Columnist.
So this is how the Sexual Revolution is ending. It is not ending with the Sexual Utopians of yesteryear shouting "Oh, Joy" and extolling the therapeutic orgasm, which was to bring happiness to Americans from every walk of life. It is ending with gangs of angry women -- some well into their 70s, some with grandchildren -- recalling sexual assaults that allegedly took place up to half a century ago. They are aggrieved. They are angry. Some still burst into tears. And their alleged assailant, in this case the avuncular 77-year-old Bill Cosby, is pictured on the front page of the Washington Post in sullen denial. Also on the front page of the Post is more evidence of the Sexual Revolution's unanticipated expiry. The University of Virginia is suspending all fraternities, even sororities, because of libidinous excess among its students. Specifically, an alleged gang rape in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house from two years ago.
I have a suggestion for my left-wing Democratic friends in light of all the controversy over Obamacare. That the controversy continues all these years after the bill's passage and that today much of the bill is in danger of amputation must be very dispiriting to those left-wingers who had such high hopes for it. They obviously labored assiduously to render it incomprehensible to the electorate and for a long time they succeeded. Yet the electorate wised up this month and voted into office large numbers of Republicans. Those Republicans are out to gut the legislation.
In the gloom of the day after last week's election I think even his allies in the media expected something more from the Prophet Barack Obama. After all, he had just suffered through a wave election and he was left soaking wet. He did not merely lose this wave election. He was swamped. Republicans were victorious practically everywhere. At times they won by double digits: Senator Mitch McConnell won by 15 points, Arkansas' Senator-elect Tom Cotton by 17 points. And forget not the governorships: Ohio's John Kasich by 31 points, South Carolina's Nikki Haley by 15 points. The sorely pressed governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, won his third race for governorship in four years by five points against unions, big money Democrats nationwide, and Hollywood! As I said last week, it was the second wave in the last three elections and an election more epochal than the president's in 2008 and his rerun of 2008 in 2012.
So what did you think of the 2014 election? Do I hear talk of a wave election? Is 2014 another 2010 election? I think it is, and that makes it more significant than any other recent election, as I shall explain in due course. First, review the outcome. Republicans have increased their margin in the House of Representatives. That was deemed unlikely a couple of days ago. They have captured the Senate, again a very questionable outcome according to the polls only a few days ago. They have won a majority of governorships, including in one-party Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts. Moreover, they probably have a majority of state legislatures. And one thing more -- the Democrats' leading campaigners continue, as has been true for years, to be the kiss of death to almost anyone they endorse. I am speaking of my friends, the Clintons.
The wave is approaching the shoreline. No, I am not talking to surfers. I am talking to Republicans and independents. The wave they have been awaiting is an electoral wave, and it seems to be coming in. A veteran of many campaigns, Donald Rumsfeld, came in from the campaign trail a few days ago saying, "It's feeling good out there." Nate Silver, the left-leaning psephologist, says the Republicans have a better than even chance to win both houses. He puts their chances of capturing the Senate at 63 percent. Remember, too, that the mainstream media is full of uncertainty. That seals it. Republicans are headed for another election wave much like 2010.
Mirabile dictu! Fully 28 profs and former profs from the Harvard Law School have taken a stand for freedom and for the rule of law. They are on the side of the Constitution and simple fairness. As Ivy Leaguers go, their stand took courage. No other Ivy League school has had the temerity to buck the bullying of federal government's Department of Education over its threat to punish universities that it adjudges as being lax on allegations of sexual assault or sexual harassment. That is right. The Department of Education says it will withhold funding if its ukase is not followed by suspect universities. Harvard is suspected of such laxity by the Department of Education, and so the university hopes to mollify the government bureaucrats by enforcing a draconian policy toward alleged sex offenders. The Harvard 28 responds that this policy is unfair. Furthermore the university has a vast enough endowment to go, if need be, its own way. What is an endowment for anyway, if not to ensure the independence of a university? Raise a toast to Harvard Law.
Let us put the forthcoming election into perspective. At least let us put it into perspective as the left-wing sees it. If, way back in the 1960s, you had wanted to gain an insight into how the left was going to break society down into a series of left-wing interest groups in the decades ahead, those groups always to be harvested as voting blocs for the increasingly left-wing Democrats, you would have done well to read Kenneth Minogue's 1963 classic "The Liberal Mind." There Minogue adumbrated the "suffering situation," the left's fanciful assortment of constituencies from the very poor in the 1960s right up to today's poor clods who stumble into the polling booth without a voter ID card or as we say a photo ID card. This poor clod may not have a pair of shoes on his or her feet or even a handbag, but what is crucial the left tells us is that he or she cannot lay hands on a voter ID. So we, blessed with our voter ID cards, are expected to have compassion for him or her, and let the wretch vote anyway -- possibly two or three times, possibly in polling booths throughout the city, possibly throughout the state.
