Conservatives and the Democratic 10
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 19, NO. 9 / SEPTEMBER 1986 : Fred Barnes CONSERVATIVES AND THE DEMOCRATIC 10 Is there a Democratic President in your future? In the 1984 presidential race, the...
...We should sever our bonds with the contras—provided the Sandinistas agree to expel Russians and Cubans, reduce their armed forces and forswear the support of the Marxist rebels among their neighbors," he wrote in the New York Times...
...On the new conservative litmus test—aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua—three of the ten Democrats cited as probable or potential contenders for the 1988 nomination actually pass, and a fourth hasn't spoken...
...In the final plenary session of the meeting Dr...
...Schneiders is the force behind the draft-Lee movement...
...Anthony Fauci, who works for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda...
...A final encouraging sign for conservatives...
...If we do not try, we will never know," he said...
...That Walter Mondale and Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson and Alan Cranston and George McGovern were critical was no surprise...
...Were Bradley the Democratic nominee against George Bush in 1988, I think conservatives would have a hard time choosing...
...There's no question that his goals, strengthening America's alliances and curbing Soviet expansionism, are internationalist...
...Pro-life groups were apoplectic, and they've made Gephardt their newest whipping boy...
...opinion, is not a disability that can be discriminated against...
...Somehow, though, he never got around to mentioning Jackson by name...
...My guess is he'd have won 65 percent of the vote if he hadn't been barred by law from seeking a second gubernatorial term in 1985...
...Hart has tried to dress up his isolationist views in the cloth of a thin new doctrine called "enlightened engagement...
...The most striking thing about Robb is his bearing—straight ex-Marine...
...is a biophysicist working in Chicaga A.D.J...
...He'll be back to the Third World stuff again, finding the United States always at fault, whatever the circumstances, whatever racist demagogue that puts him in league with...
...Conservative, these ideas aren't...
...Nor did Congress, as is shown by its subsequent silence on the issue, want to usurp the powers of detention andquarantine given, from the beginnings of the Union, to state and local authorities for the express purpose of preventing the spread of disease...
...Now it's Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Nicaragua and the contras are his problem...
...Being married to Lyn-don Johnson's daughter helps...
...those whom conservatives should consider and who may well run (Robb, Iacocca, Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri, and Governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona...
...He got into an argument, in print, with Jeane Kirkpatrick and Charles Krauthammer last March...
...Nevertheless, three Democrats with 1988 possibilities—Senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn, and former Virginia governor Charles Robb—loudly proclaimed themselves in favor of not just "humanitarian" but military aid to the contras...
...Arguments against testing to find out who is infected are oddly similar on both sides of the Atlantic...
...That brings us to Iacocca...
...For conservatives, having Bradley and Nunn in the Democratic race would be too good to be true...
...A pretty good speech, in fact...
...He's had a running feud with organized labor since he sent in the National Guard during a copper strike in 1983...
...Robb made two important speeches this year...
...Not long ago, Democratic Senators Gary Hart and Joseph Biden voted for a tax reform bill that put the top rate on individual income at 27 percent...
...The most encouraging cure was announced by Dr...
...The Second International Conference on AIDS, held in Paris in June, was remarkable for the complete lack of good news...
...When tax reform hit a bumpy spot in the road, Gephardt bugged out and made protectionism his big domestic issue...
...For all his maneuvering, Gephardt has committed two blunders this year...
...The contra issue aside, Babbitt is one of the more interesting politicians in America...
...Gephardt has been a noisy opponent of contra aid...
...Biden got press accolades in July when he supposedly nicked Jesse Jackson in a speech to the NAACP convention...
...And my, oh my, the response from rank-and-file Democrats and conservatives, tired of the pampering Jackson gets, will be thunderous, and favorable...
...Overseas, foreign workers are barred from entry to Germany if they are seropositive, while in Great Britain a person who knows that he is infected may not apply for life insurance or endowment-backed mortgages...
...He's the closest thing the party has to a successor to Senator Henry Jackson, the anti-Communist hardliner who died in 1983...
