The Squirminator
Neumayr, George
"The Squirminator" one and the same. Micromanagement and economic engineering failed. Good old-fashioned, Texas-style entrepreneurial zeal has worked. THE AGENDA With this historical guide as a reference, the agenda...
...Schwarzenegger, for all his charm and charisma, can't redeem the California Republican Party, for the simple reason that he is not a Republican...
...Every new piece of legislation should be put through a litmus test does it move us toward tax simplification or away...
...Ashamed to call himself a Republican...
...Democrats already supported the cut once, and the economy surely needs help...
...And then lost to a political rookie by eighteen percentage points...
...The best way to cure this economic hangover is to help the party start all over...
...he basically said...
...Can't forgive the Republican Party...
...With such self-hating Republicanism on display, it is no wonder Schwarzenegger can tell interviewers that his political views pose no problem for his Kennedy-wife Maria Shriver...
...And baby boomer parents had homes to sell, so it helped politically too...
...Schwarzenegger's Proposition 49, his entree into politics, is nanny-state liberalism at its best...
...A state party fallen low enough to champion Schwarzenegger as its savior clearly needs one...
...military pilot who spoke French and had experience in the Middle East—interviewed Moussaoui and decided he was a potential skyjacker, who could turn a fuel-laden jumbo jet into a guided missile...
...Convinced they had a terrorist "sleeper," the agents conferred with the Minneapolis FBI's top lawyer, and that night the INS arrested Moussaoui for the visa violation...
...On the contrary, it is an insuperable difficulty, because—astonishing as this may seem to GOP consultants—ideas do matter to the Republican faithful...
...He holds the same views as Kennedy liberals but just wants to advance them, perhaps a little more slowly, under the Republican flag...
...A package of investor tax cuts would do the same for the equity market...
...It represents nanny-state liberalism at its best, increasing the number of before-school and after-school programs by hiking up state spending...
...Better to wait for a second term...
...And who wrote that murky, misbegotten law...
...Jim Hahn, the mayor of Los Angeles, Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, and Attorney General Bill Lockyer (himself a potential 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate) all have signed on...
...One "SOMEONE WILL DIE...
...Those entrepreneurs who worked so hard to build all that wealth in the late 1990s deserve respect...
...He is just Richard Riordan, but without the public policy experience—a GOP Jesse Ventura whose Republicanism appears about as real as his movies...
...Like Richard Riordan, he is a Republican in name only—Hollywood's idea of a good Republican standard-bearer, but not what rankand-file Republicans seek...
...Asking Republicans to abandon their agenda—just because a celebrity with an R after his name, searching for a new vanity contest to conquer, might win—will create many more problems than it solves...
...The electorate gave George W. Bush real power this November, and they want to see how he uses it...
...Such comments will be as endearing to primary voters as Riordan's statement, "I'm not an ideologue, so it's not like I have a love affair with the Republican Party...
...If he works on enacting those parts of his agenda that both create economic growth and build political capital, he will win in 2004...
...In fact, the visa had expired...
...He needn't worry...
...If Schwarzenegger is "very liberal" about social programs, how long would he remain "fiscally conservative" about taxes and spending...
...I.THE SQUIRMINATOR Things we don't need: a Kennedy Republican BY GEORGE NEUMAYR Perhaps nothing reveals the California GOP's troubles more clearly than the gimmicks proposed to erase them...
...to the core...
...Moussaoui attempted a bluff, claiming he had a renewed visa and inviting Rapp and an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent to his room to show them the papers...
...Building this base for major reforms is absolutely essential...
...reports the Los Angeles Times...
...Headquarters declined, even after French intelligence officials confirmed Moussaoui's ties to radical Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden...
...he said...
...Prior to its passage, the attorney general would have simply signed an order, and the FBI would have entered Moussaoui's room surreptitiously, copied his papers, downloaded the contents of his computer, bugged the room, and tapped his phone...
...But David Broder, writing in the Washington Post in October, noticed the heavy Democratic support for Proposition 49: "Willie Brown is far from the only prominent Democrat backing Schwarzenegger's effort...
...Herein lies another potential similarity to Riordan's run: Riordan's wife raised money for Bill Clinton, a fact not lost on primary voters...
...Then the top issues should be making last year's tax cuts permanent—and even more important, building a solid case for helping the economy now by accelerating the longer-term cuts into 2003...
...Does Schwarzenegger have any more credibility as a Republican standardbearer than Riordan...
...His views harmonize nicely with her fashionable liberalism...
...As the boomer generation ages, dividends loom larger in financial planning...
...California Democrats might well encourage Schwarzenegger to seek public office as a Republican, just as backers of Dianne Feinstein urged Richard Riordan to run this year...
...THE AGENDA With this historical guide as a reference, the agenda for an investor class-friendly White House is clear...
