Washington Notebook

...Those who yearned for a single moment of truth did not find it...

...It does not help the working poor...

...Not necessarily, declares Yale Professor Ray Fair, who specializes in correlating economic statistics and election prospects...

...After World War II, the staunchly anti-Communist GOP also became a rallying point for exiles from Europe, several of whom had served Nazi regimes in their own countries...

...Frederic V. Malek, who resigned as a high-level Bush legal adviser when it was revealed that he compiled a list of Jews in the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics during his tenure as Nixon's personnel chief, was not the only one enlisted to pursue some "Jewish cabal...

...As important as what the bill does, including its education and training program, is what it does not do...

...Not in a half century, reports the veteran California pollster Mervin Field, has he seen such conflict in polling results between satisfaction with the present and worry about the future...

...But it was a far cry from the fundamental welfare reform that Moynihan, as White House domestic adviser in 1969, induced President Nixon to espouse...

...One voter's "articulate" may be another voter's "glib...

...Furthermore, through most of the century the Republican Party, with its conservative Midwestern and Western roots, has attracted to its periphery, and occasionally to its center, a variety of Right-wing zealots, some with strong ethnic prejudices...

...Congress could reconsider the provision before its scheduled phase-in...

...It does not increase welfare benefits, which have been eroded one-third by 15 years of inflation...

...Voters, while on the whole satisfied with current conditions, are unusually nervous about the future...

...asked Vice President George Bush at one point...

...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y...

...Still, the symbolism is important to some, like Augustus F. Hawkins, (D.-Calif...

...It does not create jobs...

...The Nixon-Moynihan plan failed in Congress, where it was caught between liberals who called it too measly and conservatives who called it too generous...

...Median income in 1987 was up a bit— enough to reach the highest level in history...

...For all of the talk about camera angles and style, the television confrontation was not without substance...

...If the race was not over before it started, the reason could be that one rule no longer applies...

...By this year, the middle of the road that Senator Moynihan walked, sometimes ducking, had shifted sharply to the Right...

...Dukakis says, yes, but the middle class and the poor are paying a larger share of their incomes and the rich a smaller share...

...In politics numbers remain bullets, and in the campaign statistics have been ricocheting back and forth in a battle to define the economic state of the nation...

...Accordingly, in the great game of expectations none was more overdone than the hopeful expectation that the debate would bring some blinding revelation, some epiphany, that would dispel indecision...

...Bush says that Americans are paying less of their income in taxes...

...He boasted in the Hungarian-American press of serving on advisory panels under Presidents Ford and Reagan...

...Vice President Bush has never been known to have any racial prejudice...

...One voter's "compassionate" may be another voter's "big spender...

...It is rightly called welfare "overhaul," not "reform...

...Yet a drama review is not the same as a political judgment...

...Its premise, as stated by Nixon, was, "What the poor need to help them rise out of poverty is money...

...Welfare Overhaul The latest word from the Census Bureau on poverty is good news, bad news...

...Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post that Michael S. Dukakis was "more in command of the camera," and concluded, "Bush towered over Dukakis, but during the debate it was Dukakis who seemed the bigger man...

...This notwithstanding the fact that in 1972 Nixon won 40 per cent of the Jewish votes, thanks to his pro-Israel and anti-quota positions...

...An example is Laszlo Pasztor, one of five co-chairmen of the Bush organization's Council of Nationalities forced to resign...

...Forty years of history seem, generally, to support that observation...

...He maintains that even though Bush appears to be ahead, "the election could go either way...

...who had been trying for two decades to change the creaking welfare structure, got what he wanted—a bill bearing his name that the President was willing to sign...

...In his memoirs Nixon recalls that George Shultz, then Secretary of the Treasury, said, "He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit from both sides...

...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...

...It seemed as though the television audience, conditioned by spectator sports, needed to see the prostrate boxer, the runner bursting through the finish tape, the triumphant touchdown...

...No one thought of screening him and his colleagues of other East European nationalities—until they became an embarrassment to the Bush campaign...

...Perhaps it is only a symbolic surrender...

...Why, then, was he suddenly hit with allegations of bigotry in his campaign organization...

