A Talk with Bob Bartley
Where would we have been during the morass of the Clinton scandals without the clarion light of Wall Street Journal's editorial page? Where would we have been in the Carter and Reagan years without...
...After 9/11 we heard a lot about how 'everything has changed.' In the big sense, what's really changed...
...RLB The reason it hasn't been done in a hundred years is that the only candidate to do it is us, and we haven't wanted to...
...In December, he ran into the Journal's compulsory retirement policy...
...For all the noise a year ago, there have been notably few indictments of the 'CEO crooks,' let alone convictions...
...Affirmative action and racial preferences are in the air because of the Michigan law school case going to the Supreme Court...
...it makes them particularly vulnerable to this kind of problem...
...The amazing thing for those without long memories is that one man made all that possible...
...Monetary policy and inflation are under some kind of control...
...RLB It will depend on how things come out in Iraq...
...RLB I had a conversation once with a CEO who was pretty beat up by government regulations, and his company was held guilty of a lot of things they really didn't believe they were liable for...
...How you stimulate an economy is increasingly tempered by the conclusion that it's a psychological exercise...
...You have this woman who was quite unbalanced, and suddenly she becomes a worldwide idol, just overnight...
...TAS You mentioned in one of your columns that when Bob Mundell—whom you and others have identified as an intellectual godfather of supply-side economics—went to Stockholm in 1999 to accept the Nobel Prize, he sang 'My Way' as a testimony to the cold shoulder he got from the economics profession...
...TAS What does an avowed arms-control skeptic say about a world of proliferating threats...
...TAS Lasting damage...
...RLB Fox has revolutionized the TV news business...
...Our policy toward Iraq has been awful for twenty years...
...And partly as a result of this, I think the Bush administration has gone some way toward intellectualizing a new world order, which the United States is going to lead because the fact is that no one else can...
...I don't see that quite so clearly this time...
...RLB So far, it looks like it...
...Royster always said that if he had come and worked for us for a couple of years first, it would have been a better magazine...
...RLB A: The last time around, in the 1980s, it was pretty clear that the government was out to find scapegoats, one of whom was Michael Milken...
...He knows what he thinks...
...TAS Why does he evoke such hatred from the left...
...That was the start of a boom that lasted until the 1990 recession, at least...
...Would you see the role of the courts going forward as simply mending their activist ways or actually rolling back decisions such as Roe v. Wade...
...Bob Bartley took over the Journal's editorial page in 1972, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, stepping into the shoes of the legendary Vermont Royster...
...I think it could be possible for a new Supreme Court to say that Roe was decided incorrectly—which I happen to think is the truth, that there was no basis for the law for this decision...
...If that happens, Saudi Arabia will have to start to reform, and over time we might get a more responsible Palestinian leadership...
...Those are their natural inclinations, but the body politic is not in that kind of mood, so they're torn between their natural inclinations and their electoral interests, which has them sputtering incoherently...
...That is, part of the great liberal tradition of opposition to the encroachments of the Crown...
...What does your crystal ball see for the Bush years...
...But the world is full of surprises—Al Gore got a plurality of voters...
...You could do this if you directed tax cuts not at 'aggregate demand' but at improving incentives in the economy...
...When we say "stimulus," people automatically think of Keynes, injecting money in the monetary multiplier...
...As it turned out, the 1981 tax bill was the only fiscal move since the end of World War II that has been well timed...
...TAS How about the idea of a link between budget deficits and interest rates—socalled 'Rubinomics.' RLB It has to be true in some tautological sense, but it doesn't correspond to what's happened historically...
...RLB Here at the Journal we're Whigs, not Tories...
...Could things have turned differently...
...That's really the heart of the intellectual movement that became known as supply-side economics...
...They think that the world ought to be ordered by some kind of supranational sovereignty, and that it's somehow wrong for the United States to take an aggressive leadership role...
...If you look at Jimmy Carter, U.S...
...If he can make some more marginal rate cuts, greatly expand the IRA, abolish the death tax—that would be a pretty good run...
...TAS Roe...
