Capitol Ideas/Out of Sight in San Francisco
American women. The so-called women's movement is nothing more than the feminist movement. Furthermore no reliable polls support NOW's claim that Mr. Mondale's candidacy will be strengthened...
...Almost the first person I saw was Michael Kinsley of the New THE EARLY AYN RAND: A Selection From Her Unpublished Fiction Edited and With an Introduction and Notes by Leonard Peikoff Includes early short stories, plays, and never published excerpts from We The Living and The Fountainhead...
...Even so, I was told that CBS and NBC each had 600 people on hand, and each would be spending about $7 million on the event...
...The press doesn't need to be told by Dan Rather that Geraldine Ferraro is an Italian ethnic from Queens, and I'm sure the same is true of politics junkies across the land...
...These were the first four bulletins I saw on the Student Notices board opposite Sproul Hall: "Move With Us: Aerobics, Stretching, Toning, try your free introductory class any M, W & F at American Baptist Seminary...
...That the future of the child in Buffalo is our future," and so on...
...This seemed odd, since trade unions and military spending are clearly symbiotic...
...hd, 540p $19.95 THE CAPITALIST ALTERNATIVE by Alexander Shand For those eager to find out "what Austrian economics is all about," this book is a good place to start...
...He seemed like a nice enough fellow, though...
...They were standing crash helmet to crash helmet and speaking in conversational tones...
...Then he said we should "get these deficits down"--hardly a stirring message...
...He surely is a man more comfortable taking orders than giving them...
...hd, 400 p $1 6.95 LOSING GROUND American Social Policy 1950-1980 by Charles Murray This remarkable new book explores how the social programs of the last two decades have had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, and discrimination...
...One afternoon I went across the bay to Berkeley, to see what those notoriously radical students were up to...
...Kinsley (who incidentally was wearing yuppie shoes that I think may have been made on an Indian Reservation) pointed out that whereas the media were being paid to attend this convention, the delegates were here at their own expense...
...Add to that comfortable chairs, TV monitors, and a couple of Clairol Air Massage "foot fixers," and you can well imagine that it was standing room only in no time...
...I looked about nervously for Bob Woodward and the Washington Post SWAT team before settling down with a large cup of foaming Pilsner Lite to watch the Cuomo speech on the monitor...
...Yet he is not even termed a left-wing civil rights leader...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 7 The cop took the bullhorn and examined it carefully, as though it might contain a concealed hand grenade...
...She would rebel at being lumped into the so-called women's movement because, unlike our journalists, she recognizes it as an ideologically biased misnomer minted by her political opponents on the left...
...Shapiro made the most succinct and perceptive comment on the news media-convention relationship that I heard all week...
...A blockbuster investigation into the politics and science of cancer...
...In America there is almost no area of private life that the gringo liberal deems off-limits...
...He is glad to be called a civil rights leader, but surely this is only part of the label...
...New Classes, Aug...
...Somewhat like guests at a masked ball they come to politics wearing disguises...
...1 was further reassured by Hendrik Hertzberg, the editor of the New Republic, and by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, that this was an "old tradition...
...Homo...
...When the Democrats are not complaining about deficits, they impute the recovery to them (rather than admit the success of supply-side theory...
...And again he called out "Repent," but this time no one could possibly hear him...
...I must say my immediate reaction was that Reagan had just won the election...
...I asked Shapiro to elaborate...
...Family" was just a code word to appeal to Americans who think the traditional family should be restored...
...Your rights are protected...
...And while on the subject of unequal rules intended to produce equality of outcome, it is worth repeating the interesting item reported by Al Hunt in the Wall Street Journal (and 1 didn't see i,t anywhere else): The Democratic National Committee decided " t o include gays in the list of groups qualifying for affirmative action status in party conventions and on committ e e s . . . Now, the party must actively locate gays to be delegates to future conventions...
...And this was" where we were today...
...When he delivered a line you almost expected him to look back over his shoulder in the direction of off-stage aides to check that he had read it as he was supposed to, and that he was doing okay, and that he really was, after all, a regular decent guy, doing the right thing for his country and for his party...
...The periodical press, I found, were bivouacked several hundred feet from the podium...
...Around him was a tremendous din of catcalls and whistle-blowing...
...that is, by becoming certified as victims and thus eligible for inclusion as one more group in the Recipient Sector--the Democratic party's constituency...
...Journalists were not only interviewing journalists, they were joking about it, apologizing for it, and deploring it...
