharp eye to advertisers, is shaping and creating its own version of current events.
And even though we spend endless hours surfing the Web, most of us still learn about our world the old-fashioned way—through radio, television, and newspapers. But what’s new-fashioned is the press’s unprecedented influence over the American mind. As Gerald Levin, then chief executive of AOL Time Warner, said, global media giants “might, in fact, become more powerful than government.”
“The only security of all is in a free press,” the perspicacious Thomas Jefferson said, simultaneously bequeathing a gift and a warning to the new nation. He’d be horrified to see how compromised our once fiercely independent press has become. Instead of presenting divergent viewpoints vital to the survival of a democracy, the media, after the consolidation of the 1990s, took a sharp turn to the right, nearly eclipsing objective reporting. It is axiomatic that corporate conglomerations will inevitably support those candidates whose policies won’t threaten their bottom line. But the fervor and frenzy of the new millennium press roared out of a well-oiled attack machine, revved up (or pretending to be) over Clinton’s bad behavior two years earlier. And it clamored for a regime change at home.
Clinton’s sex scandals and impeachment hearings fed the insatiable maw of the right-wing partisans in a way few of us at the time could have imagined. With communism no longer a menace, like-minded conservatives—evangelicals and politicians—needed to focus on other deviants, other threats to “American traditions and values of faith.” They found what they were looking for, as they had before, in “radical feminism,” “environmental extremists,” and the “purveyors of sex and violence”—the Clinton-Gore, soon to be the Gore-Lieberman, agenda. But now they were newly energized with proof of “corruption at the top.” Fearfully powerful, the right exercised a virtual chokehold on the press, giving them unprecedented control over public discourse and effectively flatlining dissent.
Under the tutelage of able right-wing theoreticians, the cold war morphed into the “culture war.” This handy term, popularized by Pat Buchanan, sprang off Republican lips to describe a largely manufactured divide over “hot button” issues—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, separation of church and state, stem-cell research—allegedly splitting the nation into two hostile camps. It wasn’t that there were several views on these issues, or that someone might support, let’s say, gay rights but not stem-cell research. There could be no in between, no middle ground. It was an all-or-nothing deal.
The political right pummeled the nation into believing an ideological barbed wire separated the Bush and Gore camps. And as Reagan had done, the Bushies, filled with righteous indignation, claimed to speak for the true Americans, for those shielding our nation from “the gathering storm” of moral decay.
Words like decadence and immorality, beaten into a platitudinous pulp by years of right-wing usage, suddenly became animated with reverential meaning. Bush might not yet have had a proverbial bloody shirt to wave, but he had a defiled dress, and he used it mightily. When during a campaign speech he talked about bringing honest people to government, people who wouldn’t “stain the house,” the American public immediately conjured up images of Lewinsky’s semen-smeared dress. But Gore, not Clinton, was the candidate; Republicans needed to tarnish his image, and this put the slander-panderers in a bit of a pickle.
Before his ecowarrior days, Al Gore was Bill Clinton’s squeaky-clean boy scout of a vice president. Happily married to his high-school sweetheart, Tipper, with whom he’d had four children, Gore could match his bedrock-solid family-values credentials with any red-state candidate.
Here is where the fabulously endowed right-wing think tanks came in. Organized and disciplined, meeting weekly to set movement priorities and plan strategy, they adopted talking points for the media to use, wittingly or not, against Gore. According to archconservative strategist Grover Norquist, it was not good enough to win; it had to be a painful, devastating defeat. “We’re sending a message here,” Norquist said. “It is like when the king would take his opponent’s head and spike it on a pole for everyone to see.”
Under the right’s onslaught, Gore allegedly became someone so uncomfortable in his own skin that he had to inflate his achievements. He’d lied about being used as an inspiration for the book Love Story, he’d lied about inventing the Internet, said conservative pundits. And when he said he’d never made either claim? He was lying about that, too. Could a man so fake, so delusional, so filled with grandiosity, a man with such major character flaws, be trusted as president?
A reread of the press coverage of Al Gore’s campaign is a study of misquotes, misinformation, and misuse of the public trust. “Fictional,” “nasty,” “spun to sound like something corrupt” is how Sharon Francis, executive director of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions, put it after reading the distorted reports of Gore’s trip to her state.
“You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you . . . get out your calculator or you look at his record in Texas,” said Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson. “But it’s really easy and fun to disprove Gore. As sport and as our enterprise [it’s] . . . greatly entertaining to us.”
It took Al Gore’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush for the press to issue its string of mea culpas. “We mocked him in 2000,” confessed Bob Herbert. Why? Not because of his politics, but because of his clothing. “In the race for the highest office of the land, we showed the collective maturity of three-year-olds.” Other journalists made the same admission, with the same regrets. Back then, the defining factor of which candidate the media supported was reduced to whom you’d rather sit next to at a barbecue.
All this—the intimidating muscle-flexing of the right, the caving in of liberals and the left, the abysmal failure of the press to do its job—made the Supreme Court’s decision as predictably shameful as the campaign it ended.