...So does his success as governor of Virginia...
...For Robb, cordoning off Nicaragua isn't enough...
...Babbitt has an odd assortment of pro-business, pro-environment, pro-spending cut tendencies...
...In my book that doesn't count as Jackson-bashing...
...But Nunn isn't Jack-son...
...One day soon, I suspect, one of them may realize this...
...Against this defeatist background, the number of AIDS cases caused by heterosexual transmission, particularly from women to men, is rising more rapidly than the number in any other of the CDC's risk groups...
...While Robb could be talked into running, Gephardt and Babbitt already have been...
...He suggested the Mexicans squeeze the "oil tourniquet," something that he had to know would never happen...
...Like Bradley, Robb is a liberal on social issues (Nunn favors a constitutional amendment overturning Roe v. Wade...
...It has become conventional wisdom among Democrats that the party needs a moderate or conservative on the ticket to win in 1988...
...What about the front-runners...
...Bill Bradley, say...
...And when he signs on, he often does so unenthusiastically...
...Abortion is no problem for Babbitt...
...Nunn likes to remain uncommitted on an issue—contra aid, MX missile, Star Wars—in order to wring some concession from the sponsor...
...But you also can tell he's a Republican, Kennedy adds, because he paid the money back...
...That may not sound like much to conservatives, but it's not what national Democrats often say...
...Lots of Jackson-bashing is needed...
...The first case of infection from the "safe" blood supply has been reported, as have at least two from the use of "safe," heat-treated clotting factors by hemophiliacs...
...What's gotten him the most attention is his proposal to "means test" government programs from Social Security to farm credit...
...Joanne Symons, the political director of the American Nurses Association and an influential Democrat in Washington, says that after 1980 and 1984 liberals don't have the luxury of ruling out anyone as part of the 1988 ticket...
...His emphasis haschanged a little, however...
...Stranger things have happened...
...There has also been some additional information regarding transmission of the Aids virus...
...Oh, that will come about in due course once the contras are dumped...
...Tivo of the AIDS patients are dead, while the third has survived for ten months with some improvement in immune function...
...The notorious Mr...
...The opinion issued on June 20 by the Justice Department is unusually clear and soundly-based scientifically...
...Our desire not to know the worst is justified with the reasoning that, since the disease cannot be cured and since one should advise anyone against promiscuity and drug abuse whether or not he is infected with the virus, a test can change nothing...
...He'd voted ten times before against any aid at all...
...Cuomo has made himself the chief spokesman for big government liberalism, a Mondale with charisma...
...Sure, tax reform wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Reagan...
...In other words, only the needy would get benefits...
...Instead of bucking public opinion to adopt a liberal position, some potential Democratic candidates are now willing to defy popular feeling and take a conservative stand...
...Attacking drug use gets more emphasis these days...
...Maybe their hearts weren't in it...
...Louis and heads the House Democratic Caucus, has talked to colleagues about his plans...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 17 Joe Biden...
...Jackson hasn't dropped his radical Third World ideology in which dictators like Hafez Assad and Fidel Castro rank so high...
...Well, things are looking up in the Democratic party...
...That means there's a warm spot in liberal hearts for him...
...And the fact that three leading Democrats are in favor of it hardly means the party hasforsaken isolationism...
...Reporters were skeptical of his flip-flop, particularly because Gephardt got cute about it...
...In several states insurance companies are barred from requesting blood tests for the AIDS antibodies from applicants for life or health insurance...
...He wants them as low as possible...
...Maybe they muffled soak-the-rich yearnings...
...What has happened to AIDS since we wrote our first article in January ("The Coming of AIDS," TAS, March 1986...
...You didn't hear many Democrats at the San Francisco convention in 1984 saying that Mondale needed someonemore conservative as Vice President to balance his liberalism...
...But a report of antibody production in a hemophiliac who had used only the heat-treated concentrate has just been published in Lancet (March 15, 1986), showing that we will probably have to wait until clotting factors can be mass18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986...
...He argues that the more people are permitted to keep of what they earn the better...
...Clever manipulation of inter-national economics can check the Soviets, according to Hart...
