Capitol Ideas/The End Is Nigh
Bethell, Tom
The End Is Nigh As I write, at the end of Septem- ber, the conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton will win the election. The feckless Ross Perot, who poses as an outsider but seeks to implement...
...Johnson's qualification was that, as a result of his philandering, he had become infected with the virus that supposedly causes AIDS...
...But the Soviet Union is no more...
...The true purpose of the AIDS commission, of course, is to promote destructive needle-exchange and yet more radical sex-education programs at the federal level, and to generate public pressure for increased AIDS funding at every opportunity...
...There...
...Global ambition goes hand in hand with big government, which is why we should look askance when Anthony Lewis and his friends accuse the U.S...
...There's no way it could have happened...
...post-election analysis...
...Bush himself has said that he will cut them—not very convincingly, of course, but at least he has not said that he will raise them...
...ow did Bush manage to get into H such a fix against such a potentially weak candidate as the Governor of Arkansas...
...Fortunatelyfor us, their fantasy of life steered and guided by progressive opinion is undermined by the media's unrestricted license to embarrass and expose each and every pol who rises to power...
...Budget Director Dick Darman told friends in New York the other day that "if we lose this thing," it will not be difficult to apportion the blame: first, to the "Reagan deficits...
...He appointed his own tormentor to the commission...
...If the demystification proceeds much further, voters may at last begin to question why they have to contribute so much of their hard-earned money to support this vast, deadweight class of parasites on the public payroll...
...In England at least, the emperor (or empress) may actually be walking along without any clothes at this moment...
...If Perot is in the race, Bush will be running against two candidates who have promised to raise our taxes...
...As recently as last year it could plausibly be argued that We did, for military reasons...
...One wonders if Bush even understands that AIDS itself is the most politicized disease in history...
...paradoxically, this great change in the world has undermined the GOP...
...I wanted to end up saying something nice about Bush, who is after all a nice man...
...Some members of the American press, our moral tutors, would like to see vast powers vested in Washington today (ensuring that we avoid greed, use condoms, shun homophobia, etc...
...He was admired because people realized that he stood for something more than the mere aggrandizement of government power...
...The latter was a continuation of the former, we will be told, and in the end they both failed...
...On balance I prefer the modern version...
...If Bush does not go along, the commission will use its media access to embarrass him...
...Pollsters have found that when they outline the Bush and the Clinton economic programs to voters, without identifying their authors, the voters prefer the Bush plan—until they are told that it is the Bush plan...
...This is not a stable recipe...
...likewise when he left it...
...There's no reason to suppose that a President Clinton will be spared highly critical press treatment, after a brief honeymoon...
...n the New World Order that Bush mentioned but misconstrued, we no longer need a big federal government...
...He would be well advised, however, to keep him away from the levers of power...
...Ronald Reagan is the only one to emerge from the ordeal of strict scrutiny relatively unscathed, and it's instructive to note the reason...
...Now Johnson has quit, complaining that Bush "utterly ignored" the commission's recommendations...
...Discounting Perot, however, the conventional wisdom seems sound...
...The feckless Ross Perot, who poses as an outsider but seeks to implement the establishment goal of "deficit reduction" (tax increases), may be getting back into the race, thereby introducing a element of uncertainty...
...PBS program on John F. A Kennedy showed the embarrassing performance of his press corps—laughing heartily on cue at everything he said...
...As always, however, Bush played the good sport and allowed his agenda to be set for him...
...Clinton must have thought, incidentally, that 1992 would be a mere tryout year for him...
...Bush did what he was told, and was rewarded with "blows" that rained down on his head...
...Bush's campaign strategy makes such revisionism all the easier...
...Various polls put Clinton ahead by about ten percentage points...
...Now that the ICBMs are no longer pointed at us, however, the U.S...
...In short, journalistic license is undermining the prestige of the governing classes...
...Someone told Bush that here was a meritorious figure who deserved to be appointed, and one cannot but wonder what went through the President's mind at that point...
...In almost all elections in recent years, including the British general election last spring, tax cutters have defeated tax-raisers...
...The servile press of Kennedy's day has of course been replaced by today's arrogant press...
...Conservatives should relish this deconstruction, it seems to me...
...Try to imagine, twenty-eight years ago, a petulant member of the Warren Commission feeling so scornful of Lyndon Johnson's authority that he could feel free to resign in a huff over some trivial matter and endorse Barry Goldwater into the bargain...
