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Reagan: The likely winner-but not a trend-setter
By Lee Cullum |

WHEN I APPEARED on Karen Den-ard’s talk show on KERA-FM a few weeks ago, a caller asked why Dhas become the “magazine of quiche-eating Republicans.” I replied, “Isn’t ’quiche-eating Republican’ a contradiction in terms?” It seems to me that today’s Grand Old Party people are living on Jerry Falwell’s Omaha diet: steak, potatoes and ice cream served with a glass of buttermilk. In fact, during the Republican Convention last summer, a sign carried the message: “Mondale eats quiche.”

The real truth is that today’s quiche eaters (the “Beaujolais crowd,” as political writer Kevin Phillips calls them) are the most disenfranchised voters of this election year. With the Democrats heavily committed to labor and claimant interests and many Republicans practicing a primitive brand of Protestant fundamentalism (tracing their theocratic ancestry straight back to Salem), Gary Hart’s Yuppies are left with no place to go.

It’s as if Sister Boom-Boom had said it all simply by his/her appearance at both conventions. By taking on the look of a sinister Elizabethan nun, Sister Boom-Boom performed as the indispensable town fool, the Irish village crank who forced us to glimpse, if only for a moment, our essential absurdity. Even the confused sexuality had a message: how resolutely we confuse ourselves and sidestep the critical questions of our times, settling instead for the phony release of projected animosity.

It’s interesting that the Rev. Jesse Jackson emerged as the voice of moral authority in San Francisco. Certainly his flirtation with the despicable Louis Farrakhan had done little to prepare us to receive him in this role, no matter how well-trained he might be for it professionally. It was the closing cadence that reached us (“Our time has come”), and we responded to Jackson’s penchant for speaking simple, unassailable truths: “When women win, children win.”

But what about Mondale? The pity is that he’s miscast in the race for president. Mondale is a courtier, born to do the bidding of figures stronger than he, destined always to be defined by the policies of other people. He started out as Humphrey’s man, then grew up to be Carter’s man. Finally, at the close of his political career, he’ll be remembered as Geraldine Ferraro’s running mate.

And what of her? Certainly the most intriguing candidate on anybody’s ticket this election year, she’ll survive, according to Phillips, to fight another day. By 1988, Phillips predicts, Ferraro will have had much more international exposure than she’s enjoyed to date, and the inexperience problem will have been eliminated.

Surely by then every conceivable word will have been written about the Ferraro/Zaccaro financial statement. What emerged from all those disclosures, it appears, was the story of a scrappy guy (regrettably not endowed with the fiduciary elegance of a trust officer) who’s done well in real estate. He hasn’t amassed the kind of fortune that’s become astonishingly commonplace among Dallas real estate magnates, but he’s managed to beat the odds in a stagnant market that’s altogether different from our local boom.

But why are we so disingenuous in our questions about the business company he keeps? Didn’t I read that some of Zaccaro’s holdings are near Mulberry Street in New York? Isn’t that in the same neighborhood as Umberto’s Clam House, where Joey Gallo was gunned down during dinner several years ago?

To suggest that John Zaccaro or his father had some dealings-however distant-with various associates of the Mafia is about as startling as saying that someone who does business in Garland has run into the I-30 condo crowd from time to time. (And speaking of organized crime, are we forgetting that John F. Kennedy was rumored to have sought the friendship of Judith Campbell Exner, a woman who had close connections to underworld figures?)

The point is that there’s not much purity going around. Our notion that everybody in public life is supposed to have a tidy $2 million put away in a blind trust is not only naive, it’s destructive to the American ideal of the working, sweating citizen in politics. (Does anybody remember that Lady Bird Johnson refused to put her property in a blind trust during LBJ’s tenure as president? She knew that the White House wouldn’t last forever, according to writer Eric Goldman, and that someday they’d be just the Johnsons again.)

In the midst of all the speculation about Ferraro and Zaccaro’s joint and separate assets came Ronald Reagan to the speaker’s platform in Dallas. Having just given away his daughter, Patti, to her yoga instructor in a Los Angeles hotel ceremony (not even this president has a perfect Falwell/Family Forum situation), he arrived to accept his party’s nomination looking much like a man who had triumphed over the years without ever having to endure them. Even those who are uneasy about Reagan’s “nostalgic presidency” (Phillips’ terminology) had to admire his performance that night. But it didn’t last through the first presidential debate, where Reagan seemed to grow weary and less effective as the time wore on.

Nonetheless, among his fans is a cadre of young voters. Many wonder why people in their 20s would be drawn to a president who’s almost 74. Thinking back on the upheaval of the Sixties and Seventies, I see that it was inevitable. It’s no surprise that the fractured family life of those two decades would produce a generation yearning for the stability that Reagan seeks to represent.

But in Phillips’ view, it won’t last. Although Reagan seems almost certain of reelection, his movement is no more the wave of the future than Lyndon Johnson’s landslide Great Society was in 1964. LBJ’s programs were done in by war and inflation. Reagan had better watch out for the same demons.



This month, Dis inaugurating a specialFort Worth section in all copies of the magazine distributed in that city. Jan Jarvis,formerly of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,has joined our staff to write “Inside FortWorth,” plus longer stories that will profileinteresting personalities, pinpoint civicproblems or simply entertain our readers in Fort Worth.

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