The style of “Ross II: The Sequel” flowed partly from his real revulsion with the old ways of politics and partly from the ambivalence with which he had gotten back into the race. It was possible to argue, on a selective reading of the evidence, that he had never really gotten out-that his withdrawal had been a charade designed to turn down the media heat for a while and buy him time to re-create the campaign his way. But his return was in fact a two-month process of fits, starts, doubts, ambiguities and mixed advice; even as he laid the pieces in place, his operatives were in covert diplomatic contact with the Clinton campaign, looking for a way for Perot to stand aside and still claim a moral victory.
His ambivalence showed from the moment his Volunteer leaders descended on Dallas, on their own invitation, in the days immediately following his abdication in July. He seemed both stunned and wounded by their fury; his response was a kind of tease-a series of improvised signals that maybe it was over and, then again, maybe it wasn’t. His own hope was for what Richard Nixon once called a buy-time thing-continuing the petition drive as a way to keep up the pressure on Bush and Clinton to get right on the issues. But the Volunteers wanted him, and when one of them asked straight out whether he would “honor our draft” if they got him on the ballot everywhere, he demurred only at the word draft, not at the idea.
“If all the blocks are in place, if the timing is right,” he said.
“You’ll serve?”
“Yes,” he said.
But when a hawkish majority among the chairpeople pushed him too hard at a second meeting the next day, he backed down. A motion “declaring” him their candidate had been chalked on a blackboard and signed by most of the delegates. Perot’s cocky smile evaporated when he saw it, and he took a seat with his back to it, as if to put the whole matter out of mind. It didn’t work. The semicircle of believers in front of him was just as exigent, pressing him for a yes or no.
“I want to know whether you’re back in the race,” Donna Gilbert, his chairwoman for Alaska, demanded unflinchingly.
“You’re really pushing me for an answer?” Perot asked. He seemed tense.
“Yes.”
“You might not like it,” he said. He needed time to talk to his wife and children. “My family is my weakness,” he said, “and if that leaves this room, I’m out.”
Gilbert kept crowding him for an answer. Perot’s expression darkened.
“How long can you give me?” he said finally.
“I’ve got a plane at 6,” Gilbert said.
Perot ducked out with a few staffers for 15 minutes, then came back.
“I’m not going to get back in,” he said.
“Any time?” somebody asked.
“It’s not good for the country,” Perot said. “It’s not good for my family.”
What Perot had envisioned coming out of the meetings was an ongoing political movement; he might be spokesman, banker, broker, even a shadow candidate keeping the big boys honest. What he had wrought instead was a cult of personality, an unruly and undisciplined lot whose single principle in common was electing him president. Before he could sort his options, Perot had to bring his movement to heel-or risk having it settle his future for him. The hotheads had barely cleared town when he and his people began rebuilding the organization, this time from the top down. Old leaders were displaced, the more contentious sorts like Ms. Gilbert among them; new chairpeople were installed by the corporate white shirts in Dallas. The purge was messy, but when it was over, Perot had the kind of organization he wanted, compliant, united and quiet. The pros were long gone. Tom Luce was back at his law firm, Mort Meyerson at Perot Systems. The Pentagon had shrunk, by Perot’s own measure, to shoe-box size, and he was its unquestioned master.
It had a name-United We Stand, America-but not a clear mission beyond a form of political greenmail: trying to get one or the other major-party candidate to embrace Perot’s castor-oily economic plan. The chances were slight that they would buy into a 50-cent-a-gallon tax rise on gasoline, say, or a five-year deadline for balancing the budget. In book form, the plan roared to the top of the best-seller lists by Labor Day. As real-world politics, it was a drug on the market.
Through the late summer, he veered between public hints that he might be back and private diplomatic openings to Bush and Clinton. Twice in September, he called on Jim Baker at home in Washington. His presentation-or, as some of Bush’s people put it, his grandstanding-got him nowhere. When a colleague asked Baker afterward what had happened, he replied with an expletive and quickly translated it: “Nothing.”
Bush’s strategists were desperate enough in any case to see a silver lining in Perot’s return-a faint hope that it might somehow buy the president a second look. The Clinton command, having cast their man as the candidate of change, was a good deal less enthusiastic about sharing the role and more willing to treat with Perot. The diplomatic process began with staff-level feelers in August and soon escalated to direct conversations between Perot and Clinton’s man Mickey Kantor.