...This episode, the recent PBS series on American Presidents, and the recent antics of the House of Windsor point to one of the great changes that has occurred in the past generation, and it is the only piece of good news that I have to offer this month...
...20 The American Spectator November 1992 The trouble is that Bush carelessly discarded this ace long ago...
...The goal should be a free America with constitutional government—staffed by obedient servants employed for no more than a few years at most...
...True, the news media today set up a great and concerted howling for more government...
...Not without reason were Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and suchlike thugs represented as secular gods...
...The Communists also sought the centralization of power, and for decades achieved it...
...on the other hand they gleefully unmask the officials of that government as incompetents or thieves, liars or philanderers, or worse...
...electorate may feel as free to change the U.S...
...With a Brezhnev or an Andropov still in the Kremlin, Bill Clinton would have no chance of defeating Bush...
...The goal of conservatism should not be an all-powerful America "leading" the world in some no-doubt-destructive direction...
...Bush would have done better to have taken the advice of his "moderate" inner circle and moved to the center, we will be told...
...Johnson added insult to injury by saying that he would be voting for Clinton...
...Judging by recent history, President Bush ought to be able to pull this election out of the bag, even at this late stage...
...The Washington Post will be eager to let him know who's in charge, after all...
...It might have occurred to him that Johnson was a public figure whom he could not control, and who could therefore easily embarrass him...
...They figure it's too late for him to recover anyway...
...If Bush campaigns as a conservative and loses, it will be that much easier to portray his defeat as a rejection of conservatism by the electorate...
...Bush clung to the discredited Reagan line when he should have moved away from it...
...Take the case of Magic Johnson, the sexually promiscuous basketball player whom he so unwisely appointed to the National Commission on AIDS...
...Since Kennedy, occupants of the Oval Office have been accorded a declining respect...
...Members of Bush's entourage will themselves contribute to such a Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...government as the British electorate did at the end of World War II...
...Well, thanks Dick, and goodbye...
...In the first place, Bush is a perennial babe in the political woods...
...The truth is that Magic Johnson was the political instrument of those who opposed Bush politically...
...71 22 The American Spectator November 1992...
...My purpose' here is not to berate President Bush or to lament his dramatic decline but to anticipate the news media's response to a Clinton victory...
...Johnson benefited from favorable publicity when he went on the commission...
...believe that Jude Wanniski of Polyconomics was right when he said a year ago that there has been no criticism either of Darman or of Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady in the news columns or editorials of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the TV networks over the past four years...
...Centralization requires it...
...Even though the electorate is fed up with rightwing hate-mongering, Bush allowed himself to remain the captive of the right...
...Darman didn't like it, apparently...
...Failing some dramatic new development, I expect to see Bill and Hillary Clinton on the reviewing stand in front of the White House, accepting salutes from the inaugural parade next January...
...Thus may George Bush in 1992 be compared to Winston Churchill in 1945...
...But at least they realized that the necessary herdlike passivity could only be preserved in the population at large by deifying the leadership...
...A number of columnists have already begun to conflate the policies of Reagan and Bush...
...What we are about to see, if Clinton wins, is a media analysis that will represent Bush's repudiation of conservatism as the electorate's repudiation of it...
...The New York Times played it straight, construing Johnson's contemptible behavior as "the most recent in a series of blows" to the Bush Administration's claim to have "responded effectively to the AIDS epidemic...
...by Tom Bethell Bill Clinton will be a most ungrateful President if he does not reward the perfidious "budget czar" with an ambassadorial plum...
...He has been trying to sound like a conservative—this being the autumn of a leap year—and now the press is happy to cooperate...
...We are of course very far from that ideal...
...of failing in its "global responsibilities...
...The reality is that throughout his administration Bush repudiated conservative ideas, especially in the economic realm, where he seems to have been guided by a half-remembered Keynesianism...
...We have already begun to see the media strategy: a Clinton win will be construed as a repudiation of the "failed policies of the Reagan-Bush years...
...second, to a rather inoffensive, mid-level White House aide named James Pinkerton...
...Despite harboring conservative inclinations, Pinkerton has been permitted to survive as window-dressing on the White House staff...
...And so on...
...We are better off for the change...
...Our leaders are being demystified before our eyes...
...We will be shown clips of Patrick Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Marilyn Quayle speaking at the GOP convention—and for those who still don't get it the lesson will be repeated...
...He achieved a moment of fame for promoting something very vague called the "new paradigm...
...But the end of the Cold War at least permits us to hope that some radical and beneficial change might yet occur...
Vol. 25 • November 1992 • No. 11