...He has passed up races before when there was a clamor for him—in 1972 when Democrats wanted him to run for Missouri treasurer, and in 1974 when New Jersey Democrats drew a congressional district for him...
...Good luck...
...I don't, which is good...
...There are grounds for faint optimism...
...In any case, it's a step in the right direction...
...His style of leadership is different...
...Why waste the time...
...For a fellow so cautious and such an uninspiring speaker, it's amazing that he's been able to make himself a nationally known figure...
...we believe this to be a gross underestimate, though closer to the truth than the reassuring messages issued in the past...
...There are some new measures and recommendations: infection with the virus is now grounds for denying a visa for entry to the United States, but, ac-cording to a recent Justice Department James F Grutsch, Jr...
...But the four who are too liberal for consideration will all probably run...
...Nunn now says the chances he'll run are slim, but he told Paul West of the Baltimore Sun that he's at least considering it...
...But sup-pose Cuomo shocked everyone and ran for President in 1988 as a foreign policy hawk...
...To be exact, it came in 1983...
...He has been treating the infected members of three pairs of identical twins with chemotherapy and bone marrow trans-plants from their uninfected brothers...
...It's what could put a Democrat in the White House in 1989...
...Were Reagan running for re-election in 1988, I concede that there would be no reason to check out the Democrats...
...Reagan couldn't have said it better...
...So the field will have a liberal tilt...
...Forcing the Sandinistas to do all those would be wonderful, but Babbitt left something out...
...But don't worry...
...Perhaps, he said, wishful thinking rather than preventive medicine had been used for too long...
...It had been hoped that heating the concentrate used for Factor VIII preparations would kill enough viral particles to prevent new infections of hemophiliacs...
...George Bush and Bob Dole and Pete du Pont and Al Haig are in the race, after all, and none of them has a proprietary claim on the conservative vote...
...At a breakfast session with them, he declined to state his true preference on abortion...
...But Greg Schneiders, a shrewd political consultant in Washington and a moderate, thinks Iacocca could lead the Democratic party away from its suicidal liberalism...
...But is he a Democrat or a Republican...
...He guessed wrong...
...resistible...
...Alas, I don't think it is...
...Pax reform, spurred by Reagan and Bradley, made a comeback, while trade is an issue of limited durability...
...It didn't appease liberals, but it did alienate conservatives...
...But what about John Glenn and Fritz Hollings and Reubin Askew...
...Bradley took a big step in voting for military aid to the contras last spring...
...This makes liberals nervous for fear that all programs would come to be castigated as "welfare...
...What about democracy in Nicaragua...
...The tactic was a double mistake...
...For the purpose of examining the ten mentionees for the 1988 Democratic nomination, I've divided them into three camps: those whom conservatives should take a look at, though they probably won't run (Bradley, Nunn...
...In one, he said racism wasn't the chief problem anymore in the black ghetto, but "self-defeating patterns of behavior are...
...And it's worked well for him so far...
...If he's a viable candidate, you couldn't prove it by me...
...In the other speech, he said the party's isolationism wasn't merely a false "perception...
...So the Democratic field at least war-rants a glance...
...Liberals, naturally, figure that the moderate or conservative should be the vice presidential candidate...
...Thus Jackson showed up and gave a speech at the funeral of Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball star who died of a cocaine overdose...
...Gephardt, who's from St...
...Babbitt may be on to something there...
...Thus, even if you are lucky enough to have a disease-free identical twin, your prognosis cannot be said to be good...
...Robb says Nunn's resolve not to run is weakening...
...Until 1984, Nunn stayed out of national party politics...
...Every Democratic presidential candidate took himself out of contention for the conservative vote by a single act, criticizing the invasion of Grenada by American troops...
...But that's where the credit ends...
...Who knows what his position is...
...In the opinion he is at pains to distinguish infection from infectiousness...
...Without Nunn, the MX would have died...
...But it wouldn't have without Bradley either...
...It is even worse for everyone else...
...Newsweek suggested last June that Bradley was really conniving to run, but he has persuaded me that he's not...