...Imagine the frowns that would darken the faces of NOW's exalt~es if Mr...
...But at this year's convention, unlike 1980, the rest of the Democrats waved opea-handedly from the platform rather than with clenched fist...
...It was perhaps significant that inside the press lounge, three out of the four TV monitors (sometimes all four) were switched to C-Span even during the periods of network coverage...
...How can they when they seek to "restore" the "progressivity" of the income tax...
...What about special-interest dread and the Era of Post-Watergate Morality...
...He contributed in part to Hoffer's composite portrait of the "true believer...
...In the National Journal (special daily editions were published during the convention) I read that "in normal circumstances the press might flinch from accepting unlimited amounts of free food and drink from a lobbying organization...
...The temperature dropped down to the 50s in the evenings, which made up for a lot of the hot air...
...By parading under labor's banners, they epitomized the rhetorical confusion of the convention...
...So distant were we that the sound and picture from the big TV monitors were confusingly out of synch--like watching a man chopping a log across a valley and hearing the sound on the upstroke...
...San Franciscans took it meekly on the jaw, as the 50,000 to 75,000-strong phalanx came cawing and crowing and shrieking down the street...
...She didn't elaborate, but you couldn't help noticing the adidas-shod, pale-pink-preppie shifted yuppies in among the blue collars and the railroad hats...
...I f the Democratic party can't afford to pay for the hotel rooms of its delegates, it would seem that there's not enough...
...Somehow this surprised me...
...Their goal, it seemed to me, was to arrest their downward mobility by manipulating government...
...Network television then broadcast this agreeable pandemonium coast to coast, and everyone liked it except for the party leadership...
...Powerful...
...They had tried for three years to stick President Reagan with this one, to no avail...
...Marx...
...HsingI...
...Great for your mind...
...3...
...Reagan can't simply hide behind a study...
...But for hardship assignments like political conventions, the top priority is survival and that is why the lounge was so crowded on opening day...
...He was wearing a cream-colored suit and looked more like a lawyer than a journalist, most of whom were wearing regulation woodwards--navy blue blazer, grey slacks, and button down shirt with tie firmly in place (top button undone for investigative work only...
...The results confuse journalists and t o u r i s t s alike...
...This lounge, frequented by as many of 3,000 journalists a day, provided us hacks with free food (ham rolls, roast beef and horse radish, pizza rolls, hot dogs) coffee, tea, Pepsi, Coke, and even an endless supply of free beer...
...Everyone was saying that there were 15,000 media here for the convention, outnumbering t h e delegates four to one...
...I can do no better than quote the words of Jude Wanniski in last month's American Spectator: " I f the President does not offer the voters a specific" tax reform proposal during the campaign, he will be unable to refute the Mondale charges [that the Republicans plan to "increase taxes on the poor and middle class, through some form of national sales tax"l...
...As Michael Kinsley wrote a few weeks ago in the New Republic, yuppies are downwardly mobile, finding it increasingly difficult to live in the style their parents took for granted...
...God bless America...
...Later we were joined by Robert M. Kaus, formerly of the Hollings campaign, and Jonathan Alter o f Newsweek, which made us a Washington Monthly alumni quartet...
...Actually so devoted to government interloping has the American liberal become that it is more exact to call him a socialist, albeit a socialist who knows not the writings of Dr...
...and behind h e r - - behind the AIDS patients dressed in white--was a motley assortment of clergymen, from various denominations...
...The Joy of Moving...
...584p $19.95 THE APOCALYPTICS-Cancer and The Big Lie by Edith Efron With sizzling style Efron makes intelligible to the general reader the truth about cancer-and the distortions which have been fed to a hysterical public...
...All his favorite foreign countries are socialist, some being decidedly totalitarian...
...Cohen added that, although it was true that railroads generally do get favorable press treatment, this was more a matter of "nostalgia" than of sold souls, and I fully agreed with that, too...
...Had all this gone by the board...
...We believe in a single fundamental i d e a . . . " he bellowed...
...The Newsweek people had binoculars on their desks, and I was behind them...
...1 would gladly have stayed there for the rest of the week...
...I caught sight of Morton Kondracke of the New Republic charging along with another journalist at his heels, and Kondracke was crying out to anyone who would listen: "Where's the Cuomo press conference...
...When I held my arm out straight, the tip of my little finger obscured the podium...
...Yet for reasons that remain inscrutable to me very few American liberals want to call themselves socialists...
