Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins Page B

David Frost, he kept saying, “I’m the only one who listens to the people.” Bull. Perot listens to no one. Or more precisely, what he means when he says “the people” is the people who tell him, “Ross, we love you.” Everyone else, he’s x-ed out.
    It’s his way or nothing. That’s why he quit the first time. He gutted his own corps of volunteers except for the ones who would tell him exactly what he wants to hear. That squirrelly little part of his brain that will never allow him to admit he’s wrong about anything comes up with these fantastic rationales for his own flaky behavior. A Perot presidency would be like the time of the papist plots in England. Conspirators sighted everywhere, evidence no object.
    Look, I’m not a shrink, I can’t tell you why he’s like this. I just know from studying his record that Perot is not temperamentally suited to lead this country. He does not have the patience. He does not have the knowledge, and despite his seeming common sense (when he’s not sitting there with springs coming out of his head), I don’t think the man has the first idea how to go about getting anything done in D.C. Worse, he couldn’t and wouldn’t stand having anyone around him who did know.
    George Bush once said the key thing we should watch, the one thing that would tell us more than anything else, was who he chose for vice president. Bush chose Dan Quayle. Perot chose Admiral Stockdale. Stockdale is ad-mirable in many ways, but he is not a democrat, and he could no more function as president than he could put on a pink tutu and dance
Swan Lake.
    So that leaves Clinton. I reserve the right to make fun of Bill Clinton from now to infinity, but he is bright (actually, amazingly bright), and he has a sense of humor about the world and about himself. He genuinely likes people, even the ones who don’t grovel at his feet, and he listens, which is an unusual trait in a politician.
    He is a serious student of how you get government to work. In fact, that is the great passion of his life. More than that, I don’t guarantee. Clinton is gonna have to dance with the people what brung him, and I do not know if he has the political courage to change that system. So maybe the best solution is to go out and vote for him and make sure he knows we
all
brung him.
    Finally, to all my old friends and to all my old enemies concerning what I fear will always be the Defining Moment for our generation, I think the question now is not whether you went to Vietnam or whether you didn’t, whether you fought in the war or whether you fought against the war. I think the only question is whether we can find a president smart enough never to make a mistake like that again.
     
    November 1992

 
    Dan Quayle I
     

     
    M ADISON , WIS. — How nice. Vice President Dan Quayle has joined the Lost Values Task Force, also known as Doing Nothing.
    In a speech Monday that may yet prove to be the high-water mark for disconnection-from-reality for the entire four years of the Bush-Quayle administration, the veeper gamely blamed the Los Angeles riots and all other manifestations of urban unrest and social decay on—declining values.
    Not the sky-high unemployment rates, not the rotten schools, not the lack of housing, or the lack of opportunity, or redlining, or the health-care double-bind that keeps mothers on welfare. In sum, not on poverty at all, but, as he put it, the poverty of values.
    He also managed to blame Murphy Brown, but, in a memorably charitable moment, he allowed, “It would be overly simplistic to blame the social breakdown on the programs of the Great Society alone.” Have to agree with that, don’t you? But said the veep, “It would be absolutely wrong to blame it on the growth and success most Americans enjoyed during the 1980s.”
    Unfortunately, Quayle is wrong. Most Americans did not enjoy growth and success during the eighties, and those who enjoyed it least were the urban poor, who just rioted. Perhaps