In his concession speech, Gore called on the nation to end its partisan rancor, to focus on what unites us rather than on what divides us. But he might not have realized—most of us didn’t—that we had the great divider headed to the White House. Consensus was not in the Republican play list.
Thanks to “barbecue journalism,” we didn’t know much about Bush’s plans for the country. When he talked about his relationship with God, most of us assumed he was describing private worship, not public policy. We didn’t appreciate how the word values was really a code, telegraphing to the Christian right his intentions to rid the country of what evangelicals call “radical Christ-hating” feminists.
We understood, in a generalized sense, he wasn’t in favor of abortion, but we believed Laura Bush when she said on television she didn’t think Roe would be taken away. And some of us really bought into those campaign slogans, such as “W is for Women.” Little did we realize the W stood for Whacked. If we knew then what we know now, a lot more of us would have been crying along with my daughter that cold December night.
GEORGE W. BUSH presided over an administration responsible for rolling back women’s progress in profound and frightening ways. Much of the assault was secretive and often hidden. “We know that life is harder, more difficult.... We’re struggling more and getting less of everything in return, but we’re not sure why,” Wendy, a mother of two young children, said. Her words were echoed in a 2006 study finding that for the first time since the 1970s women were less happy with their lives than men. The happiness gap was also found among high school students.
Researchers mulling over these results came up with a “the fault, dear Brutus” type of explanation: we were to blame. The reason? Women today want more, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s “they had narrower ambitions.”
Not only is this historically inaccurate, it misses the point—an important one made in 2007 by the Global Gender Report documenting the United States’ shameful slip in gender equality from twenty-fifth to thirty-first out of 128 countries, representing 90 percent of the world’s population. All those countries in the top twenty narrowed the gap from the year before. This is what the researchers had hoped and expected to find. But the United States had the ignominious distinction of going backward, beaten out by South Africa, Cuba, Namibia, and Lesotho. It’s hard to advance our scores when we have the second-worst rate of newborn mortality in the modern world. So if we, women, aren’t satisfied with our lot these days, it’s not because we want more, it’s because we’re getting less—economically, educationally, politically, and medically.
This erosion of women’s rights didn’t happen overnight. We’ve already seen the pieces in play starting in the 1980s. Bush and his crowd didn’t invent antiwoman attitudes, or antiwoman policies, for that matter. Sexism, it’s fair to say, is America’s default setting. But without doubt, W. had the worst record on women of any president in memory.
What’s happened to women in this country goes even deeper than all the legal setbacks, the programs slashed, the budgets cut. Distorted views of women pound through the popular culture and public consciousness like a war drum. Unadulterated wrath against women’s progress was unleashed (and continues to be) by numerous ultraright foundations and organizations, including the Sarah Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Carthage, Castle Rock, and American Enterprise foundations. Three in particular have been funded with the express purpose of marginalizing and demeaning women. The Susan B. Anthony List raises money for antichoice and other like-minded candidates. The Claire Booth Luce Foundation targets young women, especially on college campuses. With vitriolic attacks on women’s studies programs and feminist initiatives, it blames all the ills of humankind on women’s quest for independence. Bashing feminism is a particular skill of the members as they eagerly try to erase all its gains. The foundation woos adherents to the retrogressive agenda by generous paid internships and mentoring programs. Conservative political activists and right-wing analysts such as Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are supported while the next generation of Phyllis Schlaflys is being groomed.
The Independent Women’s Forum, whose board is stocked with Washington heavy hitters, many of whom hold prominent governmental positions, takes delight in running roughshod over feminist causes. It spends megasums publishing antifeminist newsletters, books, and periodicals; lobbying against affirmative action; and hyping the purported “myths” of the gender wage gap, the glass ceiling, date rape, and domestic violence.
Back in 2000, few of us realized the extent to which neocon billionaire backing made certain that the most familiar and prolific political voices were on the right, poisoning the mediasphere with antiwoman sentiments. The mainstream press, when it roused itself into writing about women at all, simply circulated reports filled with misleading information and inaccurate data, some supplied by these very foundations or by the self-serving Bush administration. While our attention was riveted on the traumatic events of the times, with cynicism and stealth the Bushies, by embracing evangelical Christians, reactionary politicians, and the media they control, wrapped misogyny in the gloss of respectability and gave it a life of its own.
IN THE NARRATIVE of what happened between the third wave’s invigorating thrust in the 1990s and our present struggles to regain hard-won rights, Bush’s lack of a mandate when he took office also played a significant part. The newly anointed president needed to find legitimacy and authority. And he needed to pay off his political debts. As bestselling author Nina Easton explains, “The Christian right’s sway within the Republican party . . . made it an influential power broker in the neck-and-neck 2000 presidential race.”
