European Document/Hi, I'm Johannes Rau
Shlaes, Amity
Of course, even in the midst of a civil war normal life adapts. Aside from the war (or perhaps because of it), Lebanon is in most respects a libertarian paradise. There are no exchange controls, for...
...Shouldn't the important question be whether living in a given place con-tributes to one's happiness and sense of fulfillment...
...And although there are no meter maids to hand you a parking ticket, there's also no one to protect you from being shot by the irate driver whose fender you just dented...
...But the Greens are not going to go away...
...Written by one Joan Juliet Buck, it was entitled "New York: Life at the Center of the World," and it went—in part, at least—like this: "To-day, any man who is a real man has to measure himself against New York City, and that goes for any woman, too...
...But he has not been involved in the Social Democratic party's campaign to conduct an independent foreign policy...
...The student hogging the window in your train compartment is still likely to ask in his best ironic tones about that "cowboy-actor...
...As I slipped the magazine back into its rack, it occurred to me that I'd run across a lot of pieces like that lately...
...The reconciliation Rau is after, though, may be hard to find even within his own party...
...HI, I'M JOHANNES RAU Europeans are taking a long time to surrender their jokes about Ronald Reagan's movie theater past...
...a Brussels audience watching Steven Spielberg's Back to the Future laughs loudest when the time machine takes it back to a 1955 theater with a Ronald Reagan billing on the marquee...
...In an earlier incarnation it helped oversee the enactment of Bismarck's social welfare laws, establishing Germany's tradition as a social welfare state, and since the end of World War II it has been the Amity Shlaes is deputy editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe party of unions and intellectuals...
...The center-left SPD is a century-old creaker badly in need of help...
...MAKING IT Standing in line at the supermarket checkout recently, I was intrigued to notice that the cover of the current issue of Vogue—a periodical to which I ordinarily do not pay a great deal of attention—boasted a "special report" on my hometown, little old New York...
...by Amity Shlaes None of these ideological SPD figures, though, is the party's candidate for chancellor...
...In no country is this more evident than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where in 1987 the hoary Social Democratic party has a good chance of electing to chancellor the prime minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau...
...And the prime minister of the state of Hesse has entered into a coalition with the Greens that some Social Democrats see as a model for a federal-level government...
...His low tones and pleasant demeanor at the Ahlen meeting reflected the motto posted under his microphone: "Reconciliation Instead of Separation...
...It offered little more than the usual superficial survey of trendy restaurants, fashionable department stores, and high-toned hostelries...
...There are no exchange controls, for example, so it is one of the few places left where a man can enter and leave with a million dollars and no questions asked...
...I will, as chancellor, initiate action in our alliance and towards the Soviet Union [regarding the matter...
...In Germany, which had an inflation in the 1920s that makes Argentina's today look insignificant and where unemployment encouraged the rise of National Socialism, economic points count more than others in an election...
...that would make it harder to strike...
...They all had that same breathless, hyperbolic quality, as if the writer were trying desperately to convince himself that, yes, New York in the eighties is Mecca, Camelot, and Shangri-La rolled up in one...
...Most relevantly, Stem reports that the traditionally dour Germans are feeling more optimistic than they have in years—some 61 per-cent said they were looking forward to the next year, just about double the 31 percent who had hopes for the next twelve months back in 1981..For such a grumpy country, that's a change more interesting than any momentary shift in election tactics...
...What's changed, though, is that these young Americans—who are now coming, as Miss Buck observes, in greater numbers than ever—are no longer drawn to Gotham so much by its real attractions as by the unprecedented and unrealistic hype of a hundred Miss Bucks...
...Still, the people are optimistic...
...Since then there's been additional hemorrhaging as some voters depart for the new radical environmentalist party, the Greens...
...The SPD-Green coalition in Hesse, complete with a Green party minister of environment, was established after Rau was named the SPD candidate for chancellor...
