In a town where conformity not only reigns but also suffocates, hating President Clinton and Mother Teresa gives one some claim to individuality.
Christopher Hitchens, politically incorrect, anti-abortion, pro-guns, left-winger, is indeed an oddity in a locale with very few, as I was reminded Friday during a visit to a conservative think tank.
“Imagine yourself to be Newt Gingrich,” he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute. “Who do you want to be president? A mediocre, moderate, senile Republican? No, you want Bill Clinton.”
There were a few guffaws, some grimaces. But mostly it was an assemblage of proper ladies and gentlemen, many with that hollowed-eye, intense look of ambitious Beltway professionals, scanning the room to gauge the response of others. The air was rife with unease.
But at least they had invited the Brit in the first place, to be on a panel, “The Next Congress,” whose only apparent reason seemed either the hope or assurance that C-Span, the cable channel for public affairs junkies, would show up and tape the 90 minutes for airing during some inconvenient hour of the day or night, which proved to be the case.
If you want a touch of the risque, beckon Hitchens. He’s a brainy and worldly Oxford-educated rogue who is the Washington-based correspondent for the left-leaning Nation and celebrity-obsessed Vanity Fair.
He has a reputation for hard work and hard living, though not in that order, and for the occasional outlandish (at times premeditated) pronouncement. The necktie is inevitably askew with a 3 a.m. tavern look. But after 15 years in a country he clearly likes, one might call him the capital’s domesticated dissident.
He went to Oxford at the same time as Clinton and considers him a duplicitous disaster. As for Mother Teresa, he wrote a book (“The Missionary Position”) excoriating her for toadying to dictators, running what amounts to an uncontrolled multinational corporation via 456 charity centers in 100 lands, and not even taking very good care of the poor.
He calls her “a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly secular powers.”
At the same time he’s able to switch hats, produce fine essays on esoteric literary topics, write about the daily competition between two famous auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and to use Vanity Fair’s pages to bash Baby Boomers as soulless, selfish and given to incessant generational competition.
He has gone on CNN and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a murderer; derided David Broder, ace political reporter and Washington Post icon, as a stenographer for the Establishment; and, on CNN’s “Crossfire,” made fun of Charlton Heston’s toupee during a debate with the actor.
“And Christopher’s politics can be so Left, he comes out on the opposite end,” one friend said Friday.
Hmmm. I wasn’t exactly sure about that until that day’s panel got to differences between the parties, with one conservative bemoaning that there were fewer differences these days since the GOP was getting too mushy and moderate. Its only hope was to turn Right, led by its current firebrand cadre of congressional freshmen.
“There are not yet two parties,” responded Hitchens, who finds the Democrats way too conservative and is bored by “all this idiotic donkey-elephant discourse.”
As for congressional term limits, if they were enacted, “the only people who’ll know how the place works will be lobbyists.”
He does believe in class struggle, finding America far more class-ridden than the natives would concede. (“I just hope that a populist revolt will not be led by fascists.”) And he finds Republicans wayward and cowardly.
“Having denied the delegates (to their convention) the red meat of the unborn child, it threw them the United Nations.”
He is astounded, too, “when a Republican says that their tent should have room for Oliver North but not Colin Powell.”
But will he turn to Clinton? Unlikely.
“I was at Oxford with the president. I can tell you about the inhaling thing,” he told the think tankers. “Marijuana could always be baked into cookies, and we know how he likes cookies. It’s another one of those lawyerly lies of his.”
As for who’ll win, the entire panel was asked for that Washington staple, a prediction, on the shape of the Congress and White House after Election Day.
The consensus was that the Republicans hold Congress, Clinton whips Dole.
“We have an electorate that wants it both ways, and can have it,” said Hitchens, sneaking in the last word.
“Now, is this a great country or isn’t it?!” he concluded with a smile, quickly turning in his seat and exiting.
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One happy family, eh?
This may be like the old saying, hard cases make bad law. But whatever one concludes about any rights or wrongs on the following, it’s insightful about the capital.
The invitations are out for an Oct. 1 roast of CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl. She’s a bastion of the local establishment, meaning it would be no surprise if she surfaces at Sunday’s Redskins-Bears game here. She frequently is a guest in the skybox of Redskins’ owner Jack Kent Cooke, an ego-crazed billionaire and one of the more odious folks in town.
The roast benefits the Spina Bifida Association of America. The co-chairmen are Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).
The master of ceremonies is journalist Mark Shields. The roasters are Democrats Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, and Pat Schroeder, the Denver congresswoman, and Republican Mary Matalin, the Bush spokeswoman-turned-talk host, and Maureen Reagan, the former president’s daughter.
Among big donors are CBS, Coca-Cola, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago-based law firm of Sidley & Austin, the Dow Jones & Co., Washington Post Co., and the husband-wife duo of Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and Judy Woodruff of CNN, longtime supporters of the cause.
There are many others, including Fortune 500 firms and big-time lobbyists. The honorary committee includes at least 46 U.S. senators and many House members.
So you have journalists helping hit up for money the people they cover. They are, inevitably, trading on their position as high-profile celebs to generate a favor: writing a check.
For example, $10,000 gets you a table of 10 and a full page ad in the program.
And they end up on a dais, in black tie, breaking bread and chortling, with the same folks they are asked to cover critically–assuming they have the inclination.
It seems somewhat incestuous.
Take this pledge to the bank
President Clinton did stand there in New Hampshire with Newt Gingrich and pledge fidelity to setting up some commission to change our campaign finance laws, didn’t he? He’s said money is just too much a part of politics, hasn’t he?
Well, a lobbyist chum passes along the latest missive he’s received from the Democratic National Committee:
It’s an invitation to “the Los Angeles National Presidential Gala honoring President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
It will be held at a private estate called Green Acres, owned by a grocery magnate, in Beverly Hills Thursday and feature “a Gala Concert with performances by Barbara (spell her name right, guys, it’s Barbra) Streisand, The Eagles, The Neville Brothers.”
If you’ve gagged over the price of Streisand tickets before, get a respirator: “$12,500 per person for dinner and VIP concert tickets; $5,000 per person for the private reception and preferred seating concert tickets; $2,500 per person for the concert.”
Oh, “seating is limited. For information or to RSVP please call.”
I did. Tickets are still available “but going fast.”