Greaseball Shit

But the last two presidential debates weren't draws. Al Gore used George Bush as a punching bag in Debate #1. It was only the discovery that Gore had lied that made the press score the debate as a loss for Gore. Those lies certainly reflect a deep character problem, but not a debating problem. And in Debate #2, Bush massacred his opponent, making Gore look not just like a humorless dolt (besting him on the affable-lugnut front), but also an outright menace on a variety of policy areas, from humanitarian interventions to battery-powered cars (besting him on the argument front).

The opinion that Bush is a moron is easily formed and hard to shake off, but he did emerge as the only good-humored commonsensical chap in the debate. Bush's foreign-policy instincts struck me (and three-quarters of Americans) as sound. You don't go into foreign countries, Bush is saying, to police what are basically gang wars. (Or "greaseball shit," as Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro describe the issues over which Joe Pesci gets whacked in Goodfellas.) Granted, this philosophy renders Bush's support of the Kosovo operation incoherent, but we can probably trust him to renege on his declared sympathies come election time.

The Old Vik Bush's other great triumph was the easygoing way he raised Gore's connection to former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Bush showed himself an IMF skeptic, and professed himself worried that much of the money sent to Russia wound up going into Viktor Chernomyrdin's pocket. This became something of an international legal scandal, when Chernomyrdin held a press conference to announce he would sue Bush for defamation. To be literal minded about this, there is no absolutely hard evidence that Cherno stole IMF money. Three or four years ago, there was an accusation in Le Monde that Cherno had engaged in the theft of $5 billion of government funds. When it was reprinted in Izvestia, the paper was taken over by two government-friendly "consortia," as mafia operations tend to be called in Moscow. IMF money has definitely been stolen by Russian magnates. Just before the ruble collapse in August of 1998, free-market "reformer" Anatoly Chubais came to Washington for a breakfast with Deputy Treasury Secretary (now Treasury Secretary) Larry Summers, and convinced him to bully IMF head Michel Camdessus into releasing billions in aid. Camdessus was suspicious and it took as much bullying as Chubais had anticipated to bring him around. Once that tranche was released, it disappeared, and Swiss courts have spent the past year trying to figure out what happened to it.

"If you ask any Russian on the street whether Cherno is corrupt," says a friend of mine who's been working in Moscow as an investigative journalist for a decade, "you'll have to wait until they stop laughing to hear their answer." Again, in a country where financial corruption is carried out through fronts and straws and cutouts, Chernomyrdin leaves no paper trail. But the only reason he can be cleared of committing financial "illegalities" is that, in Russia, corruption itself is legal. Cherno's family is now among the richest 500 families in the world. Here's how it happened: Cherno headed the natural-gas ministry under the Communists. When Harvard consultants arrived to insist that Russia's economy had to be privatized, the Russian government just turned its ministers into CEOs. Oh, we need a board of directors? Fine! I have two sons and a daughter. The Soviet gas ministry is now Gazprom, a global giant with a market capitalization of $100 billion. Its longtime CEO: Viktor Chernomyrdin. It would probably be worth a half a trillion if it were traded publicly, but Cherno doesn't want Western investors looking into annual reports and questioning bank transfers. So can we resort to a common-sense criterion here? A company that thinks it's worth $400 billion to keep its inner workings out of the light of day is corrupt. And this is the guy Al Gore wanted to form "capitalist" "partnerships" with.

Any American who's followed Mexican politics will recognize the pattern. This is Lopezportillismo, to neologize Jimmy Carter's favorite corrupt dictator. (And that's a field in which Mexican President Lopez-Portillo had hefty competition.) At the height of the energy crisis in the 1970s, Lopez-Portillo was peeling a dollar off of every barrel of oil Mexico sold. He was probably, at one point, the richest man in the world. And this pattern went on. When Carlos Salinas was selling his pseudo-capitalist reforms in Washington, he had the whole of the country's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) behind him. PRI oligarchs, like Carlos Slim and Carlos Hank, said: "Yes, I understand the need for reform. Difficult though it may be, I'll take over the national phone monopoly. And the national lottery."

Cherno is the avatar of these guys. So when I asked my Moscow-investigative-journalist friend whether Cherno would actually haul Bush into an American court, with American rules of discovery, he said, "Oh, sure?when monkeys fly out of my arsehole."

Wreck of the Old 49 The best exchange of the evening?in debating terms?came when Gore started hammering Bush on Texas' performance in insuring children. "Texas ranks 49th out of the 50 states," Gore said, "in children with healthcare, 49th for women with healthcare and 50th for families with healthcare." Whatever Gore meant by that, Bush should have battled back a little more forcefully than he did. He had two responses at his disposal: 1. I didn't invent the state of Texas. It was there when I got there six years ago, and it has a history. The question is whether I've improved things. Or 2. Doesn't this line sound familiar? People were saying this kind of stuff about Gov. Clinton's Arkansas in 1992; do you, Mr. Gore, think that Arkansas' nation-leading poverty rates wound up providing an accurate prediction of how Bill Clinton did as president? Nonetheless, Bush's rejoinders were sufficiently effective that Gore panicked, and let slip what may be his neutron-bomb strategy in the third debate. (It's telling that none of the national punditry noticed this.) Gore replied: "I think?I think he's a good person. I make no allegations about that. I believe him when he says that?that he has a good heart. I know enough about your story to?to admire a lot of the things that you have done as a person." Your story? As a person? There could be no doubt about where Gore was going with this: He wanted to remind the public of Bush's history as a drinker. You'd make a good president, pal, but if you're ever sitting in the cellar with a plastic half-pint of victory vodka, you can call me. Really. Any time of day or night. Gore didn't quite dare to pull the trigger here, but you could see where he might go in the third debate on Tuesday night: "Fine. I'm losing this debate. I'm pompous, stentorian and prone to lie. But do you want a guy carrying the nuclear football after a fifth of Johnnie Walker?"

Even then, a lot of those Ohio cretins might respond: "Mmmm...yeah, guess I do. Sure smiles nice."