...On September 24, the eve of the Bush-Dukakis debate, polls indicated that up to 40 per cent of the voters had not yet decided or could still change their minds about their preferences for the Oval Office...

...The '69 program offered work incentives and a graduated guaranteed income for the working poor as well as the unemployed poor...

...In the United States Pasztor became active in organizing Hungarian émigrés...

...A new factor has been showing up in the equations...

...The manipulation of figures has become more than a cottage industry Confusing as it may seem, Vice President Bush says that "we've created 17 million new jobs in the past five years, and good jobs," and Governor Dukakis continues to insist that many good jobs have been replaced by others paying onethird less on the average...

...So in the sixth year of the country's economic recovery, with stable growth and inflation figures, is Bush the inevitable winner...

...Alas, there was not even a referee blowing the whistle on illegal holding and blocking...

...Then there is this stark fact: about one out of every two black children fell under the poverty line...

...Bush's Baggage One more word about the campaign...

...Thus the President, who has a favorite story about the welfare queen riding in a Cadillac to pick up her check, got what hewanted—forced work...

...Is this the time to unleash the one-liners...

...Nevertheless, somehow both candidates appear to be more sharply etched...

...Perhaps not enough to say the campaign is over, but perhaps enough to say that it has started...

...The issues remained complicated, the proposed solutions vague and cloudy...

...Moynihan, having earlier opposed a mandatory Federal workfare requirement (as did the National Association of Governors), and having said it would waste the time of participants on meaningless "make work" jobs, in the end yielded to the White House to avoid a Reagan veto...

...The dictum handed down by George Gallup was that an incumbent administration does not lose when there is peace and prosperity...

...How come...

...Despite the sustained general recovery, however, the proportion of poor held steady at 13.5 per cent...

...But from both sides the devastating one-liners, so carefully rehearsed, did not devastate...

...Bush seems to be running on satisfaction with the present peace and prosperity, Dukakis on pockets of discontent and anxiety about the future...

...Maybe it is only Ronald Reagan who is master enough of this debate form to star in a musical entitled "Of Thee I Zing...

...According to official documents, he was sentenced in Budapest in 1946 to five years' imprisonment for having served in the Arrow-Cross Party, which set up a puppet Nazi regime...

...Although the proportion of poor whites was down to 10.5 per cent, the proportions of poor blacks and Hispanics rose significantly to 33 and 28 per cent, respectively...

...It has long been an open secret that President Nixon saw enemies everywhere (partially catalogued in "enemies lists"), and the Oval Office tapes testify to his rages against "the eastern Jewish establishment...

...Incumbents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Ronald Reagan won with favorable indices of growth, inflation and unemployment...

...The media only told them about the debate as theater...

...The indictment said that he was part of an armed group that rounded up Jews and others for forced labor under the Germans...

...It is probably true, as the early reactions indicated, that given the absence of any major pratfall few minds were changed...

...Incumbents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter lost when things looked less rosy...

...The answer is that, drawing on individuals and structures that served previous Republican standard-bearers, he found himself carrying some uninspected baggage from his party's past...

...Indeed, the initial reaction of "no knockout" appeared to reflect disappointment that neither candidate was left gasping on the mat...

...It is not until 1994 that a father or mother in a two-parent family would be required to perform 16 hours a week of community service (and it is estimated that only 5 per cent of the families on welfare fall into this category...

...chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, who calls it "slavefare...

...Maybe...

...Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of several Jews who served Nixon, wrote in his memoirs that the President was convinced "most leaders in the Jewish community had opposed him throughout his political career...

...That raises the question of "the welfare mess," as it is now commonly called...

...In the effort to change the welfare system, whose inadequacy hardly anyone disputes, the tension has been between condemnation of recipients and compassion for them, between angrily demanding work and improving benefits...

...Running for governor of California, Reagan received the unsolicited support of the John Birch Society...

...In the days following the debate, the news media kept turning to the voters to learn who had won, and the voters kept looking to the media to tell them...

...On September 27, House and Senate conferees settled on a compromise plan to enact the first substantial revision of the the welfare system in more than 53 years —after differences between Congress and the White House, principally about the President's insistence on compulsory workfare, had been ironed out...