The Baby Boom Race
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA THE BABY BOOM RACE By Andrew J. Glass Washington Every year, a radio station here produces something called Christmas in August. This time around the festival of unseasonal...
...The Democratic line on these matters was framed by Paul Begala, an alumnus of the Clinton White House and the Texas political wars, who has been reincarnated as an NBC analyst...
...An electorate that increasingly tends to brush aside policy positions to make its choices on the basis of perceived likability could use less "Jingle Bells" and more reality...
...Assuming they can retain their Congressional majorities, the Republicans seek above all else a winner who would end the omnipresent veto threat that forces them to haggle with a Democratic President...
...The other declared Republican wannabes simply fail to measure up...
...The political press corps, framing battle scenes where none exist, largely fails to report that it would make scant difference whether Gore moved up or Bradley sunk enough long shots to claim victory...
...He could also nominate judges inclined to re-interpret the Constitution in ways that would give religion greater prominence in public life...
...His campaign literature says: "If we are going to save a generation of young people, our children must know they will face bad consequences for criminal behavior...
...Appearing August 22 on Meet the Press, as a member of a journalists' panel, Begala allowed as how the cocaine caper bears "no relevance to Bush's fitness for office...
...Hatch...
...He's a war hero and he's a friend, and I'm just going to have to out-campaign him, out-organize him, outwork him...
...Baby Boomer journalists often find it hard to deal with politicians of their own generation...
...Despite her neo-Thatcherite advantages, Elizabeth Dole comes across as a lightweight...
...Johnson sought as President to forge the Great Society...
...It is not enough to call for [my dad's] volunteerism...
...There's a gap between the right language and reality...
...Our politics pays more heed to his goodguy image, which drives his seeming electabiliry, than to what he might actually seek to accomplish in the new millennium if he were to achieve a modern reprise of the Restoration of Britain's Stuart kings...
...If McCain manages to beat Bush in next February's South Carolina primary, his Vice Presidential stock would rise...
...Without more support and resources—both private and public—we are asking them to make bricks without straw...
...The reason is the same one—votes—that eventually led Ronald Reagan to choose Bush's father for the position...
...Ironically, the seeming inevitability of Bush gaining his party's nomination reflects inherent Republican weaknesses more than any deep political mastery on his part...
...Magazine magnate Steve Forbes, his second place showing in the Iowa straw poll notwithstanding, is again waging an overexposed vanity candidacy...
...I do not wantto send signals to anybody that what Governor Bush did 30 years ago is cool to try...
...Were they ever to be shipwrecked on a desert island, they would soon seek each other out and contentedly await rescue beneath the same coconut palm...
...Long passages of Bush's major social policy declaration, entitled "The Duty of Hope," read as if they could have been drafted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson...
...Most voters are far from ready to select the next occupant of the White House, but they don't mind a few verbal snowflakes swirling about the campaign...
...Sadly, too many youths are not getting that message...
...Rather than mandatory probation for possessing or selling less than one gram of cocaine, those convicted now face up to two years in jail...
...What they want, instead, is to elicit a confession...
...In any event, for a politician widely criticized among insiders as being inexperienced, untested and vague, Bush has molded a remarkably precise social doctrine...
...This reticence appears to be folly...
...Beyond Begala's partisan swipe, there has been a persistent theme in the political coverage that Bush hasn't put a lot on the table in terms of his beliefs or where he would take the country were he to win...
...LBJ's pitch, he says, has "become a warning, not an example...
...The persistent questions about Bush's possible youthful drug use largely reflect the pattern of reporters who, as a group, are absorbed with the celebrity of electronic punditry and have little patience for sustained investigations...
...The Governor, though, is far less willing to extend the same blanket pardon to adolescents that he claims for his own wild-and-woolly Yale frat boy years...
...Even pundits should be able to discern that the Republican mainstream has coalesced around the candidacy of Texas Governor George W. Bush and will continue to support him unless he stumbles in some totally unforeseen way...
...Chucking First Amendment strictures separating church and state, Bush makes noteof how fellow TexanLyndonB...
