RTV'97 Agenda

If Wendy Gramm has her way, she will replace Hillary Clinton in the White House next year. Like Mrs. Clinton, Wendy Gramm is the smart, ambitious wife of a smart, ambitious politician. Her husband Senator Phil Gramm of Texas is a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination. Like Clinton, she too is a graduate of Wellesley College near Boston. Gramm also holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University in Illinois and has had a successful career apart from her husband.

This phenomenon -- spouses with professional careers of their own paired with political candidates -- not only reflects the changing role of women but also creates new ethical dilemmas and ambiguities in election campaigns. Mrs. Gramm is the granddaughter of a laborer in the Hawaian sugar cane fields and the daughter of the first Korean-American officer of a U.S. sugar cane company. Mrs. Gramm declined to be interviewed by FRONTLINE.

She and Phil Gramm met in 1969 when the future senator was a professor of economics at Texas A&M University. He interviewed her for a job at the school. "As a single member of the faculty, I'd be very interested in having you come to Texas A&M," she quotes him as saying at the time. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mrs. Gramm recalled her initial response to his subsequent marriage proposal: "Yuck." Gramm persisted, and the couple wed in 1970 (it was Gramm's second marriage). They have two sons, Marshall and Jeff. In 1979, Phil Gramm, then a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Five years later in 1984, he switched his party affiliation to the GOP and won the Senate seat that he still occupies. The move to Washington began a succession of appointed federal jobs for Mrs. Gramm. She headed the economics bureau of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Consumer Protection and served as administrator of information and deregulatory affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. In 1987 The New York Times described her as "one of the Reagan administration's most vigorous deregulators." President Reagan called her "my favorite economist," naming her chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the powerful regulatory agency which oversees the nation's commodities and futures exchanges.

Her dual roles as CFTC head and Senator's wife put her in a difficult position. There were times when Senator Gramm sought the support of some of the same agricultural and business interests that she was regulating. On trips to Texas during his 1989 Senatorial campaign she worked both on CFTC business and for her husband's reelection. After leaving the CFTC in early 1992, Wendy Gramm accepted lucrative directorships on the boards of several corporations she had regulated. Several of these corporations were also financial supporters of her husband's Presidential campaign. One of the boards on which Mrs. Gramm sits is Enron Corporation, a Texas natural gas company, which has given almost $35,000 to Phil Gramm over the years. She was named to the company's board, just five weeks after stepping down from the CFTC, which around the same time, exempted Enron and a group of other oil and gas companies from federal regulation on some of their commodities trading. The move was a big financial boon to Enron.

Enron pays Wendy Gramm $22,000 a year for her service on its board, plus $1,250 for every meeting she attends. The CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, is regional chair of the Gramm for President Campaign. When Senator Gramm kicked off his campaign last February with a record-setting fund raising dinner, Lay and his wife were present.

Another board Wendy Gramm sits on is that of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), a large meat processing company. Based in Dakota City, Nebraska, IBP is a powerful corporation next door to a key election- year state, Iowa. Support for Senator Gramm at IBP came in handy last August at the Iowa straw poll in Ames. IBP sent a memo to its management level employees encouraging them to attend the straw poll, which is not restricted to Iowa residents, and informing them that $25 tickets and bus transportation would be provided by the Phil Gramm-for-President campaign. Gramm campaign buses picked up the IBP employees at eight separate locations in the states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois and transported them to the straw poll, where their votes helped Gramm tie front-runner Bob Dole and gave the Gramm campaign an important boost.

In a written statement to FRONTLINE, an IBP spokesman said, "Many of the campaigns provided tickets and bus transportation to the event, some bringing in people from as far away as Kansas. While the Gramm campaign paid the way for the IBP employees who attended, our people were not told to vote for Senator Gramm or any other candidate."

FRONTLINE learned that the request for IBP's help in the straw poll came from the late Alec Courtelis, the former finance chair of the Gramm-for-President campaign. (Courtelis, long a leading Republican fundraiser, died this winter) Courtelis also sat on IBP's board of directors and was responsible for bringing Wendy Gramm onto IBP's board.

While no one has accused Mrs. Gramm or anyone else of breaking any laws, the IBP case nonetheless shows how questions can arise when a candidate's spouse is appointed to a well-paying corporate directorship and when that company helps promote the husband's candidacy

Biography

JOHN ASHCROFT
U.S. Senator for Missouri

You Know You're a Liberal If...

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The following is from an article in the The Washington Times, Monday, April 22, 1996 by Don Feder

   What is a liberal? In election years, they're particularly hard to find. Even the president and first lady-who do the PC tango to the tune of "Blowin' in the Wind"-shun the label.

