Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial: 08/18/2000 RUNNING AWAY FROM THE OLD MAN Oedipus Meets Karl Marx in Campaign 2000 Bill Clinton's father was a drunk and wife-beater. Al Gore's father was a patrician United States Senator. George W.'s father is Poppy, the New England WASP ex-President with tiny whales on his golf slacks. This campaign, like Mr. Clinton's entire life, is about the old man. It's also about class, both the Karl Marx kind and the manners variety. Bill Clinton may be the last working class kid to become President for quite a while. For at least the next four years, the White House will be home to someone who's lived in better. The ruling class is back in the saddle. It was Bill Clinton's countryfied anger and ambition that got him to where he is. It's also what kept him from being what he might have been. And it was fueled by the kind of rage only a kid from a violent home on the wrong side of the tracks can ever understand. When his father would get drunk and beat his mother, Clinton learned the passive-aggressive game. He learned to mediate, to sympathize, to boil. Before he was a teen, he had already threatened to kill the old man if he ever laid a hand on his mother again. There's heat bubbling and hissing like a Chicago radiator in January inside of Bill Clinton, He is better than that, by God, he will bury the old man's memory under the landslide of his own accomplishments. But he hears a voice in the hollow of his cerebral cortex, a whisper that sounds suspiciously like the old man's drunken slur telling him he'll never be as good as the country club set no matter what he does so why not just close your eyes and let the genetic weakness wrap around you like a blanket. Richard Nixon heard the same voice. Nixon listened and undermined the Constitution. Clinton listened and got head in the Oval Office and lied about it. He channeled the old man and morphed him into a greedy, charming rogue. Al Gore's birth notice appeared in the Washington Post. He grew up in a hotel near the White House. His old man was a public man of principle who lost his Senate seat over opposition to Vietnam and support for civil rights. In private, he was a bloody terror. He once ordered young Al to clear 20 acres of timber with a hand axe as a character-building exercise. Al, the model of patrician reticence, got blisters and felled every last tree, meditating about duty the entire time. Bill Clinton would have bought a chain saw, convinced neighbor kids to do ther work, and gone after Daddy with the axe. I first met Al Gore when he was a young Congressman and I was a younger reporter. After an hour chatting in his office, I commented offhandedly that he would probably try to be the President that led America into the 21st Century. He smiled and allowed as how his father had told him the same thing. Gore went to Vietnam, partly out of duty, partly out of resume calculation, and partly out of obligation to Al Gore the Elder, reasoning that Dad's re-election chances could be fatally wounded by a son who didn't serve. Gore is running to complete the cycle of expectations and to avenge his father's galling election loss. George W. still surprises Poppy. Talk to Bush family confidantes quietly and they'll murmur how everyone in Houston and Kennybunkport always thought it would be Jeb, the photogenic articulate bi-lingual governor of Florida. Every entry in George W.'s c.v. was typed by his father. He got into prep school and Yale as a legacy. His father had some sort of interest in every company where young George worked. His father's political brain trust provided the intellectual nourishment for his unsuccessful Congressional run and his stunning triumph over Ann Richards to become Texas governor. A kid from a background like Bill Clinton's who screwed up in the Ivy league and then spent the next 18 years playing frat boy emeritus would have ended up running a grain and feed store back in Arkansas. George W. ended up in a corner office. Finally, the old man's reserved New England preppy sense of honor and duty began to rub off. But what sends George W. in a snarling rage is the thought of Dad's defeat by that hillbilly bumpkin in 1992 and the indignities Pop had to suffer at the hands of a California actor through the 1980's. This campaign is a crusade for the younger George, a vindication of his father's rightness and reticence. This is about family. He's looking right through Al Gore and into the eyes of Bill Clinton and further back into the eyes of Bill Clinton's father. This is 1992 Part Two: The Reckoning. You can hear the footsteps of the fathers in the white noise of this campaign. Whether he's wearing work boots or wing tips, the old man is always there.   Join the discussion

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