Editorials/Rich Kids/Teddy Withdraws
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S RICH KIDS Wherever one looks in this dynamic Republic one sees America's devotion to youth. The staid and austere American of yore has given way to the eternal kid, and...
...By voting for Gramm-Rudman each legislator cast himself in the role of the repentant alcoholic who of his own volition joins Alcoholics Anonymous...
...He can always change his mind and, if 1988 demands it, his tune...
...Congress may have the best of intentions, but its actions belie its noble gestures...
...Public service is," and he lamented that his every good deed was being attributed to presidential ambitions rather than to public service, which in Kennedyese is a euphemism for moral superiority...
...Senator Kennedy now has a respite in which to make his calculations...
...By the 1990s the budget will be balanced, all automatically...
...Here they have recognized their own profligacy and ineptitude in fiscal matters...
...John F. Kennedy always raised the suspicions of the left wing of his party, and Kennedy pere was an outspoken conservative and proud of it...
...Sometimes the performance is suggestive of eagles soaring...
...This year the prize goes to the junior senator from Wyoming, well known for his dogged support of immigration reform (curtailing the number of foreigners coming to this country), and less well known for his hostility to the right-to-life movement (curtailing the Tom Bethel...
...Senate in 1978 (with 62 percent of the vote, reelected in '84 with 78 percent), his father Milward Simpson having held the seat before him...
...them...
...Students of comparative politics agree that the United States Congress is the most good-looking collection of lawmakers on earth...
...Ronald Reagan was a strong con-tender for the 1985 Strange New Respect Award, with his sudden enthusiasm for detente, and his shameful strategy of propitiating the Soviet Moloch with burnt offerings of Poseidon submarines, but in the end I decided to award the prize to Senator Alan Simpson, Republican from Wyoming and Senate majority whip...
...As it demonstrated with its botch of tax simplification, this Congress cannot say no, not to extravagant tax deductions nor to spending...
...Frankly, I would rather be in Senator Kennedy's shoes than in theirs...
...Please do not disturb with too much immigrant riff-raff and too many squalling babies...
...Simpson, 54, was elected to the U.S...
...As James Buchanan, the distinguished economist, is given to observing, Victorian morality once inhibited our Congress from spending beyond its means and burdening future generations with the indulgences of the present generation...
...Upon withdrawing he declaimed, "The presidency is not my life...
...Reproduction was a "private issue," etc...
...Robert Kennedy did notbegin to compare U.S...
...Were they sincere in their vow to balance the budget they would grant the President the line-item veto or the power to impound funds and have done with it...
...policy in Southeast Asia to Nazism until it appeared that flower power would be a force at the 1968 Democratic convention...
...The youthful students of government-in-action were all set for some of that well-known humor when Simpson surprised every-one with a bitter attack first on those lobbying groups that focus on the right-to-life issue...
...Unless, of course, he changes his mind...
...Even Speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neill acknowledges as much...
...Appropriately enough, he comes from the state with the smallest population...
...He was snarling...
...Not surprisingly, our boy legislators do not handle money very well, particularly taxpayers' money...
...Yet are our lawmakers really ready to take the cure...
...Thus they have tied their hands...
...If Republican conservatism brings us to some unhappy end, he can return to the fray with his usual utopian oratory...
...He is tall and lean and engagingly self-deprecating about his bald old pate...
...Kennedys in politics rarely cease to amuse...
...They have admitted that ungoverned by legislation they might bankrupt the country, whatever that means...
...There he meets the people whose respect he really craves, even if they aren't his constituents...
...What good will the Democratic nomination do them if their moderation provokes the Messiah Jackson to bolt the party...
...The fact is that Kennedy's withdrawal merely shows us what chaos the Democrats are in and how clever this Kennedy has become...
...and then on the right-to-life movement itself...
...Commentators noted that the Kennedy withdrawal was a boon to other prospective Democratic presidential candidates, a surprising number of whom appear quite moderate...
...Yet if Senator Kennedy's ideas are flyblown, tactically he reby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...One intern recalls the day (about 1983) that Simpson showed up...
...Occasionally interns on Capitol Hill meet with the senators, who talk about anything that strikes their fancy...
...Back on the ranch Simpson is ole crinkly eyes, squintin' amiably in the sunshine as he says the obligatory howdy in Laramie...
...Actually, the Senator is in fine form...
...What the intern noticed was that Mr...
...If moderation is in season and the Democratic moderates prove palatable to the party's surviving monomaniacs, he can come out as a moderate with idealism...
...Whether he will want to in 1988 is a mystery...
...Right now no one knows their strength or what they might do in 1988...
...I believe the relevant phrase was first used by the Washington Post "Style" section, in an admiring profile of some turncoat, now forgotten, who was said to be viewed in Washington with a "strange new respect" in light of his abandoned campaign promises...
...Eugene McCarthy discovered this in 1968...
...Moreover, Robert Kennedy's shift to the left came only after Dallas...
...Never before has a Congress demonstrated such self-awareness and humility...
...Let's see now . . . maybe it should include the Cabots, the Harrimans, the Kennedys, the McNamaras, the Bundys, and the Simpsons...
...That is what is so touching about their passage Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features of the Gramm-Rudman bill...
...Others have too, for instance, that Machiavel now retired in Plains, Georgia...
...The radicalism goes back no further than to Robert Kennedy...
...Simpson is peculiar," another THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 11...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...As American Spectator readers may know, the Strange New Respect Award is presented periodically to public officials who come to Washington with conservative reputations but once in-side the Beltway succumb to flattery and fashion and acquiesce in the liberal agenda—if possible without alerting the folks back home...
