Campaign 2000

Sep 5, 2000 - © John McManamy

"The US spends more on health care than any other country on the planet, but ranks a mere 37 out of 191 countries."


Labor Day marks the unofficial start of the Presidential campaign season, so let's begin with a juicy scandal:

In 1996, Ezola Foster, Pat Buchanan's running mate on the Reform Party ticket, claimed she had a mental disorder so she could receive workers' compensation benefits.

Now, she is singing a totally different tune, asserting she never had a mental illness: "I am perfectly sane," she told the LA Times. As to why she apparently lied in filing her claim: "It's whatever the doctor said that, after working with my attorney, was best to help me."

Ms Foster has every reason to feel defensive. In 1972, Senator Thomas Eagleton was forced off the Democratic Party ticket after it was revealed he had received shock treatments for depression. Ironically, the Republicans who cashed in on the Democrats' miscue had as their stanadard-bearer, Richard Nixon, a man who reportedly popped pills and was prone to paranoid delusions, uncontrollable rages, and strange behavior, who, by his second term, was clearly emotionally unfit for high office.

That may have been nearly 30 years ago, but times have not changed that much. In 1988, the elder George Bush won the Presidency in part by capitalizing on the rumor that Michael Dukakis had seen a psychiatrist. And last year the Washington Post interpreted Second Lady Tipper Gore's disclosures of her depression as a form of damage control, a calculated effort to deflate information that could hurt her husband's campaign.

Alas for the scandal mongers, the Reform Party is a mere fringe of its former fringe self, with few voters knowing or caring what becomes of Ms Foster, leaving her free to blather and bluster and deny her way from here to November. One whiff of a faulty neurotransmitter from Dick Cheney or Joseph Lieberman, on the other hand, and Campaign 2000 would be recast as Thomas Eagleton redux.

Pity poor Abraham Lincoln. He'd be toast today, thanks to his depressions.

But mental health, at least, is out of the political closet. In his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, Al Gore committed his administration to fighting the stigma of mental illness. It only amounted to a line or two in his address, and barely got a rise from the audience, and is probably the last time you will hear the words mental and health uttered in the same sentence from either of the major parties for the rest of the campaign. Nevertheless, mental health is wife Tipper's pet project, which virtually ensures at least token Presidential consideration should the Democrats win.

The copyright of the article Campaign 2000 in Depression is owned by John McManamy. Permission to republish Campaign 2000 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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