Capitol Ideas: Coming to Terms
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas: Coming to Terms" Coming to Terms As in a second term for the Democratic incumbent....
...In an age when political groups aspire to victimhood, leadership organizations have interests that are directly opposed to those of their own rank and file...
...Forget it...
...Sometimes the guard would kill the emperor they protected...
...Here is one example...
...Dole's nomination was dispiriting for just that reason...
...CAPITOL IDEAS...
...But the present trend is strongly favored by our intellectual classes, who see that it will give them added power...
...They pride themselves on their independence, and relish the exercise of power...
...When Duke asked for $4,000, the student body happily forked over the money...
...Some conservatives distrust Kemp because the housing budget expanded while he was HUD Secretary...
...Those who persuaded him to adopt a strategy of tax cuts did the right thing, but Dole himself never seemed to grasp its political possibilities...
...But the GOP has "cowered from defending something with which it fundamentally agrees," according to Ward Connerly, the (black) chairman of the civil-rights initiative...
...The bayou-dwellers don't much mind if their elected leaders stealjust as long as they are entertaining, the economy is strong, and les bons temps roulez...
...Kemp is also right that the GOP has been run as a club that has not welcomed minorities in leadership positions...
...Dole has not felt any real political challenge for decades...
...Clinton would now seem to have 18 November r 9 9 6 •The American Spectator the kind of support enjoyed by former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards...
...On one of the two times that I met Dole, he was asked what philosophy of government he would bring with him to the presidency...
...was next in line...
...zlr The American Spectator • November r 9 9 6 19...
...By then they won't have to worry about helping elect a Republican...
...The early primaries revealed an electorate that was not happy with this arrangement, but in the end there didn't seem to be much choice...
...Dole would be heading back to Kansas-the good loser enveloped in a cloud of tributes from the Washington that he had served so dutifully: He put the nation's best interest ahead of partisan bickering, bore his war injury bravely, expanded the Food Stamp Program when it was threatened by ideology, shepherded the Americans with Disabilities Act through the legislative maze...
...The media are nonetheless sensitive to charges of allegiance...
...He would be able to stump you with angles and details you never knew about...
...They had already cranked up the predictable hate campaign against the civilrights initiative by the time I left California recently...
...The Clinton people are not so out of touch as to attribute the consequences of wage- and price-controls to "malaise...
...In fact, race-based preferences raise doubts about the promotion of all blacks-one of the many arguments against this pernicious policy...
...Just help out the farmers, boost food stamps, support the ethanol program, sit down with Dwayne Andreas, be generous to the Veterans...
...A Clinton match-up with Bob Dole has loomed ever since that awful quota-poet read her quota-ditty at the last inauguration...
...This is disappointing to conservatives, but it must be said that Clinton's economic advisers, particularly Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, have a better grasp of economic basics than the Bush-Baker team did...
...He...
...But Cabinet members with a hostile Congress are reduced to an administrative role...
...And there is no comparison with the inept Carterites of the late seventies...
...44 Republicans of Dole's age think of themselves as occupying the moral low ground...
...No sooner had Duke accepted the invitation than the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page headline: "David Duke Accepts Debate Invitation...
...The press corps is analogous to the Roman Praetorian guard, "whose notoriously venal allegiance on many occasions determined the imperial succession," in one account...
...Apart from the presidential and congressional contests, there are other important issues in this election -none more so than the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban race- and sex-based preferences in state government...
...The point is that the proper role of government is not something that he has spent any time thinking about...
...The outcome has seemed equally inevitable...
...Now we have begun to discard it with hardly any discussion...
...One can compose the Time and Newsweek boilerplate in one's sleep...
...The great achievement of Western law, centuries in the making, was the principle of equality before the law...
...The restoration of status is only one way in which feudal social arrangements are being brought back surreptitiously...
...Will Republicans ever feel confident enough to claim the moral high ground...
...The problem is that few Americans understand how much is at stake...
...But when he left the Senate, his farewell speech boasted of ways in which he had expanded government...
...Black and Latino groups at the college approved the plan to bring Duke to the campus...
...A doer, not an ideologue, he belonged to the old school that had little time for the blowdried brand of politician, and so on...
...Clinton's EPA has been more moderate...
...So I predict that a second Clinton term will find the ink brigade back on the offensive, putting Clintonian scandals on the front page and above the fold, bringing them into focus and creating a sense of moral urgency about them...
...I know, it's depressing...
...Duke in Klan robes was shown sitting behind a table with a microphone...
...It seemed to work...
...But in 1980 it was the GOP who had the great campaigner and pol, as the Democrats do today...
...When I last checked, Bob Dole was 22 points behind in California polls, and CCRI was ahead by a two-to-one margin...