...RLB Sure—if the press had followed up on [New York Times investigative reporter] Jeff Gerth's first story during the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton might never have been president...
...And I haven't changed my opinion of him (though he would probably say he's a Tory...
...In all the overt ways they're similar, but the black kid gets twenty extra points, equivalent to a full grade point...
...Are they just being paranoid...
...TAS Affirmative action—you've written that it's the second biggest issue facing the country, after the economy...
...Not that long ago there was no such thing as a VCR, no Internet, no such thing as a personal computer...
...RLB The truly good book on that is still waiting to be written...
...Do you worry about it...
...The American Spectator We're sitting here next to a still-gaping hole in the ground and there's a Code Orange alert...
...TAS Will we see an independent prosecutor again...
...RLB We don't really understand what happened in the markets in the late 1990s...
...The Democratic Party is still a potent political force...
...Somebody asked me at a conference about the big productivity boosts we've been seeing from technology—were they a one-time event...
...That's why we had to create a whole set of new public policy institutions—the Heritage Foundation, Hoover, Cato, AEI, and on and on...
...TAS The cynic's answer to how you stimulate the U.S...
...Recessions have been mild because of information technology—businesses now have those big inventory swings under control...
...RLB It's probably a useful political device, but there's nothing about plain conservatism that's not compassionate...
...RLB Sure, but it's being overwhelmed by the lessons learned since then, by more of the electorate getting involved...
...It was a once-in-a-century alignment of the stars that did in Nixon...
...Our friend Bob Novak calls him flatly "the most influential journalist of our time...
...in political science from the University of Wisconsin...
...John said, 'We have to get away from this word stimulus...
...RLB Sure...
...The Republicans have succeeded in capturing the moral high ground...
...Also, George Bush is an authentic person...
...That said, I have very little respect for the academic class at the moment...
...TAS The New York Times this morning has a headline: 'IRS Mystified by Tax Shelters.' Isn't it the job of the CFO of a company like Enron to try to play the game...
...I asked him, 'When does the long run start?' And Milton Friedman said, `It starts immediately.' I think that's why the administration is disinclined to make the stimulus argument—it starts immediately, but plays out over several years...
...They think that the world ought to be ordered by some kind of supranational sovereignty, and that it's somehow wrong for the United States to take an aggressive leadership role...
...Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz will be figures in our history like Acheson and Marshall were...
...RLB We've survived a lot of mistakes, and the good news is that our system doesn't depend on one man...
...TAS In theory, a good dose of awe can go a long way...
...At least Bush is trying...
...Bob Mundell says the same thing...
...the bright young men running Shanghai are probably not too keen to be voted out of office by all those dirty peasants...
...TAS The same question can be raised about the markets—when you first said 'fad' that's what we thought you were talking about...
...Our friend Bob Novak calls him flatly "the most influential journalist of our time...
...There's no real intellectual commitment anymore to using the government to solve perceived problems...
...Now wireless e-mail is part of the texture of American life...
...TAS How did he escape Richard Nixon's fate...
...the ex-provost of Stanford is the national security adviser...
...In that context, even a 'big' federal budget deficit is trivial and bound to be overwhelmed by other factors...
...I doubt that Roe will be reversed outright, but will be reinterpreted to provide some control of abortion...
...RLB It depends upon what you mean...
...And that was totally an accident...
...TAS The last serious 'global policeman' was Victorian Britain—is that because the world got too complicated...
...It's not all Bill Clinton's fault...
...Andrew Fastow has been indicted, but Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay haven't...
...TAS Who's your dream team of writers...
...RLB These people know what they're signing up to sell...
...What they won't forgive you for is being right...
...TAS Sounds like détente...
...And the people around him are similar kinds of people, including Karl Rove...
...There's a lot more skill and resources there than at any conceivable SEC...
...Those are stereotypes...
...It's not just in the liberal direction—when Reagan got up in the debates and said to Jimmy Carter, 'There you go again,' everybody in the country knew what he meant—the idea of Carter's meanness, which had developed during the campaign...
