Public Nuisances: Taking Issue/One Day at a Time
Tyrrell, R . Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Taking Issue THE ISSUES — oh, glowing term, preeminent in the minds of all political commentators and of political junkies everywhere. Both groups yearn...
...In fact this actually happened...
...didate for the Republican presidential nomination, he elucidates ideas on a wide range of ISSUES...
...All this is why I believe Hillary is playing it day by day...
...Back in 1996 Steve Forbes was depicted as all of the above plus a johnny one-note for his flat tax...
...Her dreadful advice regarding the Jones case probably made Clinton's impeachment inevitable, and it most certainly led to the constitutional crisis that most lawyers warned he would lose...
...My guess is that even if Bradley were possessed of the idiotic effervescence of a pop music disc jockey it would do him no good...
...Even now on such matters as the Middle East, agricultural policy, and health care, Hillary is abandoning earlier policies so fast that it is difficult to say what she stands for other than more government...
...Allow me to file a caveat...
...Others, for instance those covering Hillary in New York these past few days, seem still to be in the raptures over her...
...But then, until very recently the political classes failed to see her husband for what he is...
...I found that hard to believe, and so I sent off to Bush's office for a few of his position papers...
...It is difficult to believe that the hellish Republican party will not at some point remind the public of her many errancies...
...Who is down...
...Yes, of course, and they all liked summer school and ate all their vegetables and avoided rich desserts...
...Famed for his intellect and his absorption with policy matters, he too is consigned to the dull heap of history...
...Her record reaching back to her days in Arkansas is a record of political blunders...
...Perhaps it was artificial turf...
...He has a position on China's admission to the WTO...
...This is not the record of a suave political operative...
...Now, if the polls are accurate, the party is suffering nationally, and the press seems to be split...
...Today, as an energetic canAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...I do not want to be accused of dullness...
...Some days she is in doubt...
...I could go on with instances of Hillary's political ineptitude and malversations, but the point is made...
...His position papers are loaded with ideas about education, guns, and judges...
...the death tax (reduce it...
...Both were disasters...
...Yet if at some point the press or a political opponent raises her unsavory past for public review, her senatorial prospects will go aglimmer...
...Her coyness fades daily as something approaching frankness takes its place...
...Most of the political pundits believe that Hillary's Senate campaign is already underway...
...Consider the plight of Bill Bradley...
...Yes Bush—son of a life-long policy wonk and member of a third-generation political family—has meditated on running for the presidency for several years now, yet somehow we are to believe he has only "vague" positions...
...Now an expanding number of former aides are coming forward and admitting that Hillary encouraged them to lie...
...She would be leaving New York's Democrats in a dreadful mess, but she could offer them the old explanation that works so well for her...
...on Social Security (its "lock box," personal...
...Has a campaign finance reform, an environmental reform, and even some 25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator It takes wishful thinking and a lack of historical perspective to conclude, as many people have, that Watergate happened because a handful of terribly ordinary people mistook themselves for philosopher-kings...
...It is valid...
...Only a few of our political observers recognize this...
...He is a conventional Republican if somewhat prolix on the topics of defense and foreign policy...
...It is one of the vanities of the American political culture that its adepts are ardent for a good healthy discussion of THE ISSUES...
...The conventional way of discussing a political campaign is to discuss it as a competitive event, "a horse race," and there are very few political reporters who are not conventional...
...She has terrible political instincts but she is not without the instinct for self-preservation...
...One Day at a Time Are you convinced that Hillary Rod-ham Clinton is going to run for the Senate from New York...
...There, Cohen reports, they were walking across "a vast and silken lawn...
...Regarding a race for the Senate seat now being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, I doubt that even Hillary knows what she will do...
...And when the lazy reporter does not characterize a candidate's stand on THE ISSUES as dull, he characterizes it as "vague," possibly nonexistent...
...Once in the White House the evidence suggests that she was behind Clinton's Travelgate scandal, and she played a significant role in the Filegate scandal, despite this week's denials...
...He has, indeed, taken positions on THE ISSUES...
...In other words, President Nixon and his White House camarilla were exploiting for their purposes what had become the favorite design of New Left politics...
...The worst hypocrites on this topic are the political commentators and reporters...
...Some journalists sense that Clinton has disgraced his office and in terms of policy mattered for very little...
...What has saved Clinton is a gullible press and a fiercely partisan Democratic Party...
...He even has a farm policy whose details I would relate but I might bore Mr...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 17...
...This is the accusation being laid upon George W. Bush...
...They are available in brief digests and in full position papers...
...While in Arkansas Hillary confected a blowsy education program not unlike the blowsy health care program she confected during Clinton's first presidential term...
...How does the governor do with upstate's Armenian community...