At times, they seemed tantalizingly close to a rapprochement. Kantor guessed accurately that Perot liked Clinton, better, anyway, than Bush; he accordingly stressed the 90 percent overlap between Perot’s positions and Clinton’s. But the last 10 percent included most of the tough parts and was finally unbridgeable. When the two principals finally talked by phone for a half hour in mid-September, Clinton came away convinced that Perot was about to deal himself back into the game.
He was right; Perot had decided to re-enter the lists and was even then arranging for a poll of The Volunteers as to their wishes-the equivalent of asking admirers of Elvis Presley whether or not they would like him to come back from the dead. As a prelude, he called his hand-culled field leaders back to Dallas and invited the two major candidates to send delegations for their inspection. To answer the summons cast Bush and Clinton as supplicants for Perot’s favor, but neither dared say no.
The Democrats had been instructed by Clinton himself not to yield on policy matters; they were to appeal instead to Perot’s civic sense, and the designated leadoff man was his fellow Texan and favorite senator, Lloyd Bentsen.
The Clintonians were alone with Perot in a holding room, waiting to go on, when Bentsen interrupted the small talk. “Ross,” he said, “I think there’s something serious we need to talk about. We need to talk about your decision to get into this race.”
“Yeah, OK,” Perot said. His expression said it wasn’t.
Bentsen pressed on, reminding him of their long friendship and their shared desire for change. “But quite honestly,” he said, “I don’t believe you can win anymore.” If he did poorly, it would reflect not merely on him but on his message. If he did well, he might hurt the real candidate of change, Bill Clinton. “Ross,” Bentsen said, “I don’t think you want to do that.”
Perot said nothing.
“Ross,” Bentsen said, “there is another option. You could endorse Bill Clinton. You could seal this election and make sure you and your people are seen as part of the reason Clinton won.”
“Those are all good points,” Perot said. “Tell them to The Volunteers. They’ll decide.”
It was a rigged game, and Vernon Jordan, the civil-rights leader turned Washington power lawyer, finally called his friend on it. “Ross,” he said, leaning in close, “we both know enough about leadership to know you are going to make this decision, not The Volunteers.”
Perot changed the subject, closing down further argument. The Democrats went through their paces that morning. The Republicans did the matinee. Neither had a chance with The Volunteers. The questions were hostile, the implicit verdict guilty of polities as usual. The show closed with Perot summoning his running mate, retired Vice Adm. James Stockdale, onstage along with their wives. Perot was tipping his hand stage-managing the scene before The Volunteers were polled. Three days later, Perot made the declaration formal.
His medium was all but exclusively paid television, $24 million worth of it in his first two weeks back; he had more to spend on media than Bush and Clinton combined. His 60-second ads were slickly done, the work of a group of Dallas admen not unlike the Madison Avenue teams familiar to major-party campaigns. But his main vehicle belonged to that bastard form called the infomercial, a half-hour sales pitch dressed up as regular programming. The miniseries he produced had a homemade look appropriate both to the sales talents and the antipolitical instincts of its star; its early episodes consisted mostly of Ross Perot talking plain Texas talk about the economy or painting rose-tinted word pictures of himself.
What was astonishing about the Perot Show was its success. Roughly 16 million people watched his debut, pointer in hand, ripping through graphs and charts at the rate of one a minute, and his poll ratings started upward soon thereafter. He ceded the war of the sound bites to Bush and Clinton roadshows, partly because he wanted to, partly because he was too busy making his docudramas. It would be headline news when, nine days before the election, he made his first live-and-in-person appearances at campaign rallies. The uncandidate had by then become the ultimate media politician-the proprietor of his own talk show and, as it would turn out, the scene-stealer in what should have been a cameo role in the great debates.
title: “The Second Coming” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-17” author: “Bessie Alston”
Without doubt, Irish writing is the best that’s currently being done by any one country’s authors. Even as violence has seethed in Northern Ireland, a new wave of Irish writers has arisen, transforming not only Irish literature but Ireland’s sense of itself. This Second Renaissance is part of a larger explosion of Celtic culture, which includes everything from music (the rock band U2, the traditional but chart-topping Chieftains) to dance (Riverdance, the smash-hit revue bat around traditional Irish dancing) to movies. Roddy Doyle has written screenplays from his own novels “The Commitments,” “The Snapper” and “The Van”). Shane Connaughton has written screenplays based on his own books (“The Playboys”) and one by fellow Irishman Christy Brown (“My Left Foot”). And Neil Jordan’s excellent novels are routinely overlooked in the fuss made over the movies he’s directed (“The Crying Game,” “Interview With the Vampire”).