...But I think there was a specific kind of Clinton fecklessness, accentuated by an underlying problem with the Democrats in general...
...Recently he took some time out to talk with THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, at the Journal's offices in lower Manhattan, overlooking Ground Zero...
...I talked to one guy who runs a Canadian hedge fund, and he did a deal that left him holding a big block of Enron stock...
...Liberals may have to get used to the idea of being in the wilderness...
...Suddenly we pass all these rules saying you have to have a financial expert on your audit committee, but neglect to tell you what a financial expert is...
...Mankiw's views in particular are much more interesting...
...RLB Art had predicted that properly designed tax cuts could recoup the revenue within two years...
...We had an establishment in this country, the generation that came out of World War II...
...a distinguished Princeton grad is running the Pentagon, with a former Yale professor—Paul Wolfowitz—as his chief deputy...
...But I don't think it's a very powerful restraint, particularly given the way the government keeps its books...
...TAS The hardcore anti-taxers—people like Steve Moore at the Club for Growth—say they detect some softness in the Bush White House on tax and spending issues...
...And then of course Clinton, which eviscerated what was left of liberalism's moral authority...
...TAS You wrote a book about the Reagan era—The Seven Fat Years...
...Forty-three is more Texan, and that's a good thing...
...Where would we be in years to come without the tax cuts and deregulation preached like the gospel they are from the only editorial pulpit in America that actually sells newspapers...
...We've compiled a track record of being right or ahead of our time, particularly issues that have undermined the presumed superiority of the old-time liberal establishment...
...Where would we have been in the Carter and Reagan years without its thundering support in the battle with the original Evil Empire...
...RLB Clinton showed that an independent prosecutor is subject to political attack and can't defend himself...
...RLB The Democrats are off in space because they have a different view of the world...
...TAS In the news today Mrs...
...But it's a collection of interest groups—there's no intellectual appeal...
...It's the long-term impact of projections that are the big arguments...
...I'm not sure prosecutors should be redesigning Wall Street, but we do need to find individual wrongdoers and punish them...
...TAS 'Compassionate conservatism...
...These kinds of self-selections carry with them a certain worldview...
...Academic intellectuals are becoming irrelevant...
...TAS The poll numbers have been bouncing around quite a bit—is the electorate more up for grabs than we think...
...What's going on...
...TAS What liberal bias in the media...
...And of course Buckley and Tyrrell and Seth Lipsky...
...RLB Well, after the war on terrorism too...
...TAS Speaking of the courts, it does look like we finally are going to see them pushed back toward the center—we won't even say to the right...
...RLB Unfortunately an outsider can come out of nowhere, capture the imagination, and avoid a lot of the traditional scrutiny...
...I'm not fearful that we're going to turn into some kind of police state...
...And I'm glad to see that Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau is into the Tyco case, because he's a serious prosecutor who looks for real crooks...
...It was 1955— we'd just come out of the New Deal—and he was saying no to the government encroachment part of that...
...RLB Not at all—I'd never argue that if you don't succeed in having him run out of office, you haven't accomplished anything...
...RLB Fortunately we don't have to negotiate any arms-control agreements with them...
...We're susceptible to fads—the Princess Di phenomenon...
...monetary policy has lags too...
...RLB The White House can probably get its tax cut this year, and although it's not exactly the one I might have designed, it could be pretty good...
...Churchill once told his generals, 'I want less jaw, jaw, jaw, and more war, war, war.' Lincoln went through the same thing...
...Walter Lippmann described it in the 1920s—the only practical way to deal with the onrushing reality of day-to-day news is to carry in your head what he called stereotypes, which tell you what is news and what is not...
...I said, 'It's a one-time event that will go on for fifty years.' We're living through the second Industrial Revolution...
...TAS What's the price...
...RLB The Chinese have made a big bet that they can have a market economy without political reform...
...It would be a bad thing if Martha Stewart were indicted—she didn't have a fiduciary responsibility for any information she's accused of trading on, and her indictment would be a big expansion of the insider-trading laws...
...But it forces you inevitably in the direction of greater pluralism...