...More than any prominent Democrat, he has a conservative temperament...
...His aide, Fred DuVal, calls him a "radical centrist...
...Okay, contra aid is only one issue, not enough to decide how conservatives should vote in .1988...
...A consolidated Communist regime in Managua, allied solidly with the Soviet Union, will pose a long-term threat to America's strategic interests," Robb said...
...and those whom conservatives can feel pretty comfort-able in dismissing out of hand (Hart, Biden, Cuomo, Jesse Jackson...
...Though a Catholic, he's always been for legalized abortion...
...Biden says that if a nominee is very conservative it means, ipso facto, that helacks judicial temperament and should not be confirmed...
...As a governor, after all, he doesn't have a foreign policy...
...and A.D.J...
...Bradley is a liberal, I know, but not a New Age liberal...
...Robertson THE COMING OF AIDS II A viral update...
...His position: let's have a treaty with the Sandinistas and don't ask if they'll comply...
...James F. Grutsch, Jr...
...That they did this in the teeth of extraordinary public support for the invasion suggests how irresistible the liberal pull was...
...Trust me, this is significant...
...Maybe they simply succumbed to the momentum behind tax reform last spring...
...On Star Wars, for in-stance, he's voted for billions in funding while attacking Reagan for promising a shield that will make nuclear weapons obsolete...
...Ibddy Kennedy says you can tell he's a Democrat because he took $2 billion from the federal government...
...Since we're dismissing them out of hand, they don't require much attention...
...On Grenada, all the Democratic candidates were willing to criticize, for one reason or another, Reagan's decision to use armed force...
...This appears to mean that knowing who is infected with a lethal disease will not reduce its transmission...
...If they can't criticize him, unequivocally and by name, then they can kiss any vision of getting conservative votes goodbye...
...With Democrats, you're often better off not knowing...
...He leads the charge against Reagan judicial appointees...
...This was the most encouraging development revealed in over 900 presentations...
...But someone else is going to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1988, probably someone with less impressive conservative credentials...
...So does his DLC activity...
...A sizable chunk of the Reagan coalition consists of conservative Democrats...
...Gary Hart is bent on running Mondale-style in 1988...
...They'll even offer leadership in promoting that stand...
...But now he's an active leader of the Democratic Leader-ship Council, whose goal is to pull the party to the right...
...Babbitt lost...
...If a candidate isn't, he might as well forget presidential politics because the liberal pressure groups (women, blacks, homosexuals) will kill you...
...Biden presents himself as a centrist...
...It's unlikely that more than two of the six Democrats worth a look by conservatives will ultimately enter the race...
...Perhaps he'll confront Jackson head-on, not obliquely like Biden...
...When the DLC was formed in 1985, there were predictionsit would rapidly fall apart...
...For example, every public opinion survey I've seen has found that the American people don't particularly want to aid the contras...
...He'd have a lock on conservatives...
...These guys are the liberal hopes for 1988...
...Deal with them, he said, if you want to do anything about the growing underclass...
...By Democratic standards they are foreign policy hardliners, especially Hollings, who has been so bold as to attack arms control agreements...
...Give him credit for sup-porting the Grenada invasion when all his party's presidential candidates weren't...
...She's right...
...Worse, as of now, 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 the four liberals are the front-runners...
...He gives ILAR speeches, denouncing Ideologues of the Left and Right...
...And he's making all themoves for acceptance by liberal interest groups who have so much clout in presidential nominations...
...He's asking for trouble...
...His aides have talked about it...
...In the 1984 presidential race, the moment when most conservatives knew there wasn't the foggiest chance they'd vote for a Democrat came early...
...Still, he's been a crucial ally to Reagan...
...LaRouche has succeeded in getting onto the November ballot in California an initiative that would bar virus carriers from the food industry and schools, and would require widespread testing and quarantine...
...Jackson is the new litmus test forDemocratic leaders...
...While no cure or vaccine is in sight, we know much more about the natural history of the disease, because many people infected early in the epidemic have been followed in surveys for more than five years...
