[Vision2020] Wild Woman Chenoweth

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Helen Chenoweth: An Appreciation.
Wild Woman
by Michael Currie Schaffer
The New Republic
Greetings:

We were all wrong in believing that Doug Wilson was the first neo-Confederate in Idaho.

The New Republic 10.05.06
Helen Chenoweth: An Appreciation
Wild Woman

Among her many political accomplishments, Helen Chenoweth was responsible for what was almost certainly the best dependent clause in the recent history of American journalism. In a 1996 New York Times profile, the Idaho Republican, then a freshman member of Congress, was outlining her support for the Confederacy's states-rights take on the Civil War. But the Times' Timothy Egan saw fit to preface her comments with this remarkable opening caveat: "Though she is not in favor of slavery..."

Since Chenoweth, who died Monday at age 68, had gleefully embraced an array of other positions similarly unacceptable in civilized company, the clarification might actually have been necessary. A fire-breather even by the unreconstructed standards of the GOP's class of 1994, Chenoweth (who married just before she left Congress and became Chenoweth-Hage)popularized the notion that federal agents were secretly using black helicopters to spy on her constituents, and she even held a hearing on the matter. She sought to require U.S. law enforcement officials to get local permission before carrying firearms into a county. She served guests canned salmon not in spite of the fish's status on the endangered species list, but because of it. She proudly called herself "congressman," and she said that white, Anglo-Saxon males were America's true endangered species.

Back in the early days of the 104th Congress, the press lapped it all up. In a town full of phonies and panderers, here was the genuine article, an authentic wild woman of the wacky, wacky west, with a beehive hairdo and everything. But Chenoweth's shtick lost some of its exotic appeal in the spring of 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing introduced the coastal elites who once gawked at Chenoweth to the real live rage of the militia movement. Chenoweth, it turned out, had ties to the militias, several of whose members had helped her get elected. And her own comments in the wake of the deadly attack were hardly reassuring: Searching for just the sort of root-cause explanation her party now disdains, Chenoweth speculated that the bombings were a result of "public policies that may be pushing people too far." Her remarks included yet another brilliant dependent clause: "While we can never condone this..."

Despite all of Chenoweth's efforts to roll America back to an age of log cabin simplicity, modern political life plowed right ahead. By the time she left Congress, adhering to her own three-term limit and not running again in 2000, Chenoweth's tribe of true believers were already on the way out, replaced by (or converted to) the sort of career politicians she had despised. Today, Chenoweth's brief turn on the national stage already looks like a more innocent era, a time when our terrorists were home-grown boys with Ryder trucks, a time when our bloviating televisual rebels were against the government rather than for it. A time when vast federal conspiracies to spy on presumably law-abiding citizens were kooky and creative and implausible and outrageous--and not, you know, true.

In turn, the modern GOP looks back through rose-colored glasses at Chenoweth's feisty cohort, who have achieved a hallowed status akin to the pioneers of her own Idaho. If the party loses its majority this fall, the debacle will rightly be blamed on the fact that the sagebrush rebels of 1994 died when they came to Washington. Far from the bracing democracy of the frontier, they became city slickers besotted by compromise and manipulated by the capital's army of handlers and hacks--the black helicopter pilots of contemporary politics.

Perhaps it's fitting that Chenoweth went on to that great unregulated federal wetland in the sky just as her erstwhile comrades are facing their own Appomattox. She wasn't the last Republican lawmaker whose Confederate sympathies would lead to trouble--a certain Virginia senator can attest to that. But, with Chenoweth, there was the quaint notion that her public utterances about the Civil War--and maybe even about the black helicopters--were based on something akin to principle. Rest in peace, congressman.

Michael Currie Schaffer is a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer.