By Mark Gauvreau Judge
But eventually the conservatives’ failure to embrace a grand vision for the country–such as the procity agenda of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani–and the Orwellian atmosphere of the hunt for Clinton left me feeling enervated. Clinton’s blood in the water had put the right in a senseless frenzy, without an agenda and blind to the damage Ken Starr’s invasions could do to everyone’s privacy. I found myself wondering if capital gains and school uniforms were all there was. I saw that conservatives’ obsession with certain topics–homosexuality, affirmative action, Clinton’s penis–never seemed to spill over into an obsession with more constructive, even visionary topics, such as detailed plans to revitalize the cities or help the poor who live in them.
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Inside the conference room about a hundred young right-wingers were listening to Floyd Brown, head of Citizens United and sometime guest on Politically Incorrect. Like everyone else there, Floyd hated Bill Clinton. “The American people and the media say they didn’t know how bad Bill Clinton was before he got in office!” he cried in a nasal whine, sounding like that infomercial dork who says you can be a millionaire by selling crap through newspaper ads. “Well, let me tell you, friends, I wrote a book called Slick Willie that was published before Clinton was in office! The media knew, make no mistake about it. The New York Times and the rest of the media knew. But they engaged in a conspiracy to keep it a secret, because they agreed with Clinton’s ideology.” Brown then ranted about how the scandals revealed not the iniquity of Bill Clinton so much as the “moral inadequacies” of the American people. “Character does count!” he thundered, hitting the podium. No one applauded. It was after lunch, and the kids were pretty sleepy–though two of them did look at each other and chuckle.
One of the young guns got up and asked how conservatives could get more minorities in the party. And then Horowitz launched into a tirade that I wanted to put on a plaque and hang over my bed. He started with school choice, saying that every time the liberals kill a school-choice opportunity, somewhere a black kid and his family suffer. “You know what we should do?” he said. “We should place an ad on TV. It’ll be footage from when George Wallace stood in the doorway of the Alabama public school and wouldn’t let the black kids come in. We start with that, then Wallace morphs into Ted Kennedy. That’s what the liberals are doing. That’s the irony of the whole thing–the liberals are supposed to be for the minority, but everything they’ve done, from welfare to killing school choice, has hurt them.”
It was my turn. I was face-to-face with the great man. He reached out to take what I wanted him to sign, then realized I didn’t have anything.