...he divided it...
...Should the party ignore the lessons of Riordan's ruinous campaign and run the Terminator, all will know that the California GOP has reached its terminus.flight instructor—a former U.S...
...Consider the consequences: On August 13, 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, a Muslim and French citizen of Moroccan descent, showed up at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis and paid $6,800 in cash for flight-simulator training on a Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet...
...They registered with the party to stop liberalism, not spread it...
...But behind the Schwarzenegger strategizing are the very same small-minded, power-seeking, quick-fix nostrums and messageless "moderation" that explains the party's demise...
...With Don Nickles taking over the Budget Committee, there is a chance to move forward on dynamic scoring—the key to truly understanding the stimulant effects of tax cutting—and also on new budget rules that will make reform easier...
...The ease with which an actor known principally for bringing R-rated violence to children has achieved instant credibility as an "education activist" and political figure is comic...
...At least not in any meaningful sense...
...Casting liberals as Republican redeemers is job one for the California media...
...Since 1997, when President Clinton signed a capital-gains tax cut that made homes the least-taxed investment, the housing market has set record after record...
...Edward M. Kennedy and the band of liberal Democratic senators who ruled the Capitol Hill roost in 1978...
...Its strategists crave a winning image, when what the party first needs is a soul...
...Whatever advantages the party gets from running nominal Republicans, it loses in cynicism and division...
...It is also ideologically telling, by the way, that Schwarzenegger had initially looked at "campaign finance reform" as a "means of launching his political career...
...Have the party sages learned nothing from Riordan's disastrous primary run...
...We spent one year wasting time because there was a human failure...
...Will such desperate superficiality solve the party's malaise...
...The academy staff suspected a plot and called the FBI...
...And even in the unlikely event he survived a primary and won a general election, he would serve their agenda far more often than he would a Republican one...
...That may be a worthwhile risk...
...Broder, however, wonders, "Are [Democrats] letting themselves be used to create a new Ronald Reagan for the embattled California Republican Party...
...The FBI lawyers' refusal had tragic consequences...
...More importantly, the administration has notified Congress of its intentions to begin negotiating a new South Africa Free Trade and Development Agreement...
...I was ashamed to call myself a Republican during that period...
...The field office pleaded with bureau executives in Washington to request a search warrant under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveil-lance Act...
...Schwarzenegger is no Ronald Reagan, and the only party in danger of being used is the Republican Party...
...To the extent that his Republicanism is known, it appears not so much a philosophy as a pose...
...One could imagine her beaming with pride as her husband told one interviewer that Bush won the election "through the courts...
...In an interview with CNN after Riordan tanked in the primary, he declared stoutly that a "conservative Republican will not win against Gray Davis...
...Schwarzenegger presented his proposition as nonideological and nonpartisan, as if raising state spending by up to $455 mil-lion a year for what amounts to babysitting doesn't involve any sort of political philosophy...
...That is why ending the taxation of dividends at the individual level would be better than ending it at the corporate level...
...Call Schwarzenegger a Kennedy Republican...
...Paradoxically, when investors know that taxes will be cut in future years, they hold off on decisions today...
...That Gray Davis defeated Riordan by running anti-Riordan ads during the Republican primary has now hardened into conventionaI dogma...
...No, what it showed was that he had spear-headed an essentially Democratic cause...
...But when the new Congress convenes in 2003, things will change...
...To Joe Rosengren, the operations director, "It was very obvious he did not know how to fly an airplane...
...In addition to tax cuts, the White House needs to move rapidly on free-trade initiatives...
...A Schwarzenegger run would cause more chaos and squabbling amongst their Republican opponents...
...Truculently, Moussaoui refused consent to search his luggage or laptop computer...
...It is insubstantial and jokey—after heart surgery, he cracked, "We made, actually, history, because it was the first time ever that doctors could prove that a lifelong Republican has a heart"—and P.C...
...free markets and the European social welfare state would make for a great worldwide debate about what economic system works best...
...Why would they disturb her...
...Liberal Republicans inevitably end up asliberal on economic issues as cultural ones...
...But this is nonsense—a consoling myth for liberal Republicans, who still can't admit that nominal Republicanism is a nonstarter for the rank-and-file...
...A further capital-gains tax cut, while politically costly initially, would cause an equity market blast-off...
...In forcing the Republicans to imitate them, the Democrats would be able to claim total victory in the state, while possibly averting the inevitable backlash that will follow four more years of one-party rule in Sacramento...
...He says that he is fiscally conservative and "socially soft?' But Republicans have been burned enough times by the Jim Jeffordses of the party to know that this labeling is value-less...
...So to tell them paternalistically that they should support a Republican in name only for the sake of "winning" isn't persuasive—it only angers and demoralizes them...
...But there is a point at which compromise renders the Republican Party pointless to them...
