It does seem like they both crawled out of the same orifice...
The Politics Of Pure Serendipity
April 13, 2000
The current political wisdom, chanted in unison by all the pundits, is this: the candidate who is most adept at staying out of public view this election year will win the big prize come November.
This offers us the delicious possibility that we could get through an entire presidential campaign without ever having to set eyes on the two major-party candidates.
Shades of the '60s: what if they gave a debate and nobody came?
Still, even if the candidates are absent, you can tell the political season is well and truly underway. The signs are everywhere.
The networks are doing polls again, for one thing.
The Washington Post and The New York Times take every opportunity to remind us that there are worse qualities in a president than sheer, mind-numbing, power-suited, poll-driven dullness.
The establishment press runneth over with stories about child abuse (in Texas), pollution (in Texas), health care woes (in Texas), bad weather (in Texas) and crumbling schools (in -- yes -- Texas).
And Bill Clinton has uncorked one of the most lethal weapons in his political arsenal: Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, and chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights.
This once-bipartisan panel is lopsidedly Democratic at present, consisting of two Republicans and six Democrats, one of whom -- Christopher Edley -- is a campaign adviser to Al Gore.
Earlier this week, the commission issued a report blasting efforts to replace race-based affirmative action policies with race-neutral, merit-based admissions standards at public universities.
By sheer coincidence, the commission singled out three key electoral states for condemnation -- Florida, Texas, and California -- reserving its harshest criticisms for the two that happen to be governed by Bush brothers.
Dr. Berry acted downright snake-bit at the suggestion that her Civil Rights Commission had politicized its findings. "I can't help it because the governor's named Bush," she huffed. "It's pure serendipity."
I suspect she'll react with similar indignation to criticisms of the commission's next report, due to be released this Friday.
Purely serendipitously, it will find that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (Hillary Clinton's competition for that open New York Senate seat) is a racist pig who gets a charge out of police brutality.
Such is the wit and wisdom of Mary Frances Berry.
Jimmy Carter first appointed Dr. Berry to the Civil Rights Commission in 1980. Her abusive personal style soon became the stuff of legend.
When the forces of darkness won the 1980 election, she promptly declared war on the Reagan administration. In 1984, fed to the gills with her noisy attacks on his civil rights policies, President Reagan fired her.
As Dr. Berry tells it, President Reagan informed her that "I was serving at his pleasure, and I wasn't giving him any pleasure."
Sadly, the firing didn't take. Dr. Berry sued, and was swiftly reinstated. In 1993, Bill Clinton named her chairman of the Civil Rights Commission.
The commission has foundered under her management. A 1997 General Accounting Office report charged that, among other things, it is "an agency in disarray," unable to "provide key cost information," its proceedings hampered by records that are routinely "lost, misplaced, or non-existent."
As for Dr. Berry's temperament, it is notorious. What's more, although she is impeccably left of center, even fellow-radicals have felt her sting.
In her avatar as chairman of the hard-left Pacifica Foundation, for instance, she provoked last summer's meltdown at the Pacifica Radio network with her Stalinesque efforts to impose "diversity" on the network's flagship station, the Berkeley-based KPFA.
On her authority, network dissidents were locked out, subject to gag orders, and, in one famous instance, dragged forcibly from the station in mid-broadcast.
These follies triggered massive protests by Berkeley's aging radicals -- wonderfully called, by one local reporter, "the white ponytail set" -- who took to the streets to denounce Dr. Berry's tyrannical methods ("Berkeley or Belgrade?" shrieked one local headline).
The poor things might as well have stayed home smoking rope, or writing haiku, or whatever it is they do when they're alone. Dr. Berry is impervious to criticism.
Typically, she silences her critics by attacking them as 'racists' (her black critics are, naturally, 'Uncle Toms'). When Pacifica's Peter Bramson publicly assailed her tactics, she wrote him off as a "fascist thug."
Of course, the highjinks at Pacifica were a mere sideshow. Her real life's work is a relentless attack on the right.
This is what buys her the brittle reverence of the national press, and the public support of her fellow-leftists, who -- however disillusioned they may be behind the scenes -- see the practical applications of her instinctive viciousness.
Bill Clinton is nothing if not practical. With Al Gore largely AWOL for the duration, Mary Frances Berry makes a mighty useful surrogate.
And if you don't agree, she'll rip your lungs out.
ELECTION REPORT'S BIAS SEEN IN LEAKS by Steve Miller
The Washington Times
June 6, 2001
Miss Berry has contributed thousands of dollars to Democrats since 1992, according to election records, including donations to the campaigns of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.