"Feeling Your Pain"
Bovard, James
first time we shall be looking not into a mirror but through a pane of glass. What's saddest about Cooper's book is the way it shows a man who once did real, heroic work getting us over the...
...And it could have saved several neighbors in Berkeley, California, from harassment by HUD for opposing the move of a home for mentally ill AIDS patients into their neighborhood...
...Leap of Faith might better be titled Loss of Faith...
...What's saddest about Cooper's book is the way it shows a man who once did real, heroic work getting us over the next hills--to the Moon, and Mars being reduced, by our 3o-years-long national indifference toward manned space exploration, to a preoccupation with this sort of pixilated crap...
...After all, the Republicans became the majority in r995 and they should have been able to use their powers of oversight to investigate and expose the harm Clinton-administration policies were causing, shouldn't they...
...These citizens were virtually attacked by federal agencies because government employees felt no fear in doing so...
...This PR-over-substance approach is also evident in President Clinton's promotion of the Brady Handgun Violence 70 O c t o b e r ~ o o o _9 The American Spectator Prevention Act, which Congress passed in 1993 to stop convicted felons from purchasing grins...
...And the list goes on and on...
...You won't hear a serious word about manned space exploration during the fall campaign...
...A book filled with examples of wasteful government programs prompts an obvious question: Where has Congress been...
...Alas, on issue after issue Bovard details Congress's failure to use its budgetary and oversight powers to scrutinize and, if need be, put a stop to legally questionable executive-branch policies...
...seven days later, he upped the number to Ioo,ooo...
...Clinton called the law an unqualified success, mentioning it in speeches and interviews more than 300 times during his first term...
...President Clinton called for more daycare funding...
...Although there was little evidence to support his claim, President Clinton told the audience at the 1996 Democratic National Convention that, since it became law, the Brady Bill had "stopped 6o,ooo felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns...
...On some level, Cooper must know it himself: "Mars was lost to our generation when the manned mission, originally planned back in the mid296o's for a 1981 launch--which, as the youngest Mercury astronaut, I believed I was in a good position to commandwas canceled...
...Perhaps Americans can be weaned off the idea that government must be empathic, and get back to the time-honored notion of self-reliance...
...TRACY ROBINSON is deputy editor o/The American Spectator...
...When it became obvious that Congress wasn't biting, Clinton announced that Superfund was necessary...
...The American Spectator _9 October ~ooo 71...
...Nearly every day one administration official or another could be heard speechifying on a new, narrowly targeted tax credit, federal grant, or community empowerment program to help you, the voter, make it in this world...
...Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater ordered the airlines to improve their service, or else...
...Furthermore, other problems--like costly lawsuiLs arising from the Americans with Disabilities Act and the waste of federal money under the Freedom to Farm Act--are specifically Congress's fault because members wrote and passed faulty legislation...
...Empathy is still accepted as a necessary trait of a successful candidate...
...Better oversight of agency behavior could have prevented California winery owner Nancy Cline from being harassed by the EPA and FBI for farming on a supposed wetland...
...In his State of the Union address this past January, President Clinton said the Brady Bill single-handedly had prevented ~oo,ooo criminals from obtaining guns...
...Empathy had come into its own...
...In February 1993, Clinton told a gathering of businessmen that the program was "a disaster" that entailed too much money going to lawyers...
...And, if Vice President Gore is elected president, he can be expected to stretch federal power further in dozens of directions...
...Take the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996...
...Highway congestion got you down...
...Obviously, President Clinton is a master of empathy...
...Tired of waiting at the airport...
...Now we have a race between a "compassionate conservative" governor and a virtual-lifetime officeholder who is for "the people," not "the powerful...
...It's hard to say, but it's nowhere near what Clinton claimed...
...Additionally, the budgetary process is so convoluted that no single member of Congress can possibly know everything he's voting on...
...Instead, it ended up addicting farmers to higher payments than they had ever received before...
...It was supposed to reform decades-old farm subsidy programs in order to finally flee farmers from 60 years of dependency on governHis many examples prompt an obvious question: Where has Congress been...
...Thousands of major and minor federal programs and regulations expanded or created during the last eight years--from Housing and Urban Development vouchers to loans for farmers to federal disaster aid--failed to solve the problems they were designed to address...
...Martin's Press/426 pages / $:z6.95 REVIEWED BY Tracy Robinson Politics has not changed much since then...
...Even when Congress has investigated executive branch abuses--such as with hearings into IRS, INS, and FBI law-enforcement practices-- few reforms resulted...