...Egon Bahr and Willy Brandt say that the party, if elected, would immediately begin working to turn such drafts into real treaties...
...The lack of monetary controls that made Lebanon the banking capital of the Middle East has made it the drug capital as well...
...In the mean-time, the rest of the SPD—which doesn't have the populist role to play—is biting into the government with more than the usual dose of venom...
...Pollsters right now are divided over who will win in 1987...
...Alas, the report turned out to be less than special...
...Indeed, "the duty of everyone alive is to participate in its existence . . . to stay away from New York is to live in the past and to refuse the challenge of opportunity...
...But things went downhill from there, and lately the party has been registering closer to 40 per-cent...
...Back in the early 1970s, when Willy Brandt brought the party to its postwar zenith with his popular Ostpolitik, the Social Democrats were winning nearly 50 per-cent of the vote...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...On foreign policy, Rau couches his statements even more vaguely...
...The SPD faction leader in the Bundestag charged on January 3, for example, that Minister of the Interior Zimmer-man "endangers . . . the well-being of the state" in his interpretation of confidentiality laws in the wake of recent spy scandals...
...Rau believes a little bit of everything, but not all of it," writes commentator Herbert Kremp in the conservative national paper, Die Welt...
...Although Kohl is still viewed as a problem for his party—!'Kohl is a handicap for the Christian Democratic Union," read the headline of a lead story in the national news magazine Der Spiegel this January—Rau's "image success" apparently isn't permanent...
...But there were other SPD winners in the same elections—Saarlander Lafontaine, for example, was the first Social Democrat since 1966 to win a state back from the right...
...True, Willy Brandt paid lip service to Rau's position in the party journal Vorwaerts, telling fellow Social Democrats that "Rau is better" than a more ideological candidate...
...A variety of good old-fashioned plots are afoot in the SPD to woo back the organization's fading constituency...
...There are several different private armies, most of them superior to the government's...
...Rau—like many a West German politician of the left and right—has visited with officials in Moscow and with East German boss Erich Honecker...
...Even thetraffic betrays a laissez-faire spirit: Not a single traffic light seems to exist in the entire country, and the Lebanese driver tends to go for his horn when his more delicate American counterpart would go for the brake...
...the signs are not promising...
...For "the past century has made New York America's capital, no matter what the official truth is: and the last five years have made New York the center of the world...
...It is, as it was a generation ago, the headquarters of American garment production and of publishing, the by Bruce Bawer home of the stock market, the location of great art museums and theaters and the New York Public Library and the United Nations...
...Ironically, places like Lebanon—where the different segments of the populace are busy cutting one another's throats—are in-variably promoted in travel books as having people known for their "warmth and friendliness...
...On the homefront, Brandt's ideological godchild, Saarland state prime minister Oskar Lafontaine, won voters with a heavy-weight anti-NATO pitch...
...Instead the party last September decided, somewhat surprisingly, to go with the 54-year-old Rau...
...Eschewing the diverse attractions of the latest Newsweek, TV Guide, and National Enquirer, I grabbed Vogue and found my way to the "special report...
...Even when they get used to Reagan, Europeans still don't quite understand him...
...But leading off the whole thing was a Bruce Bawer writes for the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and other publications...
...Indeed, he's covering all bases, as demonstrated by his trip to Washington in early February...
...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT...
...Rau wants to win an absolute majority, as he did in North Rhine-Westphalia, but if he is to gain power a coalition government seems almost inevitable (no recent poll has the SPD winning more than 48 percent...
...At a December party convention in the town of Ahlen, Rau swore he would never "snivel or dissemble...
...To refuse is to be a pacifist, a coward, and a ninny...
...The existence of effi-cient and well-financed private armies is a major obstacle to Lebanese unity and political reform...
...The center of the world...
...Back in September, only 32 percent of Germans polled by the national weekly Stern magazine said they'd prefer Kohl as chancellor, while 43 percent chose Rau...
