Look at Bush. He has worked overtime to give Politics a bad name. He is a mean-spirited wimp and a career bureaucrat who has arguably committed more high crimes and misdemeanors in and around the Oval Office than Nixon would have been Impeached for if he hadn’t resigned ... Nixon was genetically Dishonest, and so is Bush. They both represent what Bobby Kennedy called “the darker impulses of the American Spirit . . .”
And Bill Clinton does not. That is the nut of it. Clinton is a decent man and a credit to his race ... Ho, ho. That’s a joke, Bubba. Bush wouldn’t laugh at it, and neither did Mr. Bill when I shook his hand and said it to him with a nice smile. He gave me another one of those weird, sleepy-eyed stares and wished me good Luck for the rest of my life.
I am now going back to the drawing board to come up with a better and more valid reason to vote for Clinton in November—which I plan to do, but my reasons are no more concrete today than they were on the flight down to Little Rock. I like him a little better, but there was nothing in what he said for the record to excite anybody except cops, money mongers, and elitist policy wonks. The rest is all a matter of blind faith and reading between the lines.
Let’s face it, Bubba. The main reason I’ll vote for Clinton is George Bush, and it has been that way from the start ... There is no way around it (for me) and no reason to apologize for it. George Bush is a dangerously failed President and a half-bright top-level Nerd who has spent the last four years avoiding grocery stores and gas stations while he tried to keep tabs on the disastrous fallout from the orgy of greed and short selling that was the “Reagan Revolution.”
We still have a problem with my inability to explain why I feel very strongly about voting for Clinton—except that another four years of the Reagan-Bush bund will mean the Death of Hope and the Loss of any sense of Possibility in Politics for a whole generation that desperately needs that fix and will wither on the vine without it.
That is reason enough to vote for Clinton. It helps that I like him as a person and trust him enough as a quality politician to believe that I can occasionally turn my back on him when he moves into the White House—which he will, I think—and I will help him in every way I can, short of guaranteeing in print that President Clinton/Gore will solve all our problems and give forty acres and a mule to everyone who votes for him.
Nobody is going to do that. And especially not George Bush. But Bill Clinton will at least try, and that’s good enough for me. He is a high-stakes gambler, and he can take a punch better than anybody since Muhammad Ali . . .
So what the fuck? Let’s kick those rat-bastards out of the temple and put one of our people in charge. We have nothing to lose except fun and the joy of watching a serious brawler go to war with the greedheads. Why not? Let us Rumble.
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Letter to William Greider
January 27, 1994
TO: William Greider
FROM: Hunter S. Thompson
DATE: Nov. 22, 1993
Well, you sure as hell made up for that giddiness that gripped you last time, eh? Probably you started asking him about that goddamn bank in Bangladesh ... Shit, why is it always extremes with you, Bill? Why can’t you find a groove in the middle of the road, like me?
Anyway, it was a magic moment in American journalism—and no doubt in yr. own education, too. I wish I could have been there for it.
But then it wouldn’t have happened, eh? No, I would have handled him, like a matador. He would have focused his dim little eyes on me, & you subwonkish bastards would have roamed Free—and he would have treated you like Girls, with flirtatious little moves & solemn nods from time to time, massaging your Main Points & playing footsie with you under the table like he did in the dimness of Doe’s . . .
Jesus. How long have we fallen? So much for the Rock & Roll vote, eh? We are down with the UAW & the Wobblies.
And it’s your fault. Screwhead. It was YOU that croaked the RAPPORT that a WHOLE GENERATION might have had with the President of the U.S. What kind of berserk hubris led you to pick some kind of stupid PERSONAL FIGHT with the President when you knew that the FATE OF GENERATIONS was in your boneless goddamn hands? What craziness compelled you to SHIT in THEIR nests?
If I were you, I’d move my whole family to a farm in rural Turkey, and try to write poems for a living. That is all you have left. Sorry. Call me.
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Final Thoughts on an Old Nemesis
On April 22, 1994, Richard Milhous Nixon died after suffering a severe stroke a few days earlier. At the time, Hunter was in New Orleans promoting a book, but he extended his stay to hunker down at the St. Charles Tavern, where he watched CNN incessantly and began to write the obituary of the man he’d been obsessed with for more than a quarter century. Nixon was more than Hunter’s antagonist or nemesis; he was a shadow self who served as a living, breathing symbol of the dark side of the American dream, and Hunter’s final send-off required him to rise to the occasion. He pulled no punches.