...The presumption here is to recite noble goals as though they were remedies, and as though any sensible person would oppose such goals...
...Whatever he espouses, Kennedy will remain a potent force at the 1988 Democratic convention...
...Next to the drab fellows of the Supreme Soviet there is no comparison...
...Spending, it must be remembered, isthe source of the deficit...
...Today's Congress thinks purely of the present, and so next year the spending will continue apace but with a call for still more shortsighted expedients: for instance, higher taxes and military cuts.^ mains shrewd...
...CAPITOL IDEAS SENATOR SIMPSON'S REWARD by Tom Bethel...
...What separates these prodigal sons from past Congresses is not compassion or their claims of political realism but morality...
...The staid and austere American of yore has given way to the eternal kid, and nowhere is this exuberant juvenescence more apparent than on Capitol Hill...
...The authors of the latest edition of the Almanac of American Politics make the following interesting comment: "Simpson, in Washington and in Wyoming, considers himself part of a secure majority and also part of the natural aristocracy that Thomas Jefferson saw would develop if egalitarian principles were given a decent chance" How's that again about a natural aristocracy...
...The fatuity is that the Senator has nothing new to say about arms control or poverty, and what he does say has been proved futile...
...There, eminences whose predecessors were once wizened and glabrous as former Speaker of the . House Sam Rayburn was wizened and glabrous, are today youthful, amazingly pulchritudinous, and more attentive than the late Elvis to hairdo or toupee...
...number of infants born in this country...
...Simpson won Additional New Respect when he appeared on nation-wide television at the time of the Medvid Scandal (a blot on Reagan's record any way you look at it) and took an unsympathetic view of the seaman's plight (curtailing the number of Ukrainians coming into this country...
...I am still hoping that his good friend Albert Hunt, the controversial Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, will be available to present the award to the statesman from Cody...
...Revenue went up nearly 10 percent last year, but spending climbed at 11 percent despite economic growth and low inflation...
...Genial was far from genial on the subject of abortion rights...
...There was a $20 billion water-project authorization, an opulent $498 billion omnibus spending act, and just days after imposing the Gramm-Rudman yoke upon them-selves the Congress confected an old-fashioned agricultural bill stuffed with friendly funds...
...E D I T O R I A L S RICH KIDS Wherever one looks in this dynamic Republic one sees America's devotion to youth...
...Between 1983-1984 indirect taxes paid by individuals increased 9.4 percent, government revenue rose to $5,536 per person, but per-capita outlays rose to $6,047...
...In the final weeks before voting for this piece of noble legislation, Congress also approved a Labor Department appropriation that was 12 percent above the President's budgetary request...
...Notwithstanding the grumbling on Capitol Hill about Ronald Reagan's cold-hearted economies, federal spending has now climbed to nearly 25 per-cent of the gross national product—three points above the Carter Ad-ministration's record...
...He is known in Washington as a humorist, something of a wag in fact, and his greatest admirers call him Lincolnesque...
...He is devoting his energies, he tells us, to arms control and to the elimination of poverty...
...Despite having taken the pledge of frugality the boys continue spending, and it is unlikely that Gramm-Rudman will stop Of Senator Edward Kennedy's withdrawal from the presidential fray it can be said, and with ardor by fans of the great game of politics, that he will be missed...
...Kennedys, I repeat, have a tendency to change their minds...
...My guess is that they will remain strong and steadfast in their monomanias...
...He recognizes that he probably can win the 1988 nomination at the Democratic convention, and this obviously makes him uneasy, as well it should...
...TEDDY WITHDRAWS to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 When the Senator alludes to the family's tradition of Jacobinism, he is being somewhat misleading...
...All depends on the extent to which radical environmentalists, consumerists, feminists, and other New Age liberals remain influential in deciding the Democratic candidate...
...With JFK and father Joe in the background, Senator Kennedy can transform his family tradition into progressive conservatism any time he chooses...
...Maybe he thinks the Wyoming space is necessary for the entire world,"said a Senate aide who has kept a wary eye on Simpson...
...Then there was a HUD and independent-agency appropriation that was 14 per-cent above the President's budget, and an Education Department appropriation that surpassed the President's re-quest by 20 percent...
...Other times the performance and the bathos conjure up cuckoo birds...
...The same Congress that passed this resolution can rescind or denature it...
...But methinks he'd rather be in Georgetown...
...If the fiscal 1987 deficit surpasses $144 billion, a preternatural process will trigger across the board cuts—uneconomic cuts, possibly, idiotic cuts, perhaps, but cuts...
...Kennedys and their handlers are allowed many dispensations, one of which is to be fickle...
...Before that he had been an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and during New Frontier days he was an adamant hawk...
...Nor is there any comparison between our Congress and the Bundestag, Parliament, or the National Assembly of the suave French...
...This seems to suggest a "pattern of discrimination" on Simpson's part—against people...
...As to Teddy's present lard bucket of prin- , ciples and policies, he offers only presumption and fatuity...
...And surely the nomination will be useless if the candidate is forced to keep the monomaniacs with him by adopting their burning issues...
...Truth be known, on that not so far-off day next fall when promised economies begin to incommode legislators' clients, nothing will restrain this Congress from rendering Gramm-Rudman toothless...
...Any convention that might nominate the Kennedy of the present, that is to say a Kennedy gaudy with New Age liberal enthusiasms, would be hopelessly to the left of he 1988 electorate, barring unforeseen calamities...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