...Spurred by a hard-eyed Legislature, Bush has also signed a law giving Texas judges wide leeway in sending even firsttime offenders to jail for crimes involving small amounts of hard drugs...
...If Jackson is wrong, a second President Bush could put the politics of faith in the political saddle by pressing Congress to alter the tax laws...
...As centrists, both are imbued with the idea of marginally expanding social and economic justice in ways that do not significantly shake the political architecture...
...This time around the festival of unseasonal mood music seemed to serve as a metaphor for the 2000 Presidential race...
...They feel that such probes, whatever their outcome, are only likely to further alienate the public...
...But except for securing his 25-year disclaimer, they won't get one from Bush...
...Bush adds: "It is not enough for conservatives like me to praise these efforts...
...Indeed, the whole show would qualify as an amusing late summer diversion were it not for the serious millennial issues of governance at stake...
...He tells audiences that the purpose of the current prosperity must be to leave no one behind...
...Our juvenile justice system must say to our children: We love you, but we are going to hold you accountable for your actions...
...He would cut taxes to spur economic growth but not, Reagan-style, to underfund Federal programs...
...We found that government can spend money, but it can't put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives...
...Bush the Younger allowed that "John McCain is a good guy...
...GWB's pitch: "In every instance where my Administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faithbased organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives...
...To be sure, Bush's strong social views are hardly the core basis of his appeal...
...We'll just have to see who the Republican Party wants to be the standard bearer...
...I like him...
...Come next February, when the snowflakes are truly falling in New Hampshire, those conclusions should still stand...
...Although the first primaries are still months away, it should be obvious that the remaining aspirants—save perhaps one—are either niche figures, like Pat Buchanan and Gary Bauer, or doomed losers, like Dan Quayle and Utah's Senator OrrinG...
...In 1980, Bush the Elder defeated Reagan in Iowa...
...When I pointed this out to Jackson the other day, he replied: "He's not the first politician to imitate Jesse Jackson...
...If the 2000 contest were being held in Roman times, the Democratic faction in the white togas would no doubt anoint former Senate brethren Al Gore and Bill Bradley to rule the Empire jointly...
...We will make a determined attack on need, by promoting the compassionate acts of others...
...A consensus seems to have emerged around the notion that, whether or not he is guilty of substance abuse, he certainly is guilty of a lack of substance...
...Since deciding to take the Presidential plunge, Bush has joined his father in talking about the need to restore a sense of dignity to the White House...
...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime New Leader contributor, is senior correspondent and a columnist for Cox Newspapers...
...This is done by churches and synagogues and mosques and charities that warm the cold of life...
...If he had ideas out there, I don't think he would be bedeviled by these personal questions...
...After Clinton's re-election was virtually assured in 1996, he spent little political capital showing why his policies could be enacted only if the voters granted him working Democratic majorities on the Hill...
...We will rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart by heart...
...What's relevant is that I have learned from any mistakes I made...
...As it happened, few reporters noticed last spring when a TV interviewer in New Hampshire asked him whether he had ever used "drugs, marijuana [or] cocaine...
...What I am going to talk about—and I am going to say this consistently—[is that] it is irrelevant what I did 20 to 30 years ago...
...Fair enough...
...While campaigning in late August, in the aftermath of the cocaine flap...
...What counts, he said, is Bush's failure to "tell us what's his position on the minimum wage [or] his position on the President's proposal to have Medicare cover prescription drugs, [or] if he supports the Republican platform to abolish the Department of Education...
...Still, the media's performance in handicapping a Democratic race that promises to be decided in the early primaries seems prescient compared to the coverage of the Republican contestants, among whom, at this point, there is no real race to speak of...
...Actually, what Bush has ducked is spelling out the implications of Republican control in 2001 at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue—a circumstance that would probably prove the single most vital feature of his Presidency...
...The Arizona Senator is disliked by some insiders for being a maverick with too many media pals, but he is Bush's most likely choice as a running mate...
...Bush framed what was to become his stock reply: "I'm not going to talk about what I did as a child...
...The sole GOP candidate who could be considered a serious Bush rival is John McCain...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 10
