Right now, the storm clouds were on the horizon, and visible to everybody, but nobody actually believed them. Maybe it was simply my degrees in mathematics, and the realization that this stuff actually had consequences. As I had stated in my previous books, two plus two equals four, not three and not five. Maybe you don't like the answers, but they are going to smack you in the face soon enough.
I called Simon and Schuster and discussed it with them. We would get a couple of hard core quantitative types, demographers and actuaries, and they would be the ones running the numbers. I would write most of the text and try to give the numbers a human face. Birth rate statistics and immigration rates can be incredibly dry and boring stuff, but they have real long term consequences.
I made sure to devote an hour or two a day to the project. Like my earlier books, I broke it down into a number of chapters, each devoted to a specific subject. One might be a history of minority voting patterns, which then led into a chapter on minority birth rates, which led to a chapter on the white majority status, and then into illegal immigration, which led to birthrates and assimilation among immigrants, and so forth. It was almost a survey course of modern demographics and population studies. Fortunately, by now I had written enough books that I had a handle on time management and could figure out how to do the writing.
To what extent any of this would have an effect, I just wasn't sure. Ignorance is bliss, especially when it is willful ignorance. There were an awful lot of Republicans who didn't want to know that the easy ride was over. Starting in the Sixties, when the Democrats became the party of desegregation and civil rights, and whites fled to both the suburbs and the Republican Party, there was a built-in constituency, and it was big. Reagan had played to this base superbly, and I knew that left to his own devices Bush 43 would do so also. Still, demographics don't lie. Minorities had higher birth rates and immigration was overwhelmingly minority. As for movement away from the rural areas to the cities, that had been going on for generations. Still, if you can learn what is going to happen, you can adapt.
The Future Republican Party: Demographics and the Changing Electorate was scheduled to come out in the fall. It was an off year, so no major elections were in the works. If anybody read it, maybe it would change their behavior next year, which was an election year for Congress. We'd have to wait and see.
Chapter 122: Impeachment
1997-1998
The Future Republican Party came out in November, just in time for the New York Times Christmas list. As far as Newt Gingrich and some of the Republican powers were concerned, it was about as welcome as a loud and juicy fart in church. These guys were busy riding the white male vote, and the word that the fast and fun ride was going to stop was not welcome. I found myself doing the Sunday morning talk show circuit and having to face fellow Republicans who disagreed.
This took one of two forms. First were the academics, who argued that the trends I was quoting weren't actually happening (No, the Latinos aren't really growing that fast; no, people really weren't moving to cities; no, etc. etc. etc.) Then you had the politicians, who tried to argue with a straight face that the Republican Party was inherently attractive to all Americans, including the minority groups. The real amusement came when the talk shows then brought out several minority leaders (a vice president of the NAACP and a director of the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference were particularly amusing) to argue about just how welcoming the Republicans were.
I think my best moment in the debate came one morning on Meet the Press. Russert asked me, "Congressman, some of your fellow Republicans are calling you too intellectual. Others say you are being pragmatic, and others are saying you're too idealistic. How do you respond to these criticisms?"
I smiled and said, "Why can't I be all three? Take immigration, for instance. The intellectual in me says that immigrants have a higher birth rate than native born Americans. The pragmatist in me tells me to appeal to this large and growing group of Americans. Most importantly, the idealist in me says that these people are crossing burning deserts and cramming into rusty cargo ships and riding leaky rafts and sailboats to get to this country. They look at America as a shining beacon to the rest of the world. I say to them, 'Join us! Be part of us! Help us hold up this beacon!' I say, from all three viewpoints, I can either be regressive, and hide in the past, or be progressive, and I choose to be progressive and face the future!"
Newt was not amused. I was violating the Eleventh Commandment, 'Thou shalt not tell the truth if the truth goes against our talking points!'
He was still in charge of the House, and still had enough Republican Congressmen to give Clinton a boatload of grief. I couldn't remember when it all came out on my first trip through, but the dam broke on the Lewinsky scandal by the end of 1997. In retrospect, I wondered on occasion if Newt was pushing this so hard to deflect from what I was saying about the party he was in charge of. Kenneth Starr, who had started by investigating the Whitewater real estate mess the Clintons were involved in, just kept digging and digging. In this he was aided and abetted by Gingrich, who was convinced there had to be a smoking gun somewhere, and that he could use it to shoot Slick Willie. When the Office of the Independent Counsel was created, there was no limit on what he could look into, or how much he could spend doing it.
As much as I despised James Carville, the man was right when he commented, 'Drag enough hundred dollar bills through the trailer park, and you're bound to find something or other.' Ken Starr was tossing hundred dollar bills around left and right, and then leaking all the results directly to the right wing media like the Drudge Report and Fox News. 'Fair and balanced' – my ass! Starr probably had these guys on speed dial.
So, for Bill Clinton's 1997 Christmas present to his family, he gave them Monica Lewinsky and a semen coated blue dress. To say it was a national scandal was to put it mildly. Hillary's response was equally scandalous. Half the country wanted to see her divorce him, preferably on television, and the other half wanted it over, but couldn't understand why she forgave him. I asked Marilyn if she would 'stand by her man' if I got caught cheating on her. She looked at me quizzically and responded, "Have you lost your mind?"
I smiled. "I take that as a negative."
"Extremely negative!"
"As in, I'd be divorced before the dust settled?"
She smiled and pointed a finger at me. "Faster!"
I smiled back. "Then I guess I better not let you catch me."
"What was that?!"
"Nothing, dear." I smirked at her.
"You behave!", she finished, and threw in some finger waggings for extra emphasis.
Newt was milking this for all he was worth. He was demanding that Clinton be called before Congress to answer for his crimes. Exactly how cheating on your wife was a national crime was convoluted, to say the least. It involved the fact that he had said he wasn't cheating on her, and had therefore perjured himself in testimony before the Justice Department, through the Office of the Independent Counsel. Considering that the Counsel's office was leaking like a sieve, if he had admitted to it, it would have been on the news before he had managed to get home.