From the moment born-again Bush declared Jesus Christ to be his favorite philosopher, evangelicals threw their large and organized grassroots constituency wholeheartedly behind him. This was no case of strange bedfellows but rather of kindred sprits. Still, the speed with which Bush took on the mantle of fundamentalist Christians smacked of payback with a sharp eye toward expediency. As the late Molly Ivins used to say, “In politics you’ve got to dance with the one that brung you.”
A newly renovated “family values” program became the creed of his administration. It signaled Bush’s commitment to return our country to what his supporter evangelical Jeff Robinson calls a “biblical patriarchy that restores the male to his divinely ordained station as head of the home and church.” When Bush called upon “All of us . . . to work together to counter the negative influence of the culture,” there was no mistaking what “culture” he had in mind. He was launching a moral crusade against feminism, reproductive freedom, and homosexuality.
By firing off sorties against progressive-thinking Americans (and having his loyal henchmen do it also), Bush was rallying his base to his side and setting up boundaries, articulating the “us or them” philosophy we’ve come to know so well.
His first day in the Oval Office, he reinstated the Global Gag Rule. Following in short order he made known his intention to get rid of Roe v. Wade and eliminate contraceptive coverage for female federal employees and their dependents. His administration restricted Medicaid funding for mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486 or the “abortion pill”), and in the first of his many bizarre appointments, Kay Coles James, a former dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a fierce antiabortion, anti–affirmative action activist, took over the directorship of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in charge of hiring and firing and discrimination complaints in the entire federal workforce.
Then, notably, he asked John Ashcroft, who while in the Senate had tied with Senator Jesse Helms as the most conservative senator (scoring 100 percent ratings from every far-right group), to be his attorney general. A Pentecostalist, Ashcroft held daily prayers in the Justice Department. He became the butt of many jokes after he spent eight thousand taxpayer dollars to cover the exposed metal breast of the Spirit of Justice statue that had stood in the Great Hall for sixty-five years. But his other actions were no laughing matter. From the get-go he showed his outright hostility to women’s safety—backing away from providing security to abortion clinics, closing the Violence Against Women Office, and picking Nancy Pfotenhauer, formerly CEO of the Independent Women’s Forum, vocally opposed to legislation protecting women from domestic violence, for a task force studying that exact issue.
But his lifetime appointments are what will be remembered as his most damaging deeds. Drawing heavily from the ultraconservative Federalist Society, whose legal philosophy is represented by Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Ashcroft, in his first six months in office, stacked the federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues known for opposition to reproductive rights.
Similarly, vice president Dick Cheney, in charge of Bush’s transition team, crafted a testosterone-fueled inner circle, a veritable who’s who of A-list neoconservatives: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John W. Bolton, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Off to a sure-footed start in the 1980s, neocons had shaped Reagan’s militaristic ideology and served in Bush I’s administration. Out of favor in the Clinton years, they used the time to secure funding and sharpen their message. In 1997 a core group of these men—Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz—along with top political operative Karl Rove, Christian Conservative leader Gary Bauer, and William Kristol, editor of the powerful right-wing journal The Weekly Standard, founded the think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC). This double-dipping just about ensured PNAC’s overzealous agenda a prominent place in American foreign policy. PNAC called for a Pax Americana—the United States as sole superpower, a benevolent “hegemon,” CEO to the world.
What they wanted, simply put, was for America to go mano a mano against the rest of the planet and come out on top. To accomplish this we had to beef up our armed forces, necessary to regain prestige after “wimping out” in Vietnam. And we had to embrace religion, necessary to give a moral imperative to our mission: dominating the globe’s major developed economies, unilaterally and, if need be, with force.
Their plan was so big stick it made Teddy Roosevelt’s look like a weenie. Although PNAC members would have to sit tight before seeing their pet project—a war with Iraq—put into place, they brought their considerable clout to President Bush’s early policy moves. We can see their pumped-up-go-it-alone approach in Bush’s walking away from the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and opposing the International Criminal Court.
Even then, Bush’s unilateral polices worried our allies across the Atlantic. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center and released in August 2001 found people living in several Western European countries to have little more confidence in the president of the United States than in Russian president Vladimir Putin.
But no matter. Real men go it alone. The muscle-flexing America of the new millennium exalted dominance, aggression, and control. It was after all Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, who said, “I want to be the bully on the block.”
Lord Guthrie, a former British diplomat, noted how “peacekeeping . . . [was] something for wimps.” All the talk, Guthrie said, was “about the warrior ethic.” It’s hard to escape the gendered implications of our new mantra: macho abroad, macho at home. In both realms, men ruled, as they did in the 1950s. The P of PNAC might just as well have meant Patriarchy for a New American Century.
Phallic politics would bring about a stunning reversal of women’s progress, craftily sabotaging our rights, curbing our autonomy, and re-creating traditional roles. But back then, no one was reporting on women’s diminishing prospects. Capturing the news instead was the mysterious disappearance of congressional aide Chandra Levy. It was a portent.
As we dashed off for our Labor Day vacations, dark clouds blotted the horizon. The perfect storm of sexism was already brewing. We just didn’t see it coming.