Ireland’s literary lions are led by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and playwright Brian Friel, whose “Molly Sweeney” was a hit in New York just this year. But the new generation, born since 1950, includes a number of writers whose names are just beginning to be recognized here:
The most commercially successful and widely read of the bunch. He writes about rock bands, latchkey kids and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Doyle jokes about not being taken seriously because of his fame (“Once the 50,000th person buys a copy of your book, that’s it, you’re finished”). But he hasn’t pandered to his audience: as he’s grown more popular, his books have grown darker, and better. “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” won England’s Booker Prize in 1993, and his current novel, “The Woman Who Walked into Doors,” the confessions of a “39-year-old widow-woman with a hollow leg,” is a brutal look at alcoholism and wife-beating.
Initially a novelist and poet, he turned to playwriting in 1988 with “Boss Grady’s Boys,” the first of six historical plays all modeled loosely on figures from his own family. Inverting the old saw that the winners write history, Barry has endowed life’s losers with eloquence and dignity. Cerebral and lyrical, he is the new crown prince of Ireland’s majestic theatrical tradition.
There are few poetic forms that this dazzling technician has not successfully attacked, from epic to lyric to a libretto for an opera about a doomed love affair of Frank Lloyd Wright’s. As the poet and publisher Peter Fallen says, “I don’t see how anyone can catch him.”
His third novel, “The Butcher Boy,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 1992, and from its first sentence, you know you are in the hands of a master. “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago,” the protagonist Francie Brady begins, “I lived in a small town where they were all after me on a count of what I done on Mrs. Nugent.” For more than 200 pages, McCabe extends the loony humor and sense of dread packed in that sentence, and never once does the tension relax. A beautiful rendering of childhood self-absorption and a portrait of small town life etched in acid, “The Butcher Boy” is one of the best stories in a long time.
No country loves its writers more than Ireland. James Joyce’s portrait appears on the 10 note, with a quote from “Finnegans Wake” on the back. Irish writers pay no tax on income from their books. And the Irish read. While I was reading “The Butcher Boy” on the plane to Dublin, the flight attendant leaned over my shoulder and murmured, “Isn’t that a grand book?” But to comprehend the miracle of the latest renaissance, you have to understand how uncongenial Ireland could be for writers as recently as 30 years ago.
Joseph O’Connor, essayist and novelist (and brother of singer Sinead O’Connor: “I have written to the pope to apologize on behalf of the family,” he jokes), coedited an entire anthology of major Irish writers who emigrated. “Now, the way Ireland presents its literary past,” O’Connor says, “there’s the Brendan Behan T shirt and the Patrick Kavanaugh boxer shorts. But if you actually read about these people’s lives, what comes across is the sheer misery and poverty that they lived in. Kavanaugh, who was an absolutely wonderful poet, lived his whole life hoping that someone would say something libelous about him so that he could sue them and make enough money to go on writing poetry.” Church-state censorship and social repression made things even worse. Edna O’Brien, who now lives in London and New York, recalls the vicious treatment she received when she published “The Country Girls” in 1960. The book was banned for its sexual candor, she was vilified from pulpits and “my father said the postmistress told him I should be kicked naked through the town.” Though she often goes back, O’Brien has not lived there since. “I was shaken. It made me more fearful, more of an exile, not just from Ireland, but from human beings.”
All that began to change in the late ’60s. The government relaxed its censorship, and the church began to lose its hold. But the biggest change came in 1968, when the government made secondary education free to all for the first time. Thousands of working-class kids suddenly got a shot at higher education. Every writer interviewed for this story credits that change with enabling him or her to write.
The bitter experience of the previous literary generations helps explain why the Irish writers now reaching their maturity -including novelists as stylistically diverse as the naturalistic Colm Toibin, the surrealist Anne Enright or the elliptical poet Medbh McGuckian–all eschew nostalgia and sentimentality. They have little to look back on fondly and every reason to describe their world as accurately -and often as brutally-as possible.