...RLB We have to be more skillful about it...
...TAS The famous napkin...
...But I think it also has to do with the structure of the Democratic Party...
...Are we in danger of stifling legitimately aggressive companies...
...Look, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the stagflation of the 1970s was cured...
...Not just the powerful ideas broadcast from a bully pulpit, but the whole notion of backing them up with equally powerful reporting...
...And that's accentuated by the necessities of journalism...
...We've learned that it matters what the nature of the internal government of Afghanistan is...
...Robert L. Bartley In the biggest sense, the American people were awakened to the kind of world that they live in, which is a very dangerous one and one that they can't ignore, as historically has been their preferred mode...
...But if they're rebates, they won't...
...I would hate to see the Michigan procedures upheld—then we'd really be off into a quota-based society...
...But when you have a group of people who all live in the same intellectual universe, those stereotypes don't get questioned...
...Where would we be in years to come without the tax cuts and deregulation preached like the gospel they are from the only editorial pulpit in America that actually sells newspapers...
...RLB Sure, but it's being overwhelmed by the lessons learned since then, by more of the electorate getting involved...
...foreign policy turned around in the last year of his presidency, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the start of the defense buildup Ronald Reagan continued...
...And Marty Anderson, who actually wrote Reagan's policy paper number one, challenged people to go back and find anyone who actually said that all of the tax revenue would be recouped in the first year after the tax cuts...
...They're not any more conservative than the typical network news is liberal—let alone CNN, which I think has its own problems...
...You can throw Brookings in there, but on the liberal side...
...RLB I don't think so...
...RLB I'd be surprised if we get a decision overturning Roe v. Wade, because it's been so long now...
...They were the experts, the smart guys, and everyone deferred to them...
...Abortion would still be legal, but the power to regulate it would go back to the states...
...So he came back and read it again the next morning...
...RLB Sure, particularly with a short-term-oriented political class who are always up for re-election...
...It will probably take a Chinese form...
...TAS If you can't depend on a Republican administration to fix these things, who will...
...What you're left with are the unions, the black leadership—which still seems to be able to deliver voters—the tort lawyers, and the reflexive good-intentions crowd...
...TAS So the liberals are right to be panicked...
...RLB There's going to be some rolling back...
...TAS So the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well in the Democratic Party...
...The amazing thing for those without long memories is that one man made all that possible...
...TAS The Democrats don't seem to have got the message...
...TAS The universities seem to be saying that if the courts knock down overt racial preferences, they'll just do it ad hoc...
...TAS So what was the reality...
...An Arab state that is a democracy and pluralistic—that would be a terrific thing...
...It's better than hanging poor Ken Starr out there...
...TAS So was Clinton farce or tragedy...
...And that's what we ought to be betting on, rather than trying to confront China...
...Free markets and free men'—we still speak for that today...
...TAS Michael Kinsley once called you 'the central cog in the vast right-wing conspiracy...
...So he went and pulled out the Enron annual report and read it...
...RLB Right—all Laffer actually said was that the curve was a teaching tool, a pedagogical tool...
...The idea of Reagan's `stupidity' or that Gerry Ford—probably one of the most athletic people ever to hold the presidency—was clumsy...
...Can we organize ourselves to do that...
...The whole idea of the 'original intent' jurisprudence that conservatives are always talking about is to provide grounds for reversing previous extensions of judicial power rather than having the judiciary being a one-way street...
...A number of us from the Journal editorial page went down to talk to him in Austin...
...She probably wouldn't have ruled that way before September 11, but it's not going to be the collapse of free speech...
...Is he the man to lead a second New Deal, this time a conservative one...
...RLB If we can succeed in Iraq with some staying power, it will change much of the world, starting of course in the Middle East...
...TAS You're kidding...
...RLB An apostate member of the establishment is always dangerous, because he's not intimidated and knows where the vulnerabilities are...
...Instead he went off to start National Review...
...They don't seem to be at all worried about ideological diversity, for example...
...You know my predecessor at the Journal, Vermont Royster, tried to hire Bill Buckley, right out of Yale...
