Capitol Ideas/Better Dukakis

...He does think that the House and Senate leaders, Democrats all, are his friends...

...It's more that he doesn't know where the battle lines are...

...There's a silver lining, then, if Bill Clinton wins the election...

...The administration showed "no qualms about beating conservatives senseless over policy disputes," but Rep...

...It's unlikely, in that event, that we would now be saddled with the regulatory, fiscal and legal fiascos of the last four years...

...He knows it for a fact because they meet socially and they have a good time together...

...Michael Kinsley of the New Republic is happy to add that Bush is a liberal and never tries to roll back liberal gains...

...171 The American Spectator October 1992 17...

...And they got it...

...Bill Clinton may even recognize this...

...What is that one big thing...

...Meet Rosty, making his way to the 19th tee...

...No distinction is made between a dollar that is exchanged voluntarily and one that is captured by force...

...Enemies...

...Dick Armey of Texas, one of the brightest officials in, Washington...

...At the beginning of his acceptance speech, addressing delegates made up mostly of government-paid teachers, government employee-union representatives, and feminist activists who would be earning a good deal less in an economy undistorted by affirmative action, Clinton spoke deceptively "in the name of all the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules—the hard working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class...

...The real fault line divides the productive and the parasites, the taxpayers and the recipient classes...

...He also touted the Clean Air Act...

...It's not surprising that so many profs are in favor of big government...

...Tojo was an enemy, Hitler was an enemy . . ." He rejects the whole idea of civil war and clings to his more familiar, somehow more comforting, 1941 world-view...

...Liberal Republicanism will finally be discredited, and conservatives will have a chance to regroup...

...What they really want is to get him sacked from his job...

...Both are said to have equal value...

...And he was "proud" to have "strengthened our civil rights laws," without "resorting to quotas...

...B ut this line of thought doesn't get us, very far, I'm afraid...

...extended my hand to the Democratic leaders, and they bit it...

...The problem is not so much that Mr...

...T his case was best put by Rep...

...The real problem is that the federal government is not gridlocked...

...n his acceptance speech Bush showed plainly that he doesn't see the lay of the land...

...Could someone in the White House please tell George Bush about disparate impact...

...He complained for example of the "gridlock Democratic Congress...

...Bush complained about "sharp lawyers running wild," and said he wanted to put an end "to crazy lawsuits...

...which has imposed a heavy regulatory burden on industry...

...The liberals have been able to get almost everything they want out of Bush...

...He doesn't see the real fault lines in American politics...

...Dick Gephardt could "lambaste the President on the floor of the House in the basest of terms and be invited to the White House the next day...

...has in fact frittered it away, and now appears to be in danger of losing to a comparative novice from Arkansas...

...Many Americans suspect there's something seriously wrong, but they don't know where to turn...

...The latter is a burden on the former, not an addition to it, as in the mathematical fantasies of economic theory...

...A dollar spent by a bureaucrat equals a dollar invested in a new company and in sum they contribute two dollars to gross domestic product...

...Spending is out of control and Bush supports any Democratic initiative, after preliminary quibbling about timetables and dollar amounts...

...It was the great triumph of Keynesianism, and the great subversion of common sense, to assert that government spending helps "stimulate" something (production) that it in fact slows down, just as it would be a great triumph of deception for someone hanging round your waist to persuade you that he thereby increased your mobility...

...So when he negotiates legislative deals with his Hill Pals he tends to get taken every time...

...At first, one suspects, he doesn't know his friends from his enemies...

...or at least obliged to produce something that people want...

...They made the mistake of thinking a while back that Ross Perot was what they wanted...

...Now, the Bush campaign says the trial lawyers are supporting Clinton...

...While lobbying for the budget summit that raised taxes and broke his most conspicuous campaign pledge, Armey pointed out, the Bush Administration applied more pressure to congressional Republicans than it has ever applied to Democrats...

...The party is already shrinking fast...

...They want "change," but they are not sure how to formulate this more distinctly...

...He has a lot of friends out there, I can see that, and there's a lot of other people he doesn't know, hasn't sent thank-you notes to . . . He's in a war, but he doesn't quite know where to look for the enemy . . . I am tempted to say that he is a good-natured fellow who learned a lot of things, knows a lot of things, but somehow there is one big thing that he doesn't know...

...Booted out by the American people...

...Many of them would be out on their ear without it...

...Gridlock is a word used by pundits to disparage the old constitutional idea of checks and balances...

...Bush's performance as President can be consistently explained with one assumption: that he quietly accepts the premises of liberalism and all along has regarded conservatives as the great obstacle to national unity and consensus...

...Bush mistakenly trusts Tom Foley and George Mitchell, who do not want him to be reelected, as that he mistakenly trusts Dick Darman and Nick Brady, who do...

...The problem is that it's no longer just an argument, it's the law...