Politics of Bad Faith

Clinton's amen chorus

African-American support for the president is being cynically manipulated by liberals who play to blacks' sense of victimization.
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A revealing aspect of the current White House crisis is the racial gap in public opinion polls, which is almost as wide as after the O.J. Simpson verdict. When the world discovered in January that the president was having sex with a young intern, a New York Times poll found that 81 percent of blacks (compared to 58 percent of whites) nonetheless approved of the way the president was conducting his job. When asked whether the president shared the moral values of most Americans, fully 77 percent of blacks (twice as many as whites) said yes.

Nine months later, after the discovery of the stained dress and the release of the Starr Report, 63 percent of blacks still thought the president -- now a proven liar and philanderer -- shared the nation's morality. This was nearly three times the number of whites (22 percent) who did.

This striking disparity, reflecting a unique community support of the president (even feminists are more ambivalent), has prompted several attempts to explain it. According to a widely quoted comment by comedian Chris Rock, Clinton's African-American support is inspired by the fact that he is "the first black president." Explains Rock: "It's very simple. Black people are used to being persecuted. Hence, they relate to Clinton."

The comedian is not alone in these ruminations. In an article exploring African-American reactions, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack quotes NAACP head Julian Bond saying, "You just can't help but think that some of this [investigation of Clinton] is race-based," while Harvard Professor Alvin Poussaint reports that rumors have been circulating in the African-American community to the effect that Clinton "must have had black ancestry."

A full-blown expression of these attitudes is on display in the current New Yorker, where Nobel laureate Toni Morrison writes of the crisis: "African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

Perhaps one has to be, as I am, a lapsed man of the left to react to the loopy anti-white attitudes laced into these cadences from our most celebrated and rewarded national literary figure. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes? Apparently, Colin Powell, the most popular presidential hopeful in polls taken only two years ago, isn't all that black, having been born into a two-parent household and, though poor in origins and familiar with discrimination, not known for his unhealthy food addictions or stereotypical musical tastes.

On the other hand, perhaps the liberal identification of blackness with victimization and social dysfunction isn't so wide of the mark in explaining the sympathy of political leftists like Morrison and Bond, or the support of the congressional black caucus for the immoralist from Little Rock. Perhaps it reflects a resonance in the black community to the White House's cynical strategy of defining presidential deviancy down: "They all do it." Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Bush -- they all lie and cheat. So why shouldn't our guy? This certainly seems to be the corrosive logic behind which some blacks have rallied behind other criminal politicians, like corrupt and crack-addicted Washington Mayor Marion Barry. It could easily account for the undertones of racial paranoia ("they're out to get our guys") that surfaced when African-American members of the Clinton administration -- Ron Brown, Mike Espy, Hazel O'Leary -- all came under investigation for irregularities in office.

Which is precisely the way Toni Morrison frames Clinton's problem: "When virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?" According to Morrison, the message from white America is clear, "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place." Or, as the late Malcolm X, in his racist phase, once put it (I paraphrase): No matter how high you rise, you're always a nigger to them.

Putting aside the racial paranoia of such attitudes coming from a black Nobel prize-winner in the era of Oprah, one might still ask why Clinton should be "our guy" from an African-American perspective. Isn't this the President Clinton who established his New Democrat credentials by delivering a verbal slap to Sistuh Souljah on the eve of his election, and banishing Jesse Jackson from the circle of power? Isn't this the Clinton who betrayed old friend and political soul mate Lani Guinier, after nominating her to be his civil rights chief, and then left her to the mercies of her political enemies, pretending ignorance of who she was and what she believed? Isn't this the Clinton whose vaunted "dialogue on race" -- the centerpiece of his strategy for redressing minority grievances -- ended up drowned in his own sex scandal while the final report of his Race Commission called merely for more dialogue? Reviewing the report, liberal columnist Frank Rich summed up the administration's record on race as follows: "high ideals, beautiful show, one-night stand."

Indeed, isn't this the Clinton who brought Jackson back into the fold and wrapped himself in the protective cloak of the black community and its historic symbols only when he himself was in terminal trouble, and only after he had lost whatever power he once may have had to seriously advance its agendas? Surely there have been few more repellent demonstrations of Clinton's user ethic than his traipsing off to Africa, with Jackson and Maxine Waters in tow, in the heat of the Lewinsky scandal after he had been trapped in his lies and become an international laughingstock, to apologize for slavery. Then there was his performance in Martha's Vineyard debasing the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington to make yet another unconvincing confession of regret that he had "sinned." These are the kinds of gestures that give tokenism a bad name.

