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The last time I saw Ollie North, he was striking a manful pose as he modeled a bullet-proof vest on the cover of a catalog from one of those mail-order outfits that sells expensive toys like camouflage fatigues and saw-tooth bayonets to Rambo wannabes.
Good place for him, pandering to those poor deviants who drool over the luscious four-color spreads in Guns & Ammo, but then I read that Ollie had escaped. He was announcing his candidacy for the U.S. senate from Virginia.
The state that gave us George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is entitled to send any liar it wants to the U.S. Senate. Further, there's no danger that Ollie North's presence in the world's greatest deliberative body would lower the moral caliber of the U.S. Congress.
But it is curious that North said he was running as an
outsider.
Here's a guy who got about as far inside as anyone has
ever been -- running his own shadow government at the
top-secret National Security Agency with his own foreign
policy and his own money from illegal arms sales. He's also
a man who will say whatever helps him most under the
circumstances, and he determined that the term
outsider
was the most effective spin to put on his
campaign announcement.
Obviously, Americans like to elect outsiders,
or
Ollie would have said he was running as an experienced
Washington hand, a savior on a white horse, or a victim of
a gang of hypocrites too cowardly to launch impeachment
proceedings against Ronald Reagan.
So, what's the attraction of an outsider? Why do outsiders appeal to us at election time?
Part of it is that, for most of us, the federal government is not a beneficial force that improves our lives. It doesn't make our streets safer, our schools better or our paychecks fatter. Instead, it is a vast collection of agents and bureaucracies who make threats to enforce arcane regulations which bear no discernible relationship to the U.S. Constitution.
We've got to elect somebody who's been on the
receiving end of this crap,
we think, somebody who
understands what it's like to be a mere citizen, so we can
turn this around.
A touching sentiment, and I succumb as readily as anyone else. But the sad fact is that government is a complicated enterprise which requires a skilled operator. To get much done, an outsider has to become an insider.
President Clinton is a good example. He wasn't exactly a babe in the woods -- as governor of Arkansas, he had some national repute from the governor's association and the Democratic Leadership Council, and he was a frequent visitor to Washington, where he had gone to college.
Still, he wasn't a Washington fixture when he took office last year. Recall the woes he faced as a relative outsider -- trouble filling cabinet posts, difficulties dealing with Congress, inability to deliver on campaign promises that, in theory, a president could have handled with a stroke of the pen.
A true insider would have known better. Also, a true insider, like George Bush, lost the election.
Anyway, Clinton's a quick study. He caught on, and got NAFTA through, thanks to full use of the powers of his office: arm-twisting, dealing, patronage, the bully pulpit.
Of course, he was denounced in some circles for acting like an insider, just as he was earlier denounced for being inept and naive -- that is, for acting like an outsider.
So it's a rotten situation for anyone seeking office.
You can't get elected if you admit to being an
insider
or a politician.
But you can't get
anything done unless you act like an insider
or a
politician.
We're more sensible in hiring plumbers than we are in
putting people in office. Nobody would engage an
outsider
to fix a clogged drain -- you want somebody
who understands the system and how to make it work.
Ollie North certainly understands the system and how to
make it work to his benefit. But he is a genuine
outsider
in one respect -- he's got a long history
of operating outside the Constitution that he swore to
preserve and protect.
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