...The Bush Administration has undertaken no such vigorous effort on behalf of any other cause," he wrote...

...This is the argument that discrimination can be demonstrated numerically, without recourse to intent...

...I hear a querulous, Bushlike voice saying in response...

...It's not that he doesn't know his friends from his enemies...

...Bush lamely noted in his speech that "our policies haven't failed—theyhaven't been tried...

...In his acceptance speech Bush said: "I Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...It spent vast political capital "on an opposition party initiative," the largest tax increase in American history, while hardly doing anything to "further its own initiatives: economic growth, spending cuts, education choice, to name a few...

...But Bush not only enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act, a lawyer's dream, but boasted about it in his acceptance speech ("43 million people" had now been brought "into the economic mainstream...

...Ten years ago, the GOP was contemplating "realignment," it's embarrassing to recall...

...It suits their purpose, to pretend that they don't exist and that Bush is failing, not because he takes advice from liberals, but because he is trying to preserve "the discredited policies of the Reagan years...

...In doing so, Armey added, the White House took loyalty to its illogical extreme: believing that Democrats are "supposed" to beat up on the President, but Republicans are supposed to follow him blindly or "face reprisals," even when he abandons the most basic Republican positions and his own campaign promises...

...Would a President Dukakis have been able to do as much...

...It has long been a conceit of mainstream economics that there is a single economy with two "sectors," public and private...

...They allege they "have been adversely affected by continuing discriminatory policies," which "have a disparate impact on women...

...As Martin Anderson points out in his new book Impostors in the Temple (Simon & Schuster, $22), private as well as public universities receive government funds...

...He regularly takes advice from the latter...

...The same blindness afflicts many other Republicans, and Bush has unerringly surrounded himself with them...

...And who does "our" refer to...

...Saddam Hussein is an enemy...

...Bush enacted it last fall, surrounding himself at the signing ceremony with a great smiling phalanx of Democrats, civil rights activists, and NAACP types...

...We're talking friends...

...Even as the GOP met in Houston a class-action lawsuit was filed against Chevron Corporation on behalf of all female company employees in California...

...His social niceness prevents him from seeing the extent to which Foley, Rosty & Co., far from being his friends, are at war with him...

...In front of him were delegates for whom work means networking, who are at the receiving end of the wealth redistribution system, who see kids as potential plaintiffs, who make the rules more than they play by them, and who habitually regard the middle class as the selfish class: notoriously unwilling to have their taxes raised...

...Sure they are...

...This state of affairs applies to some ostensibly private institutions as well as public ones...

...Recently, there may have been some dawning presidential awareness along these lines...

...It's interesting to note that the media never talk about liberal Republicans anymore...

...Why haven't they, after four years...

...The above division of the electorate into producers 'and parasites would dismay him and would confirm his worst fears about conservatives' lack of compassion...

...That's why he has failed to capitalize on the Reagan legacy...

...Voters have tried to gridlock Washington, by electing legislature and executive from different parties, but Bush instinctively thinks in terms of a national unity government and tries to enact the Democrats' agenda—to show that he's a good fellow and not one of those mean-spirited right-wingers...

...Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, now running for President on the Taxpayers' Party ticket (on the ballot in twenty-five states) points out that Bush has signed into law: the Americans with Disabilities Act, quotas dressed up as civil rights, the Clean Air Act, hate-crimes legislation, a big tax increase, spending increases of unprecedented magnitude, and an aid package for the former Soviet Union (whose breakup, incidentally, Bush did his best to prevent...

...They, therefore, must be marginalized...

...In fact there are two economies: the economy of voluntary exchange, and the economy of captured wealth...

...The Democrats were happy to avoid the word "quota" to get what they really wanted from Bush, a new law eliminating one of our most basic civil rights—the presumption of innocence (for employers...

...But if Mike Dukakis had been in office and had tried to implement the same agenda, the GOP would have constituted a real opposition, not a fake one...

...Bush, obviously, isn't really listening...

...Enemies are abroad...

...Bush believes it, Darman believes it, Brady believes it, Mitchell and Foley believe it, most economists believe it, and Harvard and Yale teach it...

...T he Democrats are said to be beholden to the "special inter- , ests," but a better way of putting it is to say that they represent those who would be earning less, or perhaps wouldn't have jobs at all, in a truly free economy...

...With a liberal Republican in the White House, Phillips says, you get two liberal parties in Washington: Republicans tend to put loyalty ahead of all other principles, and so they support the President, usually with the slogan that "he's the only one we've got...

...His collaborators somehow fail to keep their end of the bargain...

...Not the gentlemanly response...

...Principally through funding for research, and grants and loans to students," he writes, "government monies provide about 20 percent of the annual operating costs of private, 16 The American Spectator October 1992 independent universities...

...Phillips believes that four more years of Bush will completely destroy the GOP...