Still, the most prominent voices of black leadership have joined willingly in these charades. There was John Lewis, at the Martin Luther King Jr. anniversary, solemnly and tearfully forgiving Clinton and urging the rest of the country to forgive him as well. It was terrible, apparently, for the rest of us to be so judgmental of another human being. This was the same John Lewis who not so long ago was denouncing Newt Gingrich and the congressional Republicans as "Nazis" merely for attempting to reform a bankrupt and destructive welfare system.

This is what the melodramas of conspiracy and witch-hunt are really about. Not racial persecution, but political loyalties. The previously cited Times report also noted that "many of those interviewed said they not only subscribed to Hillary Rodham Clinton's statement that a "vast right-wing conspiracy" had targeted her husband, but also that they believed the conspirators were motivated by a desire to reverse the gains made by blacks during the Clinton administration. One paranoia is linked to another. Liberals and leftists from Waters to Morrison to Hillary Clinton have convinced the African-American community that Republicans are racists and want to reverse the gains of the civil rights era. This is the really Big Lie that keeps blacks in Clinton's corner and safely secure on the liberal plantation.

If liberals want instances of political persecution, they need go no further than their own character assassination of Clarence Thomas in an episode of sexual McCarthyism (to use Alan Dershowitz's inapt but effectively inflammatory phrase) whose charges pale in comparison to those leveled against Clinton. Where are the liberal apologies for this atrocity?

Or consider a more unpalatable thought: the political persecution of Gingrich, which cannot be far from the speaker's own reflections as he contemplates hearings that will determine the president's fate. Liberal leaders of the House, hoping to reverse the results of the Republican victory in the '94 election, leveled 370 phony ethics charges against Gingrich before they got one ludicrous claim to stick (and I'm willing to bet there is not one in a hundred Gingrich-loathing liberals who read this text that can describe the specifics of the charge). Yet Gingrich was censured, fined and politically destroyed outside his conservative base by what was little more than a liberal smear campaign, and yet there is not a single liberal now defending Clinton and bemoaning the unfairness of his prosecution who has offered any second thoughts about the outrage.

That is because this outrage, like that against Thomas, serves a liberal purpose. In the present presidential crisis, Gingrich is the point man for the "right-wing conspiracy" that is seeking to bring down a leader in order to "reverse" the civil rights gains of African-Americans. Cease to believe in this political mythology and what happens to the president, or to the leftist demagogues in the congressional black caucus who are still wedded to every jot and tittle of the failed welfare state? What if Republicans no longer function as racial bogey men? What if African-Americans were to see that Republican policies like educational choice and Republican values like personal responsibility work to the benefit of their community? What if they were no longer to vote 90 percent Democratic? What if they were to free themselves from the chains of a one-party system that feeds them tokens and shamelessly exploits their moral capital for its own venal agendas?

These are the real stakes that keep the political melodrama alive, and that prevent a taken-for-granted political community from fully entering the American polity and exercising its political power.
SALON | Oct. 12, 1998

Repressed memory syndrome
The legendary year 1968 stills hold the baby-boom generation in thrall -- but it was actually the pinnacle of anti-democratic narcissism.

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Nostalgia is in the air. A generation of balding boomers is busy remembering the 30th anniversary of the year 1968. It is a time in their imaginations of lost innocence, a moment when impossible dreams were brutally cut short by assassinations and repressions that have left them stranded ever since on the shores of a conservative landscape.

A summary expression of such utopian regrets appeared recently in Salon by Stephen Talbot, who is also the producer of the recent PBS documentary "1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation." The narrative line of this film was shaped by radicals of the era like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden. This choice of authorities was predictable for the veteran of a movement that promotes itself as an avatar of "participatory democracy" but also closes off debate within its ranks with a regularity worthy of the Communist regimes it once admired. Thus Talbot excludes from his cinematic paean to his revolutionary youth any dissenters from inside the ranks of those who were there.

Me, for instance. For I am one of those who does not share Talbot's enthusiasm for 1968, nor his view of it as a fable of Innocents at Home. One explanation may be the fact that I am 10 years older than Talbot, and therefore know first-hand the state of our "innocence" then. Yet Gitlin and Hayden are also pre-boomers. An age gap cannot really explain the different views we have of what took place. Oh sure, like Gitlin and Hayden I would prefer to recall the glory days of my youth in a golden light, but for me the era has been irreparably tarnished by actions and attitudes I vividly remember, while they prefer to forget.