...At the beginning of Rau's candidacy it looked as if the bumbling chancellor, Helmut Kohl, might make up for all of Rau's internal party problems...
...What got Rau the job was widespread recognition that his handsome, preacherly air (his father was a Protestant pastor) and his moderate principles mark him as a new kind of German politician, a change from the run-of-the-mill, puffed-up professional that one is likely to en-counter in Bonn...
...But by December the gap between the men had narrowed to a virtual tie...
...Rau hasn't had much to say about that, either...
...Rau may represent a new kind of politics, but the rest of the SPD continues the strident campaigns of the past...
...went out with Jimmy Carter...
...Or maybe it was Woody Allen's shamelessly romantic 1979 film Manhattan...
...With the rest of his party he opposes a change in labor law currently THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 27 being debated...
...The same differences pop up in foreign policy...
...Television coaching and questions of style are shaking up the old issue-bound coalitions, and parties scarred from forty years of battle under the proportional representation system are working hard to polish up candidates for the coming round of elections...
...or maybe it was the 1977 election of Ed Koch, that 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986...
...Social Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have gone so far as to conclude a model pact with East Germany on chemical weapons, one that in some respects supersedes international agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States...
...Brandt, the party patriarch, and his fellow Ostpolitik pioneer Egon Bahr are busy dropping in on East Bloc capitals and have even signed an agreement with Communist leaders in hopes of reminding voters of their past achievements...
...In his platform the North' Rhine-Westphalia leader hawks a brand of populism that is something novel in to-day's Europe, but it also reminds one of the appealing, conciliatory populism that in the U.S...
...Many Social Democrats feel that coalition should be with the Greens, a group Rau refuses to have anything to do with...
...Although unemployment at 9.3 percent remains high, 3 percent growth is predicted for next year, and the stock market is booming...
...keynote piece that I found myself reading all the way through, and then (since the man in front of me was buying enough groceries to stock a fallout shelter) reading all the way through again...
...He supports cutting taxes for those with annual incomes under DM 80,000 (about $33,000) but raising them for Germans in the highest brackets...
...But the West German economy may in the end be what breaks the "image" candidate...
...This does have its down side...
...Whether the Damascus agreementwill really bring the peace the Lebanese so desperately want is anybody's guess...
...The big lesson politicians here seem to have abstracted from American politics is that appearance is all, and the campaigns for several coming elections are replete with examples of hard-bitten old ideologues sweating to "out-image" one another...
...It is, as it was a generation ago, the city that young Americans migrate to in order to make their lives a little more interesting...
...Why, I wondered, was it so important for them to believe this nonsense...
...It's not, after all, as if the city has, in the past five years, become the center of anything that it was not the center of before...
...The greater irony is the travel books are right...
...We continue to insist," he declared, "that Pershings and Cruise Missiles must be negotiated away, just as the Soviet equivalent weapons must be...
...Attacks on the government's "piggish" social welfare cuts and charges about the "pitiless egoism of the right wingers" came from members of the same party that sponsors Rau's gentle statements...
...Their unofficial—and, opposing Christian Democrats charge, illegal—foreign policy is intended to undercut the government in much the same way Jesse Jackson aimed to upstage President Reagan at the Geneva summit...
...All in all, a visit to Lebanon demonstrates why men born free tend every-where to prefer at least some chains...
...In 1982, Helmut Schmidt's coalition with the centrist Free Democrats finally collapsed...
...In a way the choice was an obvious one—Rau scored a resounding victory for his party in his home state last year...
...Rau's answer to Germany's biggest problem, continuing high unemployment in the face of growth, seems vague and long term: he wants to overcome the "social, technological and ecological challenges" that unemployment represents, a task he estimates will take a generation...
...Maybe it was Frank Sinatra's 1980 recording of "New York, New York," the song of the immortal if meaningless line: "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere...
...I will remain who I am...
...What started it all...
...How could I resist...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
