Point Austin: Three Dimensions
When you're looking for heroes, avoid the usual suspects
By Michael King, Fri., June 23, 2006
That was the avuncular advice of none other than former President Bill Clinton last Saturday, as he spoke to several-hundred journalists at the Little Rock convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. (Caveat lector: local politics returns to "Point Austin" next week.) Several Chron staffers of various stripes made the trek to "The Rock," as local hipsters are trying somewhat grimly to rename it. We were treated to an increasingly cosmopolitan downtown, highlighting the new Clinton Library (political-historical exhibits much more impressive than the exterior, which the locals wryly describe as "a double-wide on stilts"), the Arkansas Historical Museum (homespun surreal: from Bowie knives to Pez dispensers); and a dazzling Picasso retrospective at the Arkansas Arts Center (worth the long drive northeast before Sept. 3).
While the city looks forward, our extended taste of Arkansan politics had a Nineties retrospective air: downhome speeches from former presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark, former Whitewater political prisoner Susan McDougal, and of course Clinton, who generously spoke for nearly two hours (extempore and Q&A); his recurrent motif for these reporters and editors was an exhortation to report political stories in "three dimensions." That is, he said we should resist the urge to "divide and demonize" the American political landscape, or to portray particular issues and politicians as "two-dimensional cartoons." He obviously believes that he and his fellow Dems (notably spouse, Sen. Hillary) have suffered most from right-wing caricature, but he also made the larger argument that ideologically determined, polarized politics makes bad public policy.
"In order to make good decisions," he continued, "We need to have an evidence-based politics ... We should be striving for a unifying political community." This was by way of flattering the assembled newswriters who have tried to fill in the blanks of oversimplified mainstream reporting. At a distance, it may sound like little more than "triangulation" writ large. But it's hard to argue with his larger point about current U.S. politics: When we're screaming at each other, we're not addressing our real problems.
About That War
When it comes to specific cases, the argument gets much more difficult. Not far from Clinton's speech and mind was the beating Hillary has taken recently from those on the left who say she's insufficiently opposed to the U.S. war on Iraq – even while the right continually beats the drum that all the Democrats want to "cut and run." In fact, countered Bill, "there are at least four Democratic positions on the war": 1) immediate withdrawal; 2) withdrawal but no timetable ("that's the United Nations position as well"); 3) those who supported the war but now want a U.N.-moderated solution; and 4) those who support the unilateral U.S. actions of the Bush administration (read: Joe Lieberman). Clinton was at pains to describe 1 and 4 as lightly populated extremes – but one of the reasons that is true is that there's so little pressure from the Democratic leadership (read, Clinton, Clinton, and their centrist allies) to provide a real counterweight to GOP saber-rattling.
If I needed a visible example, there isn't a handier one than Wesley Clark, who regaled an earlier audience with sentimental tales of his Arkansas childhood, beneath the twin specters of racial integration and the Soviet menace. Under the Fifties headline shadow of Sputnik, Clark and his schoolboy friends founded a rocket club. Clark laughed that he himself abandoned rocketry before achieving orbit; yet with that youthful energy in mind, he looked back with nostalgia at the pre-Gorbachev days of the Cold War, when the "big idea" of competition with the Soviets provided a handy "organizing principle" of American life. I can't say if his audience, mostly thirtysomething or younger, completely swallowed this bilge, though the reception was enthusiastic. But I can say that I was there, at the Cold War – and it was not only not a Big Idea, it was a hysterical international delusion. If that's all the Democrats have to offer, no thank you.
On Iraq, Clark was rather worse. "It's a war that we didn't have to fight," he lamented, "but now it's about the future of our country. We're not going to be able to just jerk the troops out of there. We have to choose carefully and choose what's best for America." In other words, Bush was wrong, but we still have to stay the course.
One wanted to ask: In 1944 Paris, was the most important public question of the day, "What's best for Germany?"
Never Again
Susan McDougal – one of my very few political heroes – is neither as educated nor as privileged as Clinton or Clark, and she'll never have a seat in the councils of power. But for my money, she gave the most moving address of the weekend, recounting her extraordinary odyssey as personal collateral damage of the GOP's anti-Clinton campaign and her simple but heroic refusal to cooperate with the official thugs at the Office of Independent Counsel, most notably prosecutorial Head Goon Kenneth Starr. This begins to sound like ancient history, and I won't recount it here. But the important thing is that McDougal, unlike nearly all of her Arkansas peers, refused to lie about the Clintons in order to save herself. She paid dearly for her integrity: two extremely difficult years in prison, fanatical public abuse on all sides, and nearly the loss of her health.
She's humbled but not bitter, and now counts among her most profound experiences months among murderers, drug dealers, and other felons who yet had more sense and charity than many of those who now rule us. "Never in a million years," she said, would her fellow prisoners believe that "God had ordained them to invade another country with shock and awe." "Never in a million years" would they claim a right to incarcerate and to torture a fellow human being without trial – they're all too familiar with that kind of treatment. "Never in a million years," she concluded, would they claim their religion gives them a right to treat others as animals or worse. "I learned a lot about the difference between those who claim to be Christians," McDougal said, "and the actual Christians."
Or as a visiting nun told her on a lonely prison Christmas night, "If Jesus were alive today, he'd be in here with us." 
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