No one preaches this lesson more eloquently than Seamus Heaney. When he gave his first poetry reading after winning the Nobel Prize, before a packed house at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre last April, he read from his new book, “The Spirit Level.” With his nimbus of silver hair framing a broad face, he looked like the man in the moon. What he read was lyrical, yes, but tough-minded and visceral, too, as though his words were marinated in a peat bog and honed on flint. “The soils I knew ran dirty,” he read. “River sand / Was the one clean thing that stayed itself / In that slabbery, clabbery, wintry, puddled ground.” Later, surrounded by fans and most of his eight brothers and sisters, Heaney chatted and joked and signed books, the perfect embodiment of Yeats’s “smiling public man.” Here, you thought, is a man who hasn’t forgotten who he is, or where he comes from, whose art has always been about keeping faith.
It’s also what’s made him the foremost landscape poet of this century: accuracy and beauty are one for him. “The Spirit Level” closes with an image straight out of Yeats territory: “inland among stones / The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.” That’s not just pretty, it’s precise; Heaney has obeyed Yeats’s admonition to “sing whatever is well made.” It’s that musical precision that sets Irish art apart, in the mastery of traditional forms like step dancing or fiddle tunes but also in the welter of novels, plays and poems now pouring forth from the new generation. And when Irish writing sings with the kind of force it has mustered lately, the whole world has learned to prick up its ears.
title: “The Second Coming” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Claude Larson”
The blithe self-confidence is classic Cavallo. Though his forecast may prove premature, no one could deny that the wildly successful road show had burnished Cavallo’s image as the savior of Argentina. Since beleaguered President Fernando de la Rua restored him to the post he occupied under Carlos Menem in the early 1990s, many Argentines have come to see Cavallo as their de facto president. Who could blame them? When the workaholic technocrat joined the government in March, de la Rua ceded extraordinary power, giving him authority to ease regulations on private companies, hunt down tax evaders and unilaterally adjust import tariffs–all with the tacit understanding that only he could break the recession that has plagued Argentina for nearly three years. Ever since, Cavallo, 54, has been as visible as any head of state, making five trips overseas to reassure investors about Argentina’s prospects under his stewardship. And he’s not a man prone to self-doubt. “He thinks he’s God, albeit a humanized God,” jokes Buenos Aires pollster Manuel Mora y Araujo. “Sort of like Jesus Christ.”
The question is, can he still work miracles? Menem’s magic is long gone; the former president was placed under house arrest last week in an investigation of illegal arms sales. Cavallo is riding high, though. The markets’ response to his so-called megaswap exceeded his own expectations. But it will take more to heal the crippled economy than merely stretching out Argentina’s debt-repayment schedule. At every stop on his 72-hour road show, Cavallo assured American and European audiences that in the second half of 2001, the economy will grow 5 percent faster than it did in the same period last year (box). But observers are adopting a wait-and-see posture, both at home and abroad. “The main problem is the total lack of confidence in the Argentine government, both locally and in international markets,” says Pamela Starr, an Argentina specialist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “The economy is in dire straits, and unless it returns to growth soon it will fall into a serious crisis.”
Some experts believe Argentina is on the verge of a depression and that only Cavallo can prevent outright default on the country’s $128 billion foreign debt. Analysts warn that a suspension of debt payments could trigger a regionwide financial catastrophe, with global ripples. In 1991 Cavallo slew hyperinflation by pegging the Argentine peso to the dollar on a one-to-one basis, ushering in six years of sustained economic growth. But the monsters facing him today are more beastly. Argentina’s combined unemployment and underemployment rate is more than 30 percent. Much of the private sector remains paralyzed by interest rates that start at around 30 percent for medium-size businesses. And experts warn that the government will likely need to borrow an additional $12 billion this year to cover its outstanding foreign-debt obligations. Small wonder that Argentina’s country risk rating was recently downgraded to a B, putting what was once Latin America’s richest nation below Chile and on a par with Bolivia.