What do you suppose our ebullient vice president says to his sorely pressed staff when he rolls into the office at the end of the day and discovers that, yes, he has done it again? He has committed another verbal blunder, a gaffe as it is called. My guess is that he laughs it off. That is what he does in public. Why should he act any differently in private? He has been committing gaffes since the beginning of his career. Sometimes they have forced him to cancel a presidential race as in 1988 when he was caught using vivid lines drawn directly from a speech by the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Who would have ever noticed, right Joe? Sometimes the gaffes have forced him to make a public apology to one or another foreign power as he did recently with three important allies. Yet most of the time he simply laughs and apologizes while we all laugh along with him. Good old Joe. Remember when he was speaking at the last inauguration to the Iowa State Society Inauguration Ball and he yawped, "I'm proud to be the president of the United States." Good old Joe.
Can it happen here? It *is* happening in Europe where French polls show that the National Front's Marine Le Pen would win the election for president if elections were held tomorrow. Something like it *has* happened in Italy where an anarchist comedian, the happily named Beppe Grillo, garnered 25 percent of the vote last year. Most spectacularly, it *almost* happened in the United Kingdom last month. What am I talking about? An election in which the lowly voters overcome the professional pols and vote their minds. Now there is evidence that it can happen here. In the United Kingdom last month 45 percent of Scottish voters voted "yes" to break up their union with England, a union that has endured more than 300 years. Eight-five percent turned out to vote. Only a last minute rescue mission by the leadership of all London's political parties saved the United Kingdom, but at a high price. Owing to London's promises, the Scots have come very close to home rule. Can Northern Ireland and Wales be far behind? Moreover, the United Kingdom's professional pols face another challenge in next year's elections when its Euroskeptics again challenge them. The Conservative Party, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats, then will have to contend with their dynamic fourth party, UKIP, which already has 24 of Britain's 73 seats in the European Parliament. UKIP is the broadly conservative and libertarian party to the right of the Conservative Party. It has a rough equivalent on this side of the Atlantic, the tea party!
The 2014 midterm races are heating up. It seems to me everyone is uneasy. The Republicans have not raised enough money. The Democrats are mindful that the president is immensely unpopular, and their candidates are struggling. Some Republicans are gleeful. Will they win the six additional Senate seats to control that chamber? Could they win even more? It is beginning to look like 2014 will be almost as welcome an election for the Republicans as 2010. In that year, the conservatives, numbering about 40 percent of the vote, combined with the independents, numbering about 35 percent of the vote, to send the Democrats packing in the House and in many statewide elections. What motivated the independents was the economy. Despite the Democrats' hopeful testimonials, the independents recognized that the economy was in the tank and they saw no signs of hope. In their view, President Barack Obama was overspending and had already run up the national debt to frightening levels. The independents often vote from fright. Usually they do not consider foreign policy, but in this election my guess is they will. The world is in a heap. Ukraine, Gaza, ISIS and the rest of the Middle East, Ebola in Africa, and, of course, the seeming chaos on our southern border -- all conspire to alarm the independents. This election the independents will be moved by fright to vote on foreign policy issues as well as on the economy. They will vote Republican.
Being a sports impresario -- in this case an NFL commissioner -- has never been easy. I know such magnificoes oversee the most prosperous sport in the country. They just put the logo of the NFL on a product line and watch the money flow in. Do they have a line of formal wear or of gardening equipment? It is only a matter of time, and sports fans will be drawn to them with wallets open. Does the NFL have a line of women's lingerie? Apparently, Mr. Roger Goodell, the present commissioner of the NFL, is contemplating it. Why else would he be so apprehensive about a handful of women critics out there squalling in the audience along with his millions of admirers, both men and women, both wearers of lingerie and opponents. Goodell has just appointed four women to some sort of policy positions in the NFL to appease this angry minority. As I say, being a sports impresario has never been as easy as it looks.
There is a mystery about Congressman Paul Ryan's new and very good book, "The Way Forward: Renewing the American Dream." Perhaps there are several mysteries. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate, begins by writing at length about the place he has lived all his life, Janesville, a town of 60,000 in southern Wisconsin. It is rural, but it also has industry. Moreover it has Ryans. Sixty-seven of his cousins live nearby. The Ryans have lived there for generations along with other Catholics, Protestants and presumably citizens utterly oblivious to religion's call. But the point is that most of the citizens of Janesville are decent, law-abiding, can-do citizens. Ryan describes it as an ideal community to grow up in and to discover the American Idea. It is his idea of how we live as Americans. It is also the Founding Fathers' idea, and the basic idea of modern conservatism, of which Ryan is a leading member.