...Even within the Republican Party, supply-side ideas are far from universal acceptance...
...Among the new generation, Michael Kelly...
...And what's it about Midwesterners in journalism anyway...
...And all these bright young people are going to want to have some say about their political future...
...That's exactly what happened, if you count the effective date of real tax cuts at 1983—after all the phasing-in and staggering was out of the way...
...I came away from that thinking, 'This is a guy who has been greatly underestimated, and in particular he's not his father all over again.' Bush Senior was a patrician from Connecticut, with a little bit of Texas...
...But the phrase got politicized—everyone fixated on Art Laffer's curve, with marginal tax rates and tax revenues...
...Bernard Goldberg's bestseller got its start as a piece on the Journal's editorial page...
...The military thrust, going back to the 1970s, which undermined the arms-control crowd and do-good internationalism...
...TAS While we're on the universities, we've got a Yale and Harvard president...
...TAS For instance...
...He's continuing to write his Monday column, "Thinking Things Over," and plotting a successor to The Seven Fat Years, his history of the Reagan era...
...War is an inherently unpredictable Where would we have been during the morass of the Clinton scandals without the clarion light of Wall Street Journal's editorial page...
...Nods and winks can always go away when the situation changes...
...And of course you have the president's religious experience, never to be underestimated, and a source of irritation among the secular intellectual class...
...Maybe we should see it as a psychological phenomenon, along the lines of a fad...
...RLB I don't think that would be the worst outcome in the world...
...But that was the conception at the time, from some writers who got carried away...
...And David Frum and David Brooks, two more of my graduates who have gone on to do good things...
...War is an inherently unpredictable Where would we have been during the moraenterprise...
...Yes, I think we are going to have to have an activist foreign policy, and I hope we get a little better at it so we don't have to go around invading countries very often...
...The more prosperous they get, the more of that there's going to be...
...On the way out of the room, he said, 'Well, Bob, it's still the best system in the world.' TAS In your valedictory column as editor of the Journal's editorial page, you wrote, 'What I found most in this society is that progress happens...
...Clinton is calling for a national I.D...
...Then rather than waste a lot of energy on some kind of intellectually consistent tax reform in the second term, he could go after Social Security, which really is a huge problem but fixable, conceptually, at least...
...economy is: 'Take Baghdad.' RLB That's right...
...The way the game is currently played, deficits are used as an argument against tax cuts...
...TAS So you're not a deficit hawk...
...It reminds me of George Bush saying, 'kinder and gentler,' and Nancy Reagan snapping back, 'kinder and gentler than what?' TAS So we're still groping for the outlines of the new New Deal...
...Where would we have been in the Carter and Reagan years without its thundering support in the battle with the original Evil Empire...
...Not bad for a bright young guy out of Iowa...
...RLB Political correctness, affirmative action—the whole post-modern idea is not a bed for intellectual ferment...
...For starters, you have to remember what we're talking about here is the world's supply of capital and the world's demand for capital...
...At the very least, businesses are distracted from the business of operating their businesses...
...If it had been up to me, we would have had a real trial in the Senate, but I don't think there was any Republican appetite for that...
...Marginal tax rates have gone back up some, but they're still not the 70 percent that they were prior to Reagan...
...That's where the public policy intellectual work takes place these days, not in universities...
...TAS So does the whole debate come down to whether we're talking about long- or short-term effects...
...TAS The Pentagon gives the impression that it doesn't particularly want to...
...Not just the powerful ideas broadcast from a bully pulpit, but the whole notion of backing them up with equally powerful reporting...
...TAS Was Wall Street asleep at the switch in the late 1990s...
...RLB People will always forgive you for being wrong...
...RLB It will depend on how things come out in Iraq...
...And partly as a result of this, I think the Bush administration has gone some way toward intellectualizing a new world order, which the United States is going to lead because the fact is that no one else can...
...Nothing similar happened in the Clinton administration...
...Analysts Jack Grubman and Henry Blodget may have done some things wrong, but they're basically being convicted of being television personalities...