...Rather she is a mainstream American woman with normal expectations from government and society...
...T h a t evening I went to a smart media party given by the National Journal at the Circle Gallery, close to Union Square...
...Toward the end of the parade came excommunicated Mormon and presidential candidate, Sonia Johnson, and a small knot of her feminist faithful...
...But then I reflected that Mondale was perhaps half right, when he said that the Republicans will do the same, because at least some of Reagan's aides have been thinking about yet another tax increase...
...So l relaxed and contrived to enjoy, my beer and pizza...
...This would be tolerable in almost anyone except the President of the United States...
...If it was good enough for Victor Navasky of the Nation, and Ron Reagan, covering the event for Playboy, it was good enough for me...
...By all odds she is now the woman most competent to run our government, and she remains a Democrat...
...Can you do this some other time...
...hd, 220p 824.95 I ORDER FORM [Use this order form or photocopy} I ITEM PRICE | SUBTOTAL | N,Y...
...Then I walked down Telegraph Avenue and the first book store I came to had just about everything ever published by C.S...
...The world's oldest internal martial art has important benefits for today...
...From his lurid analyses of our domestic condition, abounding as they do with gruesome tales of huddled masses and rich exploiters, it is apparent that his lot is with the fabulists of socialism...
...Maybe they've had their day, I don't know...
...In most of their countries a liberal is a citizen who eschews government involvement in private lives...
...And they need policies to suit...
...Imagine having to phone one's editor in the midst of this melee, and being told that one had just missed some vital development--a Cuomo press conference or whatever--that a wire service reporter had chosen to treat as "news...
...Gomorrah for a Tomorrah !" "That's the good thing about America," said Bob Bible...
...Why don't you forget about i t ? " said Badge No...
...asked the policeman...
...Cuomo must have been delighted to find that he could use the words "family" to describe the entire country, and yet encounter almost no criticism from the very people who specialize in using words for a living-the press...
...came reverberating loud and clear across Market Street...
...Liberalism is another term bound to confuse our guests...
...Many bystanders were no doubt affronted but were too outnumbered and too afraid to register any protest...
...Eventually a Cuomo aide appeared, and r i l E AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 9 CAPITOL IDEAS (continued from page 9) Newsweek told me that at no earlier convention had he been so far from the action...
...Read the Bible While You're Able...
...What I meant to say was that none of my conservative friends could understand what all the hullaballoo was about...
...It's sad that unions are no longer representative of what they set out to be," Lili said, gazing out at the marchers...
...Today he is a peace activist...
...The Democrats' new-found enthusiasm for reducing the deficit struck me not only as politically inept (the Republicans got nowhere with it for twenty years), but as incoherent...
...There was a glint rather than a gleam in her eye, and she read a dull little speech through granny glasses...
...State residents add sales tax | Shipping & Handling US Po• S2.25, UPS $3.50 | TOTAL: Republic (he writes the TRB column...
...The sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of a l l . . . We must be the family of America, we recognize that at the heart of the matter we are bound to one another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems...
...Then they abandoned them...
...Again, when Mondale gave his acceptance speech on Thursday night, you sensed in him a meekness that spilled over into sheepishness...
...It was a nice sunny afternoon, and everything seemed very quiet and peaceful by comparison with the Democratic Convention...
...but she is no feminist...
...But then yuppies do not really have trade Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...As an Italian Catholic," added Wall Street Journal reporters Dennis Farney and David Rogers, "he doesn't just talk about 'family' and 'flags,' he also seeks to wrestle them back as issues for Democrats...
...This amazing promise was followed by a stunned silence of perhaps half a second, followed by tepid applause...
...And of course one has no more confidence in the people that will be advising him than one did in Jimmy Carter's court...
...And perhaps that is why the presence of so many reporters had a dispiriting effect...
...At the end of it she raised her fist, not her open hand...
...Mondale strikes one above all as a deferential soul, perhaps having been rebuked once too often in childhood...
...By now Bob was surrounded by five very large cops in motorcycle gear...
...I asked Kinsley if he could think of a media angle...
...not self-consciously joining the working class, like Selden Osborne in the thirties, but tumbling into it willy-nilly...
...Mondale's candid statement should at least have the beneficial effect of preventing the Republicans from hiding behind their Treasury tax study, due out in December...
...The enthusiasm for him at the convention seemed to be uncritical to say the least...