When I read the other day about those cross-hatched engravings found by archaeologists in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar being "the first known examples of Neanderthal rock art," I, of course, thought immediately of Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone, the magazine for modern aesthetes, covers "rock art" ceaselessly. That a Rolling Stone writer might have found modern rock's roots among Neanderthal man came as no surprise to me. What about punk rock? What about grunge? I believe the word is grunge. Yet I had leapt to a hasty conclusion. The report I was reading about in London's Daily Mail was not drawn from Rolling Stone but rather from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And it was not about the artistic aspirations of rock singers, but rather about artists who really were scribbling on ancient rocks over 39,000 years ago, artists drawn from the species Homo neanderthalensis, a species of human much like us only less intellectual.
Immediately after his telephone call consoling the Foley family on their son's grisly murder at the hands of Islamofascists, President Barack Obama took a powder. He headed for the golf course. Yes, the golf course! He had golfed eight times in 11 days, as the world was in tumult the likes of which we have not experienced since the late 1930s. There is something very odd about this man. He seems to think he can duck his obligations by lolling on the golf course. Does he believe no one is looking? In his brief life, my guess is, he has been posing all along. He had no role model as a father. He had no lasting role model as an adult. Now he has to produce. No one else can serve as his hidden advisor. He has to lead and he has not a clue as to what to do. Thus, to the golf course he goes, no matter how his critics complain or how a growing number of journalists express their dismay.
Turning once again to what the sociologists call "coping mechanisms": There is marijuana and then there is alcohol. They are increasingly the civilized options. Consider alcohol. Consider a suave scotch and soda. One does not sit down to a scotch and soda to get blitzed, unless one is a veritable drunk. One sits down and sips a scotch and soda while conversing with friends. Perhaps one reads a book. One enjoys the scotch for the taste. With scotch there are scores of different tastes. One drinks a single malt. One drinks a blend. The same is true with bourbon and all manner of alcoholic drinks. One imbibes for the taste, then for the refreshment, finally for the relaxed feeling it imparts. Very, very finally, some drinkers drink a scotch and soda to get blitzed and drop out. Maybe the pathetico drinks to pass out or to throw up. A true alcoholic is a sad spectacle. A drunk is a person who has ruined many a good drink.
Is it not a thing of wonderment that the two leading families of the Party of the Poor and Down-and-Out are ending the summer in Martha's Vineyard? Both the Obamas and the Clintons are renting spacious mansions, probably from Wall Streeters, on that enchanted isle. They're playing golf and tennis, and -- who knows -- croquet, just like the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. Yet do not expect them to be dining together in the moonlight. In fact, relations between them have turned downright hostile. Hillary this week has made it all but final. She is a neoconservative, a genuine, 24-carat neoconservative! She has all the credentials. Back in the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the official godfather of neoconservatism, defined a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality. By that definition, a mere believer in muscular foreign policy pronouncements is no neoconservative. Perhaps he or she is a hawk but not a neoconservative. To be a true neocon one has to have once been a liberal -- preferably a Trotskyite -- and to have come to one's conversion in fits and starts. Well, Hillary certainly fills the bill, complete with fits and starts.
One would never guess who attended Dick Scaife's memorial service on the Pennsylvania countryside last week. Scaife has been referred to as the "father of modern conservatism." In his lifetime, he donated a fortune across a whole range of philanthropic endeavors, from the arts to medical research to politics -- conservative politics. His conservative causes were very elevated -- sophisticated thinks tanks, professorial chairs, intellectual reviews -- but also at times they were very partisan. In the 1990s, Scaife was a leading opponent of Bill Clinton, and he frequently drew blood. When Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" she doubtless had him in mind.
In dipping into Daniel Halper's interesting new book about the Clintons' return from the grave that they had dug for themselves during their White House years (from an approval rating of 66 percent after his impeachment, he plummeted to 39 percent upon leaving the White House to a chorus of pardon-induced Bronx cheers), a thought occurs: We have been reading these exposes about the malfeasance of the most corrupt presidential family in American history for over two decades! For some reason the scandals that these books reveal never sinks into the American mind. Today, despite Bill Clinton's public record of shoddy financial deals, brutal politics and endless abuse of women, he is the most beloved of recent presidents.
I have been vindicated! For years I have been comparing the Clinton family to the family of Warren Gamaliel Harding, our 29th president and a president of dark memory at least to most liberal historians. For me, Warren was sheer slapstick, as to some degree his modern-day equivalent was, Bill Clinton. And forget not their gruesome wives. I began my historical comparisons in the 1996 bestselling book, "Boy Clinton: The Political Biography." For years, I punctuated my syndicated column with references to the two families. Then in my 2007 book, "The Clinton Crack-Up," I clinched the comparison in a reminder of how that Little Rock monstrosity, the Clinton Library, compared so favorably with the Harding Memorial in Warren's hometown, Marion, Ohio. But now, you ask, how am I vindicated? Well, America's historical memory is not very strong. Comparing Bill with a 1920s president to a modern American audience was not easy. Yet, by month's end it will be much easier. In fact, the comparison will be inescapable.