...Basically the problem is that Republicans of his age think of themselves as occupying the moral low ground...
...Republicans of Bob Dole's vintage tend to take political criticism at face value and internalize it, not realizing that it is intended to produce just that effect...
...But the modern "corps" can-see that the White House is basically sympathetic to the cultural agenda of upheaval and antagonism to traditional religious values...
...If told he will be suspected of racism if he opposes affirmative action, Dole's instinctive reaction is to get with the program to prove he is among the great and the good...
...And he never will, even if elected...
...A single legal class replaced groups of unequal status...
...He carries the Tenth Amendment in his pocket, as though he aspires to a constitutional restoration...
...Blacks in general do not understand the extent to which they have been undermined by their own leaders, and perhaps Kemp can help to make this clearer to the inner-city dwellers...
...Constitutional government was based on the presumption that all citizens would be treated equally, just as the umpire treats all ballplayers...
...They do not write their own budgets, Congress does...
...Such groups, of course, are not normally in the business of paying handsome sums to hear from David Duke...
...The public senses this, guessing that he is about as likely to raise taxes as to cut them, just as George Bush and Bill Clinton did...
...The following day there was an editorial page cartoon by the paper's resident smear artist...
...The "official" news media have for four years acted as the Clintons' ex-officio bodyguard...
...There is little that can be done about it, I'm afraid...
...Jack Kemp was a good choice, though, and at that moment in August one felt Dole had a chance...
...Words have now replaced swords, of course...
...On the contrary, their soul mate Al Gore, who once worked as an editorial writer for the Nashville Tennessean, just might be ushered into a vacant Oval Office...
...I suppose a miracle could happen, but it doesn't seem likely now (the election is six weeks away as I write...
...So Clinton has been spared the campaigns of vilification that were mounted against Republican presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan...
...But with Dole you would feel from the beginning that the whole exercise was a waste of time (the same would have been true of George Bush, of course...
...In September, the student senate of California State University at Northridge voted, iiio, to invite former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to take the pro-CCRI side of a campus debate...
...I know I would choose Clinton...
...He became a mere strategist of legislation...
...Query: Has anyone asked Powell if he was promoted to the Joint Chiefs because he was black...
...He responded as though he had been asked something completely different...
...In the Oval Office he wouldn't have time...
...As for the civil-rights struggle-John Kurzweil points out in his estimable California Political Review that, depending on the wording, polls will show support for affirmative action but opposition to preferences...
...In the back of some people's minds has been the thought that, just as the Republicans wrested the presidency back after a single Democratic term in 1980, so they would again in 1996...
...The caption read: "And here, representing the pro-CCRI side of the debate...
...Interior Secretary Babbitt is admittedly a trouble-maker whom any prudent president would throw over the side, but the tide of environmental fanaticism has receded since Bush and his EPA chief Robert Reilly left Washington...
...Dole would know strategies, Clinton would understand what was at stake...
...Vice President Gore did not mention environmentalism in his convention speech...
...The Left can whip him in line more easily than the Right...
...He understands that blacks have been betrayed by their own leaders...
...Clinton would be back on the reviewing stands in January 1997, imbued with a winner's heartiness too horrible to contemplate...
...i by Tom Bethell f you could spend an evening discussing policy questions with Clinton or Dole, whom would you choose...
...He might even put on a display of agreeing with you now and then...
...The most conventional wisdom about presidential politics, that incumbents are reelected as long as the economy is strong, seems to be holding true this year...
...The rise of the free-market system had to await this crucial innovation...
...The presidency was the one remaining rung of the political ladder above Senate majority leader...
...Fantasies of global apocalypse along the lines of Earth in the Balance are becoming much harder to sell...
...Dole has been leery of supporting it, apparently because it is opposed by Colin Powell...
...Leaders are rewarded with power, their followers saddled with counterproductive "entitlements...
...Year after year he could coast to unreflective victory in Kansas...
...Now, in an arena where real leadership is expected, he is about as much use to conservatives as the Senate Sergeant-atArms...
...TOM BETHELL is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution and TAS's Washington correspondent...
...The idea was to use the "debate" to discredit the opponents of quotas by misrepresenting them as racists...
...He has no principled objection to the policies of his opponent, for one thing...
...If it is not reversed, the consequences will be serious...
...President Clinton seems to be viewed by a majority of the electorate as an amiable rascal-much as politicians are regarded in Arkansas' southern neighbor, Louisiana...
...Dole is not suited to a race for the presidency...
...As he saw it, 1996 was simply his turn for the GOP nomination...
...Political philosophy...
...It is a legitimate question to ask of anyone who both supports and was or is in a position to benefit from affirmative action...
Vol. 29 • November 1996 • No. 11
