Suddenly

...Milton Friedman comes in for some particularly nasty treatment...

...Mario Cuomo, properly understood, is a clever but self-impressed sophist of whom the Will of old would have made light work...

...Obviously, a conservative journalist needn't always take the side of Republicans, even if he himself owes much to Republican patronage...

...The tone is tutorial from the very first two words of the introduction, informing us how "proper conservatives" think and act...

...Sadder still, he's seldom to be found deSUDDENLY: THE AMERICAN IDEA ABROAD AND AT HOME, 1986-1990 George Will/The Free Press/417 pp...

...Whether or not America is under-taxed, the same, alas, cannot be said of Will's readers, and after a while you find yourself skimming over the homilies...

...It is depressing enough to find a thinker of Will's caliber emulating the rhetorical power plays of the left—regarding opponents as cranks laboring under one or another "phobia...

...Cuomo too is a big one for governance and the polity and statecraft, and we all know the compassionate results...

...Leaving aside Will's own peculiar manias, one can't quite account for that contemptuous tone in which he invariably addresses the head of our common household...

...So readily does Will embrace media caricatures of conservative "extremists" that you wonder if even his empathy for Judge Bork was that of a fellow conservative, or of a fellow intellectual.tion may one day experience`and perhaps even enjoy"—the "metaphysical overload" a Cuomo Administration would induce...

...Will can only admire that sparring spirit and wonder idly whether the naTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 41...

...Friedman may not possess Will's mastery of "governance—though the various countries which seek his economic counsel seem to have done all right by him—but isn't even he entitled to that "civility" and "propriety" so vital to "soulcraft...

...Less in the spirit of conservatism than liberalism, properly understood, he has a way of turning every issue (even something as innocent as America's shortage of nurses) into a broad indictment...

...The President "is reeling around the ring, groggy from a devastating flurry of hooks to his solar plexus and uppercuts to his chin, punches thrown by himself...

...But he can at least refrain from adding to the abuse of a wounded or maligned compatriot, and hold off on the uplifting lectures on governance, the ideal polity, or conservatism properly understood...

...My, that was a graceful performance...

...Bush's vice-presidential nominee "was so over-programmed that it seemed someone backstage, armed with a remote-control wand, was operating a compact disc—a very compact disc—in Quayle's skull . . ." (By contrast, Will writes in an equally strained attempt at praise, Democratic voters who turned down Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1976 "should have been spanked and sent to their rooms without dinner...

...In Suddenly, a collection of columns going back to 1986, the old George Will is still there, only less often than we might have hoped...

...Dan Quayle too, in those weeks before the election when friends were most scarce, found himself an object of Will's ridicule—he'd "absorbed" his conservatism "in a golf cart...

...But as every writer knows, the well-crafted sentence has a still more determined enemy—vanity...

...Fr his suspicion only deepens as one .1...

...More and more his essays have the air of "public acts," intended to elevate, instruct, scold, reward, or otherwise direct the "soulcraft" in which politicians and political writers like himself are supposedly engaged...

...Like so many who would run the public household, he just needs to stay closer to his own...

...Commentary is necessarily public, but somehow the really persuasive columnists don't make it seem so...

...He can do without people like Infant Doe's parents, and courts like Indiana's asserting by their actions that people like him are less than fully human...

...Friedman is caught...

...As he examined the logic which led doctors in Bloomington, Indiana, to starve to death an infant with Down's syndrome, Will's best traits were evident—relentless rationality, a disdain of euphemism, a ferocious hatred of evil just barely restrained by civility...

...The household is in arrears precisely because his "ethic of common provision"--another favorite loftyismamounts in real life to common congressional troughsmanship, that subtle art of dolecraft by which billions are redistributed in exchange for votes...

...reads his 1986 column, "Mario Cuomo's Sparring Spirit," the weakest of the lot and the moral inverse of Will's "Infant Doe...

...They write unselfconsciously, caring damn little how their piece will look as "a public act...

...What rubbish," Will sniffs...

...To say anything good about Bush is "a Herculean task...

...firm to the end, though, and there's a more familiar and agreeable George Will, forgetting the "publicact" and writing again about his son, those hopeless Cubs, the family dog...

...Perhaps in some academic journal these finely crafted barbs would pass for howlers, but just how they could cause the least distress to the President of the United States is hard to figure...

...This would explain the continued hectoring even now that Bush has shaken off his taxophobia...

...Bush's taxophobia guarantees that the deficit will stifle rational debate about choices for the public household...