...So they took steps to restore predictability and order to the proceedings, which in turn became so dull that not many people wanted to watch them anymore...
...Likewise, Geraldine Ferraro appealed to the truth that "Americans want to live by the same set of rules...
...No U.S...
...Alex Brummer of the Guardian (England) described Governor Cuomo as looking " l i k e a Chicago g a n g s t e r . . . He looked like he'd just walked out of an Al Pacino film...
...Old Mondale came to the mike and said we should "get these God-awful nucalar weapons under control," by which I suppose he meant that the U.S...
...1 and 2 . " "Empty Gate Zen Center of Berkeley Announces a Visit by Master Dharma Teacher Mu Deung Su Nim (Free Public Talk, Wed., July 18...
...Hundreds, or thousands, of reporters covering the sam'e event tends to result in a uniformity of interpretation for this reason...
...The great unexpected pleasure of the Convention Center turned out to be the Railroad Press Lounge, a huge press freebie sponsored by the Association of American Railroads...
...should stop using the latest technology in building them...
...Mondale's candidacy will be strengthened by a feminist running mate...
...That is truer than ever after Mondale's nationally televised speech...
...Here we were still in our starting blocks and he had completed the first lap...
...T'ai Chi Ch'uan...
...Under the rubric of "dignity" (a codeword that usually means indignity), the Democratic platform further advanced the cause of homosexuals by pledging: "We will assure that sexual orientation per se does not serve as a bar to participation in the military...
...How can they when they support affirmative action--an explicit recognition of the claim to preferential treatment by virtue of group membership...
...Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, Tolkien, and George McDonald...
...Bob Bible lacked the necessary permit...
...Mondale had invited UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick aboard...
...Beware...
...He lifted his bullhorn to his lips, and his admonition "Read the Bible people...
...Then Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac o f American Politics and a Washington Post writer, came over and shared some of his findings with us...
...First the networks made the conventions dull," he said...
...union interests at heart...
...The AFL-CIO protest parade was just beginning to file down Market Street, and so we went to watch it for a while...
...A fascinating view of the development of a master storyteller...
...Gay Rights Now...
...Jackson...
...And that was the last we heard from Bob Bible...
...W e l l , that is enough for one convention...
...Moreover, CSpan and Cable Network News were taking over the gavel-to-gavel coverage, and as more and more people have access to these alternative channels the political junkies who actually enjoy watching politicians give speeches will switch to them, and the networks' role will diminish further...
...Mel Elfin of (continued on page 48) When I went into the Convention Center later that day, my heart sank: It was nothing but a great big milling scrum of about ten thousand people circulating about endlessly, each with a necklace of credentials, and most of them further festooned with badges and buttons...
...On the day before the convention began I bumped into Lili Osborne, Eric Hoffer's friend, a block or two from Moscone Convention Center near Mission Street...
...My goodness, Geraldine Ferraro had only just been named by Mondale, and Barone had already been all over her Queens district, up and down Queens Boulevard, up to her office, back and forth, and he had collected a thousand bits of data and probably by now had them stored in a computer...
...Wouldn't it be a good thing to have your own p a r a d e . . . " As the cop spoke (and there are no name tags on these San Francisco cops), Bob put his bullhorn up again and called out, "Repent...
...He asked me what I thought about the Ferraro choice...
...But the Democrats have no intention of instituting such rules...
...The crowd waited with extraordinary patience for nearly an hour...
...C-Span thus becomes the first true "medium," like a clear pane of glass between the event and the viewer...
...We've got this problem with people who might get violent...
...In Central America last June he actually spoke of the International Monetary Fund, which pours billions of dollars in loans into the Third World, as an institution that has "raped Latin America o f its resources," andhe called the Panama Canal an American "badge of disgrace...
...Later on it occurred to me that it belied Elizabeth Drew's complaint that too much money is flowing into politics...
...The leader, a man in his thirties with a cropped beard, wore a crash helmet, and he said his name was Bob Bible...
...The next day Ferraro and Mondale 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 came to an open-air welcome rally on Market Street...
...He was referring to the much reduced network coverage this year...
...1674...
...I knew I would never have thought of it myself...
...But I must hand it to Walter Mondale for making the one utterly forthright promise of the convention--the promise to raise taxes if elected...
...Mutuality...
...My heart went out to the daily press...
...Very few of the opponents of Ronald Reagan are termed left-wing, though most of these so-called reformers have moved steadily left for years until some are downright radical...