...The ex-astronaut blames Senator William Proxmire (those "Golden Fleece" awards), but every president since Nixon, and every Congress since about the 9and, is guilty...
...As American Spectator readers are aware, it is this gap in the political discourse that James Bovard strives to fill with his reporting...
...A more self-reliant population would not need such a large bureaucracy, which means we could enjoy lower taxes along with a less intrusive government...
...After the 1994 election, Clinton was back to denouncing Super fired as an inefficient boondoggle...
...In the end, the phase-outs never came, and taxpayers were stuck with the tab...
...Still, Congress should not be excused from trying...
...Vice President Gore proposed a nationwide telephone traffic-jam hotline...
...ment...
...failing to understand how a supermarket scanner worked could cost you valuable support from working morns, and fumbling to explain during a debate how the deficit has personally affected you (in truth, an absurd question), could be deadly...
...This flip-flopping is often quite remarkable...
...T he 2992 presidential election may perhaps best be described as the triumph of empathy over experience...
...under the new legislation, wheat farmers received 5o times more in subsidies than they had under the previous farm bill...
...What's the real number...
...if it wasn't reformed, there would be "poison in the ground...
...As Bovard chronicles in his new book, "Feeling Your Pain": The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the ClintonGore Years, such pronouncements are good for public relations, but little else...
...Any candidate who uttered one would find himself drowned out by a rapidresponse team's rut-furrings about"priorities here at home...
...If you had a problem, the administration came up with a government program to address it...
...He is so empathic that he has no problem changing his position on an issue completely, depending on the audience he is addressing...
...Kids getting in your hair...
...In April 1999 the number supposedly had grown to zSo,ooo , and only three months later it ballooned to 4oo,ooo...
...In 2994, he proposed a bill supposedly to fix Supeffund, which Congress did not pass because it perpetuated the worst aspects of the program...
...For example, Bovard points out how the president has been, at various times, for and against the Superfund environmental clean-up program...
...The youngish, upstart governor of a small and backward state cared his way to victory over one of the more experienced public servants ever to hold the office of President of the United States...
...The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves...
...What, then, can be done...
...In fact, the "solutions" often were more harmful than the problems, as in the case of increased availability of government flood relief resulting in more people moving to floodand hurricane-prone areas, or how EPA mandates for smog-reducing additives in gasoline ended up contaminating drinking water with cancer-causing chemicals...
...Bovard notes that the Clinton administration committed a lot of mischief with its loose loan program requirements and broad interpretation of how to determine which land farmers would be paid to keep idle to stop erosion, but it seems that Congress takes the prize on this one...
...Unfortunately, it is probably not possible for Congress to effectively practice oversight of a federal government as large as ours...
...Finally, in the presidential election year of 1996, Clinton was again trumpeting the still-unreformed program in campaign speeches as a huge success...
...Bovard is not optimistic that the end of the Clinton administration will signal a new day...
...Even if Republicans capture the White House, there is little reason at this time to expect that they would have the resolve to shut down HUD, eviscerate the IRS's powers, severely curb the FBI, cease dictating racial hiring quotas, end the war on drug users, plow under farm subsidies, dismmltle trade barriers, and respect the Bill of Rights...
...In the end, it may not matter anyway, since only a handful of those "felons, fugitives, and stalkers" were ever prosecuted for attempting to illegally obtain weapons...
...N Giving the people All the _ Painld]lers They Don't Need "Feeling Your Pain": The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years James Bovard St...
...Americans might be better offnow than before President Clinton took office, but according to Bovard, that's no thanks to the myriad of feel-good money giveaways that were created or expanded under the Clinton-Gore regime...
...there are just not enough hours in the day...
...Thus far, no one in politics is challenging the govemment policies that arose from the empathy-lest of 1992, asking if they actually worked to make peo...
...Ifa discussion of the issue were somehow to last more than half a minute on an MSNBC split-screen, the word "hubris," in connection with man's boorish need to place himself on other spheres, would surely be spoken-- as if mapping the human genome, potential medical miracles aside, hasn't been, in its way, an act of monstrous self-absorption...
...He writes: The vast majority of Clinton-era misgovernment will survive the end of his administration...
...All, Gordo, what can you do...
...ple better off in the last eight years...
...Bovard calls this the "king can do no wrong" notion, which he says permeated Clinton's executive branch...
...But, as Bovard writes, "More people are willingly becoming wards of the State, either depending on it for their next meal or surrendering their judgment"so you shouldn't count on it...
Vol. 33 • October 2000 • No. 8