...People talk about the 'cost' of a tax cut over ten years—they don't talk about expenditures that way, let alone the entitlements...
...Dean Acheson was the epitome—he called his memoirs Present at the Creation...
...Deficits can be a problem, but that's not likely when the federal debt is only 35 percent of GDP, as at present, instead of more than 100 percent at the end of World War II...
...RLB The first thing I did when I took over the Journal's editorial page was to hire George Will—an obscure aide to a senator who was on his way out...
...TAS And foreign policy—how about a wild card: China—friend or foe...
...We've learned that it matters what the nature of the internal government of Afghanistan is...
...The American Spectator We're sitting here next to a still-gaping hole in the ground and there's a Code Orange alert...
...TAS So it's quixotic to take on a sitting president...
...Bizarrely, out of this all, liberals would have everyone believe that this is a bunch of illiterate cowboys...
...Bob Bartley took over the Journal's editorial page in 1972, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, stepping into the shoes of the legendary Vermont Royster...
...He's continuing to write his Monday column, "Thinking Things Over," and plotting a successor to The Seven Fat Years, his history of the Reagan era...
...RLB I have a lot of confidence in our two hundred years of experience in digesting whatever comes along...
...Recently he took some time out to talk with THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, at the Journal's offices in lower Manhattan, overlooking Ground Zero...
...RLB Pretty clearly we've been in a period of regulatory overdrive...
...RLB A lot of people were asleep at the switch...
...The Tory idea of a privileged aristocracy was never very popular in the United States except in the South, and it was destroyed there by the Civil War...
...So I'd agitate on human rights, but I wouldn't cut off trade or stop educating their young people...
...TAS The poll numbers have been bouncing around quite a bit—is the electorate more up for grabs than we think...
...You have to have some way to push things back...
...It was all there in the footnotes...
...RLB Supply-side economics—if nothing else it has undermined the conventional Keynesian view...
...If they're marginal rate cuts, they'll have a feedback effect...
...TAS You're an activist conservative—a contradiction in terms...
...TAS But you're certainly a great fan of the idea of progress—how does that square with Bill Buckley's famous formulation about the conservatives' role being 'to stand athwart history and shout "Stop...
...we want to make excuses for him...
...He's more than a spinmeister—he has serious thoughts about public policy, in a way the Carvilles of the world don't...
...TAS So Pax Americana...
...When you have a monopoly local newspaper, it's hard for an unhappy reader to switch...
...Now I have my doubts about even that...
...RLB You have to understand the context in which he said that...
...On the other hand, we probably should have some trials over Enron...
...It took two hours and he couldn't believe what he was reading...
...Thank goodness it didn't last really long...
...RLB First of all there's the enormous power of the U.S...
...RLB Most of the damage from Clinton's presidency—foreign affairs particularly—would have happened anyway, even without the scandals...
...But I'm not sure I believe in stock 'bubbles,' even now...
...But just as a practical matter, I find it a little hard to think we would ever reach that point...
...If we hadn't had that last crazy run-up, in 1999 and 2000, everything would have looked fine...
...But the change in slant and emphasis helped Fox become number-one in cable—there was a market out there waiting to be tapped, and no one else saw it...
...I don't think that's healthy and it probably won't be sustainable—there would be all sorts of unhealthy resentment and antagonisms...
...I don't know...
...It took him two days to get rid of the stock...
...Certainly the State Department's no good at it...
...TAS Let's be optimistic—a great victory in Iraq, the economy goes right, he gets reelected with a massive mandate to take on tax reform, privatize Social Security...
...Our tendency has been to let things run downhill until we had to step in and lose a lot of lives...
...mainstream economists agree that incentive effects work in the long term, but are down on `fine tuning.' I had this discussion a few weeks ago at the Hoover Institution, with Marty Anderson and John Cogan, who had a lot of intellectual input into the new Bush tax bill...
...Nixon was hounded from office, but that was part of the Vietnam War—we had this superheated public atmosphere and a sagging economy...
...But there's also a kind of warning that was exposed by the Clinton investigations—that people who contend for high office tend not to be normal people...
