Nothing became Robert Torricelli’s senatorial career so much as
his leaving it. The Torch, as the tabloids now insist on calling
him, did the right thing. He was mired in sleaze, and sinking like
a stone in the polls, and his chance of winning re-election was
virtually non-existent. So in a teary speech on Monday Torricelli
did what he called “the most painful thing that I have ever done in
my life.” Even though he had done nothing wrong, he said, and the
Senate would be much the poorer without him, he was dropping out of
the race.
Actually Torricelli was never a major-league villain. He was
mostly a small-time machine politician, with small-time tastes, and
an apparently genuine belief that liberal positions compensated for
personal failings. “I most certainly have made mistakes,” he
declared, but he never said what any of them might have been, and
probably did not think them important.
And even if he had made mistakes, he said, “When did we become
such an unforgiving people?” What mattered, it seemed, was not that
he had accepted expensive gifts and illegal campaign contributions,
and been “severely admonished” by the bipartisan Senate ethics
committee, but that he had fought for the environment, senior
citizens, and a woman’s right to an abortion.
Torricelli, in fact, was the perfect Clinton Democrat.,
wallowing in self-pity, while blaming everyone but himself for his
problems. Indeed as Torricelli announced on Monday, Clinton had
called him “several times” from Britain that day to tell him he
understood his predicament and that he shared in his pain.
“We recalled all the fights that we were in together,”
Torricelli said, “all the times I went to the White House and told
him in the darkest days that what I admired about him is that ‘you
never give up — you never compromise, you never stop, you never
give up.’ The phone connection wasn’t the best, but I could hear
his voice crack. I admire that man so much…”
So Clinton’s voice cracked, and perhaps Torricelli’s did, too.
After all, they had a common bond. Both had been unfairly judged,
and neither had deserved it. Meanwhile the Democratic Party seemed
to be imploding. The week before Torricelli dropped out of the
Senate race, a pusillanimous Al Gore spoke out about Iraq. His
speech was disgraceful, and full of lies and innuendoes. The
titular leader of his party began by saying his main concern was
over “those who attacked us on Sept. 11, and who have thus far
gotten away with it.”
It was as if the Taliban had not been destroyed, or the members
of al Qaeda were not being hunted down. It was as if there had been
no retaliation. Indeed Gore insisted that “the vast majority of
those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded of
more than 3,000 Americans were still at large, still neither
located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized.”
This was, of course, a lie. The “vast majority” was dead, in
prison, or on the run, and the idea that Gore was appointing
himself to avenge the deaths of 3,000 Americans was obscene. Gore
also said the Bush Administration “has operated in a manner
calculated to please the portion of its base that occupies the far
right,” and he expressed his concern about “the doubts many have
expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the
calculations of some in the administration.”
And then he added, with breath-taking smarminess, “I have not
raised those doubts, but many have.”
The same day Gore spoke, Bush also spoke. “The Senate,” he said,
“is more interested in special interests in Washington, and not
interested in the security of the American people.” Bush was
talking about the Homeland Security Bill, and the Democrats’
insistence that jobs it created go only to union members. It was a
dumb thing to say, but it hardly deserved the hysterical response
it got from Tom Daschle.
Bush had impugned the Democrats’ patriotism, Daschle said, and
he demanded that Bush apologize. Senator Robert Byrd, a pious old
fraud, also demanded an apology. The Democrats are sensitive to the
charge that they are the peace-at-all-costs party, and that they do
not always act in their country’s best interest. Meanwhile their
hysteria over Bush’s mild jibe was heightened by the spectacle of
the three Democratic congressmen who turned up in Baghdad as Saddam
apologists.
The three — David Bonior, Jim McDermott and Mike Thompson —
were useful idiots all. Bonior said in Baghdad that a “horrendous,
barbaric, horrific” number of cases of childhood leukemia and
lymphomas had been caused by “uranium that has been part of our
weapons system that was dropped here during the last war.”
That was not true, and numerous studies, some by the U.N., have
said otherwise. Then, on his return to Washington, Bonior, once the
second-ranking Democrat in the House, preached moral equivalence.
Fair is fair, he said, and neither the United States nor Iraq
should dictate the rules for on-site inspections. Meanwhile
McDermott said we should take Saddam at his word on granting
unfettered access to the inspectors, and forget about using
“coercive stuff” — armed force — to make him comply. He also said
that Bush was willing “to mislead the American people” about
Iraq.
So it was a very bad week for Democrats. Gore and the useful
idiots had reawakened the old notion that their party’s foreign
policy was still dictated by Jane Fonda. Then along came
Torricelli, and a reminder about the sleaze. With the elections so
near, it was a very bad week indeed.