...By lending his stature, Nunn has helped keep it alive and influential...
...Nunn's vote for contra aid was expected...
...Robb tells anyone who cares to hear that Nunn is his preference for the 1988 nomination...
...r„Were Bill Bradley the Democratic nominee against George Bush in 1988, I think conservatives would have a hard time choosing...
...The Nicaraguan people will see democracy elsewhere in Central America and demand it for themselves, Babbitt said...
...The categories, however, make the field sound better than it is...
...Yet without complaint, these three knuckled under on Grenada in hopes of placating the liberal, isolationist wing of the party that dominates the presidential primaries and caucuses...
...It's self-evident why conservatives aren't going to vote for Mario Cuomo, no matter who the Republican presidential candidate is...
...He's completely open to the idea of running...
...The fourth is Chrysler president Lee Iacocca...
...Wrong as they were, they spoke from the heart...
...That amendment—it's the one Nunn backs—will never pass, he said in explanation...
...9 / SEPTEMBER 1986 : Fred Barnes CONSERVATIVES AND THE DEMOCRATIC 10 Is there a Democratic President in your future...
...Democrats have actually grown "hesitant and ambivalent about asserting American leadership abroad...
...His tax reform bill (top rate 30 percent) preceded Jack Kemp's by two years, Reagan's by three...
...It's not likely, but it is conceivable...
...He's courting liberal groups galore, and he's now got the most liberal voting record in the Senate...
...Let's look at the Democratic presidential lineup...
...He is invariably described in the press as "thoughtful...
...On the other hand, we know that a lot is missed: in California a report to the governor shows that there is serious under-reporting of AIDS...
...The writer, Assistant Attorney General Charles J. Cooper, separates disabilities which might arise from having AIDS itself, and cannot be discriminated against, from infection with the Aids virus, which is not a disability...
...But there are other encouraging signs...
...On any given issue except Grenada, he's on the other side from conservatives—contras, Star Wars, South Africa...
...Robb is another story...
...But after a year on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he embraced the contras...
...Finally, the Public Health Service has issued estimates of about 300,000 new cases by the end of 1991...
...It's plain Iacocca isn't a New Age liberal...
...The number of Americans infected with the Aids virus has increased by about 40 percent and is almost certainly between two and three million, the number of AIDS cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has increased from 15,948 to 22,173, and the number of known deaths among these cases has risen from 8,220 to 12,186...
...Gephardt also got into trouble on abortion when he dropped his support for reversing Roe v. Wade by constitutional amendment, letting the states decide whether to allow or ban abortion...
...He's the only liberal I know who uses supply-side jargon about "marginal tax rates...
...His switch prompted peaceniks to sit in at his New Jersey office...
...Bradley had them arrested...
...Grenada was a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates, with a 100 percent failure rate...
...Hart's problem is that he would bar any realistic means for achieving them...
...President Reagan was playing the maybe-I-won'trun game at the time, but that didn't matter...
...They may well prefer a moderateto-conservative Democrat to, say, Bush...
...Even that's a change...
...When I talked to him early in 1985, he had reached the point of believing that some action had to be taken against the Sandinistas...
...Governor Mario Cuomo of New York expressed qualified support for the bill...
...He points out that, when writing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Congress did not in-tend to prevent an employer from exercising his own judgment about whether his workforce is put at risk by someone who is potentially contagious...
...Robertson is a biologist interested in embryology and behavior who works at the Research, Testing, and Development Corporation of Lexington, Georgia...
...He has his own sense of timing...
...Two non-sexual routes of transmission, recognized early in the epidemic, are the carriage of the virus with clotting factors used by hemophiliacs and in blood and blood products used in transfusions...
...This, as you might expect, means he's a lot less acceptable to conservatives...
...He flunks on the social issues, but he was a pioneer on tax reform...
...James Curran, the leader of the AIDS task force at the CDC, bravely apologized for earlier underestimating the disease...
...He can latch on to whatever one he wants...
...He says "bilateral and regional agreements with Nicaragua to constrain the Sandinistas further" are the answer in Central America...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