The myth of innocence begins with President Lyndon Johnson's announcement in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Talbot was 19 years old and draft-eligible: "We were all like Yossarian in Catch-22," he recalls. "We took this very personally. They were trying to kill us. But now Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle." The miracle, of course, was the democratic system that we had declared war on. Contrary to what Hayden, Gitlin, Talbot and all the rest of us were saying at the time, the system worked -- and we should have defended it instead of trying to tear it down. Talbot does not notice or reflect on this contradiction.

And of course "they" were not trying to kill "us." (Even in retrospect, the narcissism of the boomer generation is still wondrous to behold.) The attention of Johnson (and Nixon after him) was actually on the fate of Indochina, where they were committing American forces to prevent the blood bath and oppression that (we now know) were in store for the Vietnamese should the Communists win the war. Subsequently, more people -- more poor Indo-Chinese peasants -- were killed by the Marxist victors in the first three years of the Communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the 13 years of the anti-Communist war. This is a fact that has caused many veterans of those years to reconsider our "innocence" then. But not Talbot, or the other nostalgists he cites.

For them, our innocence (in the moral sense of culpability for what happened) remains intact to this day. In their memory, our innocence (in the sense of idealistic possibility) was brutally ambushed in 1968, when forces inherent in the System we hated conspired to murder the agents of our hope: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

"I experienced King's assassination as the murder of hope," writes Talbot, speaking for them all. Gitlin, whose history of the '60s first announced this theme, remembers his thoughts at the time: "America tried to redeem itself and now they've killed the man who was taking us to the mountaintop." There is something extremely distasteful in this false memory of Gitlin's. For, as Gitlin well knows, in 1968 neither he nor Hayden nor Talbot nor any serious New Left radicals were following King. Here's one indicator: Not a single white student activist leader or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis demonstrating alongside King at the time that he was killed. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) was following King at all when he was killed. Two years earlier, while King was still very much alive, he had been unceremoniously toppled from the leadership of the civil rights struggle by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee radicals, led by Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose slogans of black power, and whose agendas of racial separatism and violent struggle, had replaced King's nonviolent integrationism in the political imaginations of the left.

Gitlin was far from the idealistic liberal he portrays himself in his book or in Talbot's film. Like everyone else in Students for a Democratic Society, he had stopped voting in national elections as early as 1964 because, as the SDS slogan put it, "The revolution is in the streets." The two parties were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the corporate ruling class. Activists who saw themselves as revolutionaries against a "sham" democracy, dominated by multinational corporations, were not going to invest hope in a man whose political agenda was integration into the System, and who refused to join their war on the Johnson administration and its cooptive "tokenism."

Hayden's attempt to formulate a doctrine of original innocence involves fewer flat untruths than Gitlin's. He relies more on the manipulations of truth that were for him a kind of political signature: "At that point," Hayden says of the King assassination, "I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn't know what would happen. Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I'd be imprisoned or killed."

The reality is that any "middle-class assumptions" held by Hayden -- or other SDS activists -- had already been chucked in the garbage bin years before. Three out of four drafters of the 1962 SDS charter, the Port Huron Statement, were red-diaper babies (the offspring of Communist Party members) and Marxists. The fourth was Hayden himself, who by his own account had learned his politics in Berkeley in 1960 at the feet of "red-diaper babies and Marxists" (he names Michael Tigar in particular). By 1965, Carl Oglesby was proclaiming publicly, in a famous speech, that it was time to "name the System" that we all wanted to destroy. The name of the System was, of course, "corporate capitalism," analyzed in pretty much the same terms as in the party texts read by the Communist cadres in Moscow, Havana and Hanoi.

Hayden was already calling the Black Panthers "America's Vietcong," and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August. (This is described conveniently, but unhistorically, as a "police riot" in Talbot's film, Gitlin's book and Hayden's own disingenuous memoir of the events.) Civil war in America was not something that might be imposed on the SDS revolutionaries from the outside or above, as Hayden insinuates. Civil war was something that they were trying to launch themselves.

Testimony of Anita K. Blair
General Counsel, Independent Women's Forum

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Subcommittee, and ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting the Independent Women's Forum to testify today concerning the Civil Rights Act of 1997. My name is Anita Blair, and I am Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Independent Women's Forum ("IWF").

The Independent Women's Forum is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to research and public education on policy issues concerning women. The Independent Women's Forum neither solicits nor accepts government funds. Pursuant to House Rule XI, clause 2(g)(4), I confirm that IWF has at no time received any federal grant, contract, or subcontract.