...His Riordan-style liberal Republicanism is not a minor problem that they can finesse with a few patronizing phrases or by teaching him how to play a Republican on TV...
...Liberals, after all, know a Democratic Trojan horse when they see one...
...Examine Proposition 49, an initiative that former Pete Wilson advisers helped Schwarzenegger craft as his entree into California politics...
...The bureau's Washington lawyers contended they lacked sufficient evidence to satisfy the 1978 law...
...Take the giddy GOP talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger as a potential Republican candidate in the Golden State...
...He offered California Republicans the prospect of a meaningless victory and was surprised when they didn't take it...
...No, but it does help illustrate and explain it...
...In the short term, Bush's staggered 2001 tax cuts actually hurt the economy...
...Ending their double-taxation—by allowing individuals to receive dividends tax-free—would be a simultaneous political and economic coup, much like the Clinton housing tax cuts...
...Vote for me, you extremists...
...Legally and secretly...
...The contrast between U.S...
...Whether he will run for governor, he says, is up to "the almighty—Maria...
...That was another thing I will never forgive the Republican Party for...
...it moves us closer to a flat tax where all income is only taxed once...
...The argument for Schwarzenegger is that things for the Republican Party in California can't get any worse...
...And how about asking Ireland, the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia to join NAFTA...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 want de facto Democrats representing them...
...It will not find one by neglecting substance for superficiality...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002...
...Like clockwork, once Proposition 49 passed, the Los Angeles Times described Schwarzenegger as a "charismatic candidate that California Republicans could use...
...But swinging for the fences can lead to strike-outs...
...Candidates like Riordan and Schwarzenegger pass that point...
...If anything, Davis's ads only reinforced what Republicans already knew and disliked about Riordan: that he was a waffler with little conviction...
...The president should not try to change the world in the lame-duck session of Congress...
...Moussaoui's note-book contained the telephone number of the Hamburg apartment of the main al-Qaeda attack cell, where Moussaoui's paymaster and the plot's Eugene H. Methvin, a Washington-based journalist, has reported on American courts and law enforcement since 1952...
...But the media are happy to play along with this cynical charade...
...On August 15, FBI Special Agent Dave Rapp—himself a former military fighter pilot—confronted Moussaoui at a nearby Residence Inn as he started out for his first simulator flight...
...government to protect its citizens...
...They stampeded Congress into imposing restrictions on the executive branch that nearly a quarter of a century later intimidated top FBI executives and stymied field agents, who sniffed and begged permission to pursue the terrorist skyjack plot...
...The rank-and-file want honorable, not hollow, victories...
...Talk magazine described him as "impatient" with the religious right...
...In an interview with George magazine, he pouted about the Republicans who impeached Clinton...
...He served on the 1983-1986 President's Commission on Organized Crime...
...What's now conveniently overlooked is that Davis ran anti-Riordan ads during the primary because Riordan, arrogantly looking beyond it, had begun running anti-Davis ads...
...For evidence that tax cuts work, look at the strength in the housing market...
...Davis assumed that Riordan would be his opponent and wanted to bloody him early in the race...
...What makes Republican strategists think Schwarzenegger would be any different...
...Its meaning was clear: rank-and-file Republicans in California do not George Neumayr is a writer in southern California...
...Let's watch the Congressional Black Caucus wrestle with that one...
...Whole-sale tax reform and private-account Social Security makes sense and would be home runs...
...It is not unreasonable for rank-and-file Republicans to expect their leaders to carry the Republican standard, not shred it...
...No, the tabloid-tarnished former Pumping Iron muscleman has much less...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 Fix the law, not law enforcement BY EUGENE H. METHVIN The long-awaited House-Senate joint intelligence committee hearings revealed shocking failures on the part of the U.S...
...Riordan didn't unify or revitalize the California Republican Party...
...Now we know the worst: the FBI fumbled golden chances to prevent al-Qaeda's "Attack on America" because the agency tried to obey the law...
...He has told the press he is "very liberal" about social programs, supports abortion and homosexual adoption, and wants "sensible gun controls?' In the same style as Riordan, for whom he campaigned vigorously, Schwarzenegger complains openly about the party's conservatism...
...Energy policy, prescription drugs, and the minimum wage will also be on the agenda—every one an opportunity for the Bush administration to show the investor class the power of competition and self-reliance...
...Schwarzenegger said to Broder that his alliance with Democrats showed that "this cause is bigger and more important than who you are or what your philosophy may be...
...California Republican primary voters aren't contemptuous of all compromise...
...He campaigned hard for terrorism insurance and homeland security, and those items should come first...
...Bush's trade czar Robert Zoellick has promised agreements with Chile and Singapore by the end of 2002...
...So a push for accelerated phase-in has the best risk-reward balance of all potential economic legislation...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