...a vice president who is an all-but-dissertation Ph.D...
...Don't use the word—say: "It will be good for the economy in the long run...
...You have two kids in Grosse Point, one white, the other black...
...We ought to take the other side of the same bet—they're going to have to have political reform too...
...True engagement will require being constantly in the world, in difficult spots, heading off the need for overt military action...
...With cable news, people vote with their fingers...
...it must have been December of '99, when he was campaigning...
...It also depends on what kind of tax cuts...
...How long that will go on, I don't know...
...We are a society of the law and obviously we will have to strike a balance...
...Robert L. Bartley In the biggest sense, the American people were awakened to the kind of world that they live in, which is a very dangerous one and one that they can't ignore, as historically has been their preferred mode...
...At the same time I'm not quite willing to say that we can run a society that is totally colorblind, because none of us are...
...Being totally color-blind is an objective to work for, but we won't get there soon...
...RLB At a dinner awhile back, Bob Mundell said I should retitle it 'The Seventeen Fat Years,' because that's what we ended up having...
...We can keep on rolling...
...TAS The Democrats don't seem to have got the message...
...Then the president can fire him—as Nixon fired Archibold Cox—but he has to pay a political price...
...Right now we have a judge here in New York ruling that it's not OK for war protesters to march up and down the streets...
...TAS Speaking of books—corporate governance...
...We've made amazing progress...
...problems have solutions.' So we're not slouching toward Gomorrah...
...The consensus of the economic profession at the moment is that fiscal policy ought to be directed to long term, and short-term stimulus should rely on monetary policy...
...RLB That's a constant fight...
...What's happening in China is that they're developing a middle class...
...TAS The market tanked and Bill Clinton wriggled off the hook...
...RLB Not at all...
...It's inherently ineffective—better to do it within the Justice Department...
...It's not hard to envision scenarios that might come down to the discredit of the Bush administration...
...Those are their natural inclinations, but the body politic is not in that kind of mood, so they're torn between their natural inclinations and their electoral interests, which has them sputtering incoherently...
...To switch gears, the Journal's editorial page was as big a player in the Clinton scandals as anyone...
...presidency—for the most part Americans don't want to go against it...
...That's a pretty substantial accomplishment...
...They couldn't find it, because Art never said it...
...And what's it about Midwesterners in journalism anyway...
...RLB The intellectual community—the universities, anyway—pretty much bankrupted themselves...
...The extraordinary thing was not the crash—it was the boom...
...After 9/11 we heard a lot about how 'everything has changed.' In the big sense, what's really changed...
...In December, he ran into the Journal's compulsory retirement policy...
...RLB Mundell's idea was that you could have a monetary policy directed at one objective—say, controlling inflation—and fiscal policy directed at another—stimulating production, for instance...
...What the liberals have to worry about now is that it's all happening again—this time to the benefit of the conservatives...
...The only argument for a balanced budget is a political argument—that balancing the budget is a restraint on the appetites of government...
...TAS So the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well in the Democratic Party...
...RLB The Democrats are off in space because they have a different view of the world...
...They point to the appearance of people like Steve Friedman of the Concord Coalition and Greg Mankiw of Harvard—surely no supply-sider—on the White House economics team...
...RLB I'm a little concerned about whether we can learn how to manage a society with instant communication...
...Not bad for a bright young guy out of Iowa...
...RLB Well, it's more than that...
...TAS Is there an inherent problem of democracy here—that it's difficult to sell long-term economics to a short-term populace...
...Stanley Rothman and Bob Lichter have it about right—a certain type of person wants to go into journalism, and another sort of person wants to go into, say, business or the military...
...Does the apparent volatility of real-time global markets worry you...
...card, and meanwhile there is some rumbling from even very conservative groups about what we might call collateral damage to American liberty from the war on terrorism...
...What seems to be happening now is that we're endowing a new establishment...
...TAS Once upon a time 'commentators' were something you wheeled out—Eric Severeid...
...TAS It's a pretty sterile place already...
...And that's the mainstream news business...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