...As for the substance of Democratic party policy, what is there to say that hasn't already been aired and mulled over...
...Joan Mondale (Joan of Art) had evidently dieted to the point of emaciation, and her daughter Eleanor looked as though she was planning to attend some punk-rock event, with her loose pink tie and mid-calf grey pants...
...There was something really depraved about this collective act of defiance--an attempt to represent choice as victimization ("We demand massive federal funding to end the AIDS epidemic"), and to neutralize opposition by selective appeal to Christian virtue ("Bigotry is Immoral...
...qpb, 242p 81 1.50 HAYEK ON LIBERTY by John Gray Gray shows the importance of Hayek's theory of knowledge and its connection to Mill, Nozick and Friedman...
...He has a sense of humor, and I didn't get the impression that he was an ideologue...
...I made my way to the floor during the parliamentary warm-up (we were allowed there for 30 minutes at a time) and I met Walter Shapiro of Newsweek (another Washington Monthly alumnus) talking to Murray Kempton (Newsday...
...The only exceptions were three or four men from Long Beach, who stood on a corner carrying tremendous, sail-sized banners ("No...
...One wonders whether the media will find it possible to ignore this bombshell in 1988, if the same rule still obtains...
...Consider the Rev...
...In fact some delegates-those swearing fealty to such special interests as labor--were financed...
...It covers many areas and contrasts Austrian with monetarist, neo-Keynesian, and socialist views...
...How Hayek influenced political practice is examined as is his system of ideas as a whole...
...Well, don't worry Richard...
...Richard Cohen was a little bit more candid when he wrote in the Washington Post that what many people "need are political leaders who understand that for many the conventional family is a bygone thing...
...Some paraders came by with a street-wide sign: "Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group...
...marching along with it, protesting Reaganism with it at the outset of the Democratic Convention...
...The idea of family...
...even he was immediately swallowed up by a globular cluster of reporters and cameras and microphones...
...Intervention in Central America...
...Can you do this in the name of Jesus...
...You haven't been reading the Bible...
...The Bible says they're an abominat i o n , " said Bob...
...Thing is, we've got 50,000 people here," one said, very close to Bob...
...How can they, when they seek to encourage some Americans to live at the expense of others...
...He found it to be unconstitutional...
...San Francisco is certainly a beautiful city...
...When he brought up the budget deficit, I noticed, the people in the press lounge didn't even bother to look up from their food...
...And consciously or unconsciously, everyone knew that this was a deeply depressing state of affairs...
...Once upon a time the conventions were uproarious and interesting and unpredictable, he explained...
...Someone told me the distance was 450 feet...
...Her husband Selden, a Stanford graduate, had joined the longshoremen in the 1930s, believing, as people then did, that the revolution would originate with the working class...
...Eric, of course, had been a longshoreman (he died in San Francisco last year), and Lili told me that she herself had joined the Seafarer's International when she was a tuna- and sardine-packer in Monterey...
...that she was a pro-abortion left-winger who in a former age might very easily have been excommunicated from the Catholic C h u r c h . . . but what I stumbled out with was: "She doesn't balance the t i c k e t . . . " "Interesting," said Barone, clicking the verdict into his computer...
...Show God you appreciate it by reading the Bible...
...368p $23.95 THE RESOURCEFUL EARTH edby Herman Kahn and lulian Simon Contrary to environmentalist predictions of widespread disaster, the authors conclude, "If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now...life for more people will be less precarious economically than it is now...
...Could you be Christian and do what we ask you to do...
...Next came the gay/lesbian protest parade, coming down Market Street in the opposite direction...
...The New York Times responded that Cuomo had demonstrated "that it is possible to carry the battle to Ronald Reagan on terms and territory that he had previously made his own: the terms of family and traditional v a l u e s . . . " It is possible, yes, but only with a little help from an "adversary press" that turns into a bodyguard press when the liberal agenda is at stake...
...read the typical yuppie placard...
...I need to preach, don't I?" Bob said...
...The thin-lipped and pointyjawed Ferraro conveyed a sense of ambition that bordered on the ruthless, I thought...
...Then he strode off in search of more data, and I knew that within an hour or so he would be another lap ahead...
...The Democrats will provide them...
...I take this to be a sign of improvement within the party...
...In response there was a steady chant: "Gay Rights Now...
...The Democrats this year evidently felt obliged to disguise their increasingly liberal (leftist) ideology with conservative labels and symbols--talk of "family" and the waving of American flags...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