...It demonstrates the intellectual poverty of libertarianism, the antipolitical and antisocial doctrine of severe individualism...

...But is it fair to brush him off as a purveyor of rubbish, an "antisocial" misfit "caught" trying to pull one over on us...

...It doesn't occur to Will that when he finds himself eyeing other peoples' wallets, speculating on how much more can be extracted, he has strayed just a bit from the elevated pursuit of soul-craft...

...Later on, we're favored with discourses on "political philosophy, properly undertaken," "conservatism, properly understood," and "vocations, properly pursued...

...The nation's wallet is remarkably thick...

...Alas, the column's "New York" dateline alone tells us what to expect...

...ven more tiresome than Mr...

...About the NEA, for instance, he makes the usual conservative points, but only after dismissing as "foolish" a proposal by Senator Jesse Helms to act on them...

...Nowadays, he writes essays like "Abortion: There Are Splittable Differences," acknowledging "a broad consensus supporting liberal abortion policies"—doubtful points the old George Will would have dismissed as morally irrelevant...

...Like the college editor who first discovers the satisfaction of being feared or admired for his words, Will strains just a bit too hard for the scathing put-down or high-minded denunciation...

...His] monomaniacal worship of 'free choice' —even regarding addictive substances—is less a philosophy than a fetish...

...Our influential scribe has ventured off to spend a day with the powerful governor, returning full of fresh impressions and reassessments...

...In fact, the best thing about that "Infant Doe" column was that it so thoroughly disregarded Will's own notion of political writing "as a public act...

...There are reasonable enough grounds for doubting Friedman's analysis of the drug problem...

...We learn only that Cuomo is a stimulating companion, keeps a demanding schedule, has a "willowy but steely lady" as a driver, put in a "graceful performance" in a radio interview, and quizzed a six-yearold boy with "metaphysical" questions until the child—no match for the governor's sparring spiriturst into tears...

...Simple, unequivocal, and unaffected columns like "Infant Doe" come too rarely...

...On the evidence, Down's syndrome citizens have little to learn about being human from the people responsible for the death of Infant Doe...

...If only he could say it Matthew Scully is assistant literary editor of National Review...

...Professor Friedman, it seems, has a bad case of "taxophobia," Will's sophisticated term, and also favors decriminalizing drugs on libertarian grounds...

...His own son, Will wrote at the end, had Down's syndrome and was "doing nicely, thank you...

...Intimidation, it's fair to say, is not the strong suit of either man...

...more agreeably, without that implacable indignation that gives even the best argued of his columns a tension and bitterness...

...Go back to his previous collections and you find columns with titles like "Abortion and Fetal Pain," "A Trip Toward Death," and "Abortion: The Court's Intellectual Scandal...

...His "low, dishonest campaign . . . squandered the precious commodity of the nation's attention...

...Whatever the cause, all that anger has not been good for Will's writing...

...Life as "America's most influential commentator," as the dust jacket calls him, composing a thrice-weekly chore list for the "public household," no doubt wears on a man, perhaps especially a man of such gifts...

...If any of the grave questions that used to concern Will ever came up, they didn't rate a mention...

...I write (of course) the old-fashioned way, in longhand, with a fountain pen," he confided in his 1983 Statecraft as Soulcraft, in the "firm conviction that the rushing typewriter, with its clackety-clack rhythm, is an enemy of well-crafted sentences...

...Conservatism, whether absorbed in a golf cart or lecture hall or network studio, puts a lot of stock in loyalty, and for all his "inelegant" ways at least Quayle's idea of soulcraft includes this trait...

...Will's L charges of "taxophobia" are the three or four columns in which he refers to "the nation's thick wallet," this to support his thesis that we're "a nation undertaxed...

...The government's wallet is thin by political choice...

...About each, Will does indeed have something worth saying...

...Efforts to "catch" his subjects in fraudulent reasoning are apparently reserved for crackpots like Professor Friedman, for he makes no mention at all of abortion even after having spent the day with its most eloquent defender...

...Indeed, Will writes, the President was not only "monomaniacal" in opposing taxes...

...he's a "lapdog" so "hollowed at the center" as to be unfit for governance...

...Maybe it's just a case of wounded pride, Will having lost the presidential favor he relished in the Reagan years...

...19.95 Matthew Scully THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 fending fellow conservatives in need of help—Robert Bork being the outstanding exception...

...Bush, he writes in the lead paragraph of his first-year assessment, "showed little promise and he has kept his promise' weak variation on the Churchill line about Attlee being modest, and having much to be modest about...