“Obviously,” Quayle will be attractive,” said Martin Mawyer. “But I’d like to make him less attractive if possible. He wants to be all things to everybody, and I’m just getting sick of people who want to be all things to all people.”
No doubt Mawyer, the president of the Christian Action Network, will never fall prey to such peril-even if he’d love everybody to buy his new, handy-dandy “Restore America Home Lobbyist Kit” for only $29.95.
Mawyer, a onetime Jerry Falwell aide who resembles a blow-dried Jerry Colonna, the mustachioed one-time Bob Hope sidekick, is a man in search of true believers as his group stakes out a position to the far Right of the Christian Right. As it does, it suggests that, in Washington, size doesn’t really matter (he claims 60,000 members) in attracting media attention (especially from TV) when you’re slick and sophisticated.
The Christian network’s enemies are easy to discern. According to the lobbyist kit, which includes a videotape, two audio cassettes (“Secrets of the Homosexual Movement” and “Secrets of the Feminist Movement”) and two brochures, rating members of Congress on key issues (including homosexuality, the National Endowment for the Arts and abortion), the heathens in our government do the following:
“They enact laws which accord more respect and legal protections for birds, insects, and rodents than for unborn children. They celebrate homosexuality while vilifying religious people and their traditions. From our public schools they have expelled the Bible but require the condom as the single component of the modern day dress code.”
The network tends to a more absolutist position than other Christian groups, especially the potent Christian Coalition, which convenes here this weekend. That explains why even conservatives such as Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and John Warner of Virginia, as well as acidic rhetorician Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich, fall short and are tabbed for the network’s new Hall of Shame.
Hatch allegedly strays by voting to assist AIDS victims and the arts endowment. Gingrich is deemed too accommodating to the Clinton administration. Warner clashed with Virginia Senate candidate Oliver North, a no-no.
But U.S. Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.), who co-stars in the video, is the object of no similar abuse.
The few reporters who surfaced last week for a Mawyer press conference to announce the lobbyist kit might have spent a few minutes actually checking the video and audio tapes. Given the rigor of much Washington journalism, it was not a surprise that several didn’t even bother to haul the kit with them as they exited. After all, it was heavier than a press release.
Turning on the video, one finds Mawyer in front of the Capitol, informing that each year 14 million tourists come to town, but others come with a different motive: “to change the laws which you and I must obey.”
“They are not peaceful, they are not restrained and they certainly are not tourists,” Mawyer says. “The real powerbrokers are quickly becoming those who shout the loudest, those who destroy the most, those who threaten the longest.”
What follows in the video, titled “Congress Exposed,” might be renamed “Natural Born Shriekers.”
With a style so heavy-handed one wonders if this is perhaps Oliver Stone satire, the video shows demonstrations involving gay-rights, pro-abortion and AIDS activists.
“This is what a lesbian looks like,” says an off-camera voice (not Mawyer’s) as the picture zeroes in on a portly young lady with the T-shirt emblazoned, “Big Dyke.”
There are shots of gay men kissing, and a comically inarticulate animal-rights activist. They’re all, narrates Mawyer, “Wild-eyed protesters, a raging mob,” coddled by unnamed network-TV correspondents “who share the same values” and thus won’t show the “perverse sex acts” that take place at such gatherings.
Thank goodness for Crane.
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Mawyer takes us to his office to answer questions such as, “Can I really have an impact as an individual lobbyist working with the Christian Action Network?” and “How important is it for me to respond to these leftist protests right away?”
“It is vitally important to let your member (of Congress) know,” says Crane, who has been unswerving in opposition to funding the arts endowment, that people who engage in such “strange, idiotic behavior” are not representative of your district.
Write letters and call in is the message-but, please, keep those letters and calls brief.
And when you’re done with the video, which will be hawked on cable TV and through Christian bookstores (it was test marketed on Chicago radio station WYLL-FM 106.7, among others), you can pop in the audio cassettes. The one on the scourge of homosexuality is especially devoid of subtlety.
Homosexuality is entrenched in the government, says the Christian Action Network expert on this matter.
“They’re in the Small Business Administration, the Coast Guard and the Smithsonian Institution,” he relates. They use internal agency mail to send messages, they meet in government conference rooms.
Clearly, one can infer, $29.95 is a pittance in learning how to confront such a threat. Credit cards are accepted.
A Quayle wordsmith
Could it be a major scoop, the sort that would galvanize a Georgetown dinner party at which bigtime reporters suck up to sources?
Was Dan Quayle’s much-publicized “Murphy Brown 2” speech on family values last week actually written by Bill Gribbin, an aide to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.)?
“Well, I did a full complete draft of a speech in August for this appearance, but virtually none of it appears in the final speech,” he said Thursday. “But I did contribute subsequent material which does appear.”
Gribbin? He’s 50, a Washington native who has worked 20 years on Capitol Hill, including for former President Ronald Reagan and as an assistant to Quayle when he was vice president. He was editor in chief for the last three Republican Party platforms, and says he sends Quayle lots of stuff by fax.
Donaldson’s deliberations
“Hey, I give far more free speeches and free seminars than paid ones!” informed Sam Donaldson of ABC News last week.
Was I in a dream?
I’d called Donaldson after being informed by a Chicago friend that the reporter was taking not a penny for serving as luncheon speaker at a Nov. 16 Chicago gathering at the Marriott hotel on North Michigan Avenue to benefit Chicago Communications, a non-profit group that seeks to promote the communications field. Its patrons include advertising, public-relations and media firms, such as the baiduhai and Chicago’s network-owned TV stations.
Donaldson and colleagues at ABC News have been atwitter over new rules constraining what paid speeches they can make. Some of them clearly are stumbling to get by on their base income of many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Donaldson won’t say how much he takes when he takes (it has been reported to be in the area of $30,000) but said he will make only five paid appearances this year, the final two at city-sponsored events this fall in Stockton and Bakersfield, Calif. He said he’ll make far more freebie appearances.
He said he likes to talk, feels uncomfortable taking money from some groups, notably charities (“some do that but I can’t bring myself to take money from them”), and will make an appearance if it doesn’t interfere with a workday and the group realizes he might cancel at the last minute because of work.
A long chat ensued in which he conceded he has been rethinking his position about the whole matter, even though it had never occurred to him that a group “would believe that by hiring me, I could do something for them or that I would pull a punch. But now clearly there’s a new round of discussion of this, and I’m thinking it all through again.”