THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 11, 1996 TAG: 9610110502
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 82 lines
It has been a tough season if you make your living as a conservative political humorist, and the strain was beginning to show Thursday afternoon on P.J. O'Rourke.
There aren't many truly conservative political humorists to begin with, and fewer still who are truly funny. O'Rourke is both, but the humor was showing a bitter edge as he chiseled an early epitaph for the Bob Dole campaign over a club soda and a cigarillo at a bayfront hotel.
Virginia Beach is a Republican town in a Republican state. Asked what he could say to cheer up the home team in a speech he would give that evening, O'Rourke could only answer: ``Not much, I'm afraid. Not much.''
``I haven't even watched the debates,'' he said. ``Too depressed.''
O'Rourke, whose books, essays and lectures prove that conservative commentators need not look and sound as though they suck lemons for sustenance, was in town for a talk to the Virginia Beach Forum at the Pavilion Convention Center.
If the gloom of the political season was still weighing on him, he didn't let it show as he turned a jaggedly funny wrath on politics in general and politicians in particular. It was a mix of Mort Sahl and Mark Twain, with just a tiny touch of Will Rogers - though one gets the feeling that O'Rourke has met a lot of men he didn't like.
``Look at the four most important political figures in the U.S. today,'' he said, naming Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich.
``Now, would you hire any one of them to mow your lawn?''
Dole, he said, would be on his knees cutting individual blades, as Gore talked to the dandelions and Gingrich tried to trim the name ``Newt'' into the lawn.
``Clinton,'' he said, ``would not be able to make up his mind: `Do the front yard first, or the back? Rotary mower or Reo? Mow first, or rake?'
Sooner or later, he said, ``Clinton would give up and be inside raiding your fridge and flirting with your babysitter.''
His primary topic, ``The Politics of Worry,'' was a well-practiced discourse on what he sees as a liberal-Democrat philosophy that all is woeful in the world, and that only a well-greased, big-spending central government can make everybody ``smarter, taller, richer, and take strokes off your golf game.''
As O'Rourke sees it, things have never been better, and people ought to recognize that and cease their whining about the ills of the world.
``There is no threat of war. The Soviet Union is just a disjointed group of individual states with too many K's and Z's in their names. They're nothing but armed Scrabble contestants.''
China, meanwhile, is too busy on its ``conquest of the world's shower flip-flop market'' to be a threat.
``In general,'' he said, ``life is better now than it has ever been. If you people think there's some Golden Age out there that you missed out on, then let me ask you to do one thing: Go visit King Arthur's dentist.''
Earlier in the day, O'Rourke confessed to mystification as to how the Republicans had seemingly squandered a mandate to govern after they chased the Democrats from congressional leadership less than two years ago.
With Clinton leading most polls by 20 points or more, even conservative commentators - O'Rourke among them - are beginning to wave the white flag.
In his talk, he compared the campaign to the summer's election in Russia: ``Here you have the two most important nations in the world holding elections, and the No. 1 question is, `Is one of the candidates dead?'
``It turned out Yeltsin is still alive. With Dole, the jury is still out.''
So how did it all go so wrong? ``I don't know,'' O'Rourke said. ``I can't quite figure it out.''
Arrogance, he said, may have been the GOP's greatest sin.
``They had a mandate to govern, but there's a big difference between a mandate to govern and a mandate for revolution.''
Still, as he said later in his speech, the sky is not falling, despite politicians having become ``professional Chicken Littles.''
But if people are satisfied with turning their lives over to the government, he warned, ``We really will wish the sky was falling.''
MEMO: P.J. O'Rourke, the former editor of National Lampoon magazine,
has written eight books, including ``Parliament of Whores'' and ``All
the Trouble in the World.'' He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone
and The American Spectator magazines. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
P.J. O'Rourke addresses the Virginia Beach Forum Thursday. by CNB