...In the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal that may have changed, but apparently to this day the political observers see Hillary as a political genius...
...Most simply report: "Who is up...
...Cohen standing over there on the "silken lawn...
...But, of course, to mediocre or lazy minds all discussion of policy very quickly turns dull...
...The result was a fat sheaf of stuff that looks and reads like very heavy social science...
...This, even though, as early as 1992, witnesses as credible as Gennifer Flowers and Colonel Eugene Holmes (the former Army ROTC recruiter) delivered the goods on him...
...the marriage penalty (reduce it...
...The political hacks mark him down as DULL...
...The problem for her is that she is not a politician but a celebrity...
...Why they fail to see the celebrated Hillary for what she is defeats me...
...My guess is that Hillary is playing it day by day...
...This subversion has been the piecemeal alteration of our constitutional system, over a period of many years, from one of separate institutions—president, Congress, the courts—sharing powers, to a system of all-power-to-the-people participatory, communitarian democracy in which power would run directly to the president in the name of the People...
...That is correct, Cohen found himself on "silken lawn...
...The time they devote to covering THE ISSUES or a candidate's position on THE ISSUES is, truth be known, minimal and perfunctory...
...The other day, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen reported covering Bradley in East Hampton...
...This is not to blame the New Left for Watergate...
...Why did the press corps not look into this matter...
...Cohen, his feet nuzzling the "silken lawn," reports that Bradley induced sleep...
...Her prospects to replace Moynihan derive not from her political skills but from her celebrity...
...Arnold Beichman "Parties in the Age of Watergate" SEPTEMBER 1974 16 September 19 99 • The American Spectator ideas about sex education...
...From Travelgate on she has displayed not only a tin ear for politics but a willingness to lie brazenly...
...Clinton Fatigue" has become a cliché only for one reason...
...Holmes provided an impudent letter in which Clinton as a student admitted to dodging the draft...
...Bush even has trade policies that sound very much like free trade policies...
...That powerful little group that gets the Clintons into so many fixes...
...Both groups yearn for a field of political candidates who addresses THE ISSUES...
...It was her political advice and political appointments that doomed Governor Bill Clinton's first term to defeat and a couple of years in the wilderness...
...A bit more honesty or reflection would point to a long-term subversion of professional political tradition, which merely culminated in Watergate...
...So let me leave all further discussions of THE ISSUES to the journalists who really care about them...
...It is to indicate that, as so often has happened since the Bolshevik Revolution, the differences between the so-called Left and Right may not be differences at all...
...Starting at least with Travelgate she only made Clinton's problems worse...
...The candidate with the statistics and charts risks being dubbed "cold," "aloof," lacking the human touch...
...Hehas a position on corporate and personal tax rates (no increases...
...Flowers provided tapes of intimate conversations in which Clinton could be heard coaching his former lover on lying to the press...
...Some days she sees herself as a shoo-in...
...At any rate, Bradley piped up about "the lack of low-incoming housing...
...And, well I could go on, but this column is getting dull...
...Her refusal to cooperate with Congress or the courts made a peaceful negotiation of her husband's problems impossible...
...To be sure no politician in America could have survived as many scandals as Bill Clinton, but his survival was not the consequence of Hillary's talent for lies and smears...
...The columnist Michael Kelly reminds us that George Stephanopoulos has admitted Hillary's role in her husband's lies to the press...
...He opposes quotas and racial preferences...
...She could blame it on "the Clinton haters...
...If some devil-may-care candidate does wage a campaign solely on THE ISSUES the press corps's judgment is not likely to be flattering...
...The minute he erupted on, say, the subject of low-income housing, the press would esteem him dull, dull, dull...
...Yet the political observers persisted through all Clinton's years of scandal and misconduct in seeing him as just another good-government progressive...
...No, Hillary's fans in the press and in the Democratic Party are attracted to her because she is a celebrity...
...Hence her senatorial prospects look plausible...
...The celebrity is vacuous at this point...
...But their enthusiasm is not for any set of policies she has espoused...
...Every now and again a reporter gets involved with THE ISSUES...
...Once he is fired or put on medication, the political reporters go right back to the horse race...
...During Clinton's Whitewater controversies and his pursuit by Paula Corbin Jones, Hillary's truculent advice to stonewall and to deceive made Clinton's problems worse...
...How much money has the senator raised...
...On taxes he addresses marginal tax rates (reduce them...
...Then even the press might take an interest in what has to be among the most scandal-ridden records in modern politics...
...retirement accounts, and gov- C .- ernment investment of Social --- -Security funds—which he opposes), and on health care (favoring medical savings accounts and private-sector alternatives...
...At that point Hillary may bow out...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