The Independent Women's Forum has conducted programs, published studies and participated in many public debates on the subject of "affirmative action." We agree with individuals like Ward Connerly and organizations like the American Civil Rights Institute that preferences and quotas must be removed from our laws, because discrimination, especially the government-sponsored kind, is wrong. Here is why we believe as we do.

What if ? What if, over twenty-five years ago, President Nixon's men had obeyed the law? I refer, of course, to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex or national origin.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the president's men set the federal government on a collision course with the 1964 Civil Rights Act when they defined "affirmative action" in terms of goals and timetables, preferences, set-asides and quotas. Today over 130 federal programs distribute contracts, jobs and benefits on the basis of race, color, sex and national origin exactly what the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids.

But suppose the president's men, instead of talking about categories and numbers, had actually acted affirmatively? Suppose they had acted to affirm the values that are truly relevant to success and happiness in life for all people values like strong families, sound schools, safe streets, and growing opportunities?

We wouldn't be here still talking today.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was right: Race, color, sex and national origin shouldn't matter. When our federal government persists in counting and dividing Americans in those ways, it violates the spirit and the letter of our civil rights laws.

It also violates the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unambiguously that race and ethnicity can be considered by government only when necessary to remedy specific instances of past discrimination; the same rule applies to sex except in the narrow case when "enduring" male-female physical differences are at issue.

The Civil Rights Act of 1997 will require the federal government hereafter to comply with the Constitution and the civil rights laws enacted by Congress. It will prevent the federal government from adopting rules and regulations that discriminate and grant preferential treatment to individuals and groups on the basis of race, color, national origin or sex.

A huge majority of Americans endorses these principles. Last November Californians voted overwhelmingly to add the principle of non-discrimination to their state constitution, in language essentially identical to the Civil Rights Act of 1997. At that time the Independent Women's Forum conducted a nationwide survey of adults, including voters and non-voters.

According to our survey, 85 percent of people overall said they would vote for a nationwide measure incorporating the language used in the California Civil Rights Initiative (essentially the same used in the Civil Rights Act of 1997). An astonishing 67 percent said they were "strongly" for it. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of African-Americans said they would vote for the same language, as did 83 percent of those who describe themselves as "Liberals."

Americans support the principle of non-discrimination because we are, fundamentally, Americans. We hate checking off the boxes on every federal form, because they don't describe who we really are individuals with abilities, talents, energy and hope.

What if twenty-five years ago our federal government had acted affirmatively, in harmony with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to let all Americans enjoy the advantages of strong families, sound schools, safe streets and growing opportunities? In the past twenty-five years we could have seen two generations of advantaged children, of all colors, outside the boxes, exercising their individual abilities, talents, energy and hope.

Tuesday, January 21, 1997

Gilmore sidesteps rights bill

BY TYLER WHITLEY
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Attorney General James S. Gilmore III, speaking to a women's group, ducked taking a position yesterday on one of the group's core issues -- a parental rights amendment to the Virginia Constitution.

Gilmore, the all-but-certain Republican candidate for governor this year, said the attorney general's office could not take a position when it is offering legal advice on the issue.

A public hearing on the proposal to amend the constitution, which has been introduced by state Sen. Steve Martin, R-Chesterfield, will be held in the General Assembly building tomorrow at 7:30 p.m.

''We are in the process right now of taking a look at some of the legal opinions,'' Gilmore said. ''I won't tell you any more about it right now, while we have to give advice to people on both sides of the aisles and all different points of view.''

As a matter of policy, the right of parents to rear their children is extremely important, he added.

Gilmore spoke to Concerned Women for America, an organization that was in Richmond to lobby the General Assembly for a series of conservative issues ranging from eliminating no-fault divorce to banning same-sex marriages.

Gilmore said the legal issues concerning same-sex marriages had not ''matured'' to the point where the attorney general's office could file an opposing brief, but he said pending legislation to ban such marriages would be helpful.

He threw his support behind bills requiring the mother to be notified if a child seeks an abortion. He also said he would oppose any attempts to bring riverboat or casino gambling to Virginia. The issue is moot because proponents have fared so poorly before the General Assembly that they did not attempt to push for riverboat gambling this year.

Gilmore drew applause discussing his role in going to the U.S. Supreme Court and winning a free speech case that required the University of Virginia to use student fees to pay for a student Christian publication.

He also was applauded when he described the attorney general's role in writing guidelines to allow prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.

Concerned Women for America has about 16,000 members in Virginia. About 55 attended a meeting at the Richmond Marriott Hotel before going to the state Capitol.