None of this seems to faze the messiah of Buenos Aires. “Once we complete this megaswap, the fears of a default that have been affecting Argentina will be eliminated,” Cavallo told NEWSWEEK. “We have acquired sufficient power to reverse a three-year-old recession, and the sense of a power vacuum has completely disappeared.” Argentina began its slide into recession in the fourth quarter of 1998, and Menem’s failure to slash government spending drastically caused its fiscal deficit to rise sharply. Brazil’s devaluation of the real in early 1999 then hit Argentina with a double whammy: it enabled its big neighbor to the north to export its way out of economic crisis at the cost of the Argentine private sector as cheaper Brazilian goods flooded the local market and undercut made-in-Argentina products. Argentina in the past has steadfastly refused to devalue the peso to offset the Brazilian measure, and for the foreseeable future Cavallo is widely expected to stand by his 10-year-old decision to link the Argentine peso to the dollar. In the short term Cavallo plans to focus his considerable energies on the government’s fiscal problems. He plans to cut the public-sector budget deficit by about $3 billion to meet the target figure of $6.5 billion established by the International Monetary Fund last January.
Cavallo’s detractors claim that his breezy self-confidence can sometimes turn to complacency. That became painfully evident last year when he ran for mayor of Buenos Aires and finished a distant second. Visibly shocked, Cavallo dropped dark, but completely unsubstantiated, hints about possible electoral fraud and dismissed the mayor-elect as an “impotent” rival. That failure came after his doomed run for the presidency in 1999, when he ran a poor third behind the winner, de la Rua. For all his demonstrated skills as economic czar, Cavallo “is a bad politician who’s unaware of his own limitations,” says sociologist Artemio Lopez. “He’s unable to build consensus on account of his personality, and in political terms he’s a minor player.”
In addition to his arrogance, legal problems could spoil Cavallo’s second coming. A federal judge investigating the Menem government’s illegal arms sales to Croatia and Ecuador in the 1990s placed the former president under house arrest last week after Menem declined to give oral answers during a court hearing in Buenos Aires. The magistrate had already jailed a former Defense minister and the chief of the Army under Menem. Cavallo was one of the cabinet ministers who signed the executive decrees authorizing the transactions, which subsequently resulted in the illegal arms sales. He could still become a target of the investigation, though he has signaled his readiness to answer questions under oath in the case and has denied any wrongdoing. In his defense, he points to the numerous criminal and civil accusations that were brought against him soon after he quit the Menem government in disgust in 1996. “I became the target of a judicial persecution [campaign], and until now they’ve been unable to convict me,” says Cavallo. “In the arms-trafficking case I have already given testimony and will testify every single time I’m asked to do so.”
Of course, Argentine legal wrangling will matter little to foreign bankers if Cavallo performs his economic magic one more time. And if his policies bring back a semblance of prosperity in a year or two, that will put Cavallo on course for a second run at the presidency in 2003. He can take consolation in the meantime from knowing that he’s the best card Argentina can play for the foreseeable future. “There’s a sense that there’s no one else,” says pollster Mora y Araujo. “In the middle of the crisis, Cavallo banged on the table and confidently declared that he would rescue us from this mess.” That may be the betting line out of Buenos Aires for now. But 35 million Argentines will not stop praying for solvency, with or without Domingo Cavallo.
title: “The Second Coming” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Pauline Wilson”
Jack and Meg White dress like ghoulish parodies of Tammy Wynette and George Jones on the cover of their follow-up album, “Elephant.” The CD was made in two weeks, recorded entirely with equipment that predates the Stones (“no computers were used,” they boast on the liner notes), and advance review copies were printed only on vinyl. Critics love these small acts of rebellion, and early reviewers have already decided that “Elephant” is the best rock album in a decade. It’s not. But it’s a far better album than “White Blood Cells,” full of not just great sounds but great songs. “Elephant” is a scratchy collection of tense, maniacal rock, bittersweet country and buzzing power-punk. Jack White’s wordplay is as playful and bizarre as ever (“I had opinions that didn’t matter/I had a brain that felt like pancake batter”). His voice is campy and high-strung one minute, smoke-wrecked and gruff the next. And above all he seems to feel every song he sings, even when he’s being tongue-in-cheek smarmy. His guitar work is just as impassioned–searing mad then back-porch lethargic then downright intimate. The production lets it all hang out. You can hear fingers slipping on strings, Meg’s occasionally bum drumbeats and all that wonderfully fuzzy reverb that’s been missing since rock cleaned up its act 20 years ago.
It’s no small feat that the White Stripes delivered a smart, art rock album with soul, especially considering they once were pretentious enough to name a record after a Dutch abstract-art movement (“De Stijl.” Ugh). So maybe it’s time to drop the enigmatic charade–Meg is Jack’s ex-wife, not his sister. And what do you know? “Elephant” still sounds great.
