GOP Returns to the Scene of the Crime

As they wandered in the San Diego wilderness from floor speech to beach party to celebrity-less celebrity bash last week, the conventioneers at the Republican national conclave in San Diego seemed less a political party in search of a leader than a sect in search of a saint. Their anointed nominee, after all, was ill-equipped to do what Ronald Reagan did so perfectly: personify his party as well as lead it, so that all its contesting factions could genuflect in the same direction.

Is there anyone left who could meld supply-siders with deficit hawks, Christian right zealots with industrial self-servers, national-sovereignty populists with world-trade plutocrats, men who hate women with women who hate women, and thus exemplify the meaning of the GOP?

Well, I have a candidate, and it’s a shame she wasn’t invited to San Diego. Though Antoinette Frank could hardly have come. She’s on death row in Louisiana.

You may have read about Frank. On March 4, 1995, she and an accomplice robbed the Kim Anh Vietnamese restaurant in east New Orleans and executed three of the restaurant’s employees.

It wasn’t the carnage at the Kim Anh that makes Frank so ready a metaphor for the Republicans, it’s what she did afterward. Frank was also a New Orleans police officer. After the murders, she returned to the murder scene in a police cruiser as an investigative officer, apparently in the hope that her ostentatious efforts to respond to the crime would hide the fact that she had committed it.

The bold conceptual leap inherent in Frank’s method was already being refined by national politicians. Don’t just deny your sins; present yourself as the avenger who will punish the perpetrators (who are always, of course, someone else). In the year since Frank demonstrated the model, we have seen congressional Republicans put it to excellent use, most remarkably in denouncing President Clinton for the budget deficit, a deficit he has (first of all) cut in half, and which (second of all) was caused by a national debt that quadrupled under Reaganomics in the 1980s.

In true Frankian fashion, Republicans blame the 1980s debt on the Democratic Congress, because Congress holds the purse strings. Never mind that for 11 of the 12 years of Reagan/Bush rule, Congress reined in the administration’s budget and spent less than the president requested. If, as Bob Dole claims, growth has been slow under Clinton, it has at least been growth maintained while Clinton paid down, instead of adding to, the Republican red ink.

Similarly, we have seen Alfonse D’Amato in high dudgeon over Clinton’s alleged ethical infractions, Nixon apparatchik William Safire accusing Hillary of lying and of political skulduggery and Republicans from Gingrich to Kemp to Quayle to Limbaugh who managed to avoid being drafted by virtue of one or another slim excuse, who blast Clinton for the same.

Accusing one’s opponents of committing precisely one’s own crimes partakes of a level of shamelessness that can only be thwarted by strong witness, as happened to Frank. On the night of her rampage, two Kim Anh employees hid in the restaurant’s freezer. When they emerged, Officer Frank demanded that they describe what had happened, and they told her: “You know what happened. You were here.”

But commensurate political witness has been hard to scare up recently and never harder than at the San Diego convention, where the Frankian culture entered a new and advanced phase. The Republicans are now declaring their innocence while plotting the crime, playing cop and criminal simultaneously. How else to explain a party that brags about Kemp’s compassion while coercing him into abandoning it in the blink of a weekend? A party that contends that an IUD is inherently a murder weapon, but a cop-killer bullet is not? A party whose nominee forced his first wife into a shotgun divorce and admits seeing little of his daughter during her formative years, but decries still-married Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village” as a moral affront because it violates his conviction that child rearing is the sacred duty of parents? Or, for that matter, a party that applauds that last rhetorical obscenity, even though its own family-values GOP Congress is the most divorce-prone Congress in history?

It all seems like monstrous inconsistency until you realize that it’s intentionally monstrous. The new Republicans would do poor Antoinette Frank one better--would swear to you while aiming the gun that they’re determined to catch who killed you. Lacking anti-communism and Reagan-induced imbecility to bind their incoherent goals and means together, they need a new figurehead to sanctify what they’re about. The party needs a patron saint. I’d nominate St. Frank.