Scrapbook
Scrapbook TARRING CCRI WITH THE DAVID DUKE BRUSH The California Civil Rights Initiative, the anti-quota measure on the California ballot in November, continues to do well in the polls. It is...
...He told a crowd in Little Rock that on his watch “15 million of our hardest pressed Americans have gotten a tax cut to raise their kids...
...In this otherwise dispiriting election season, they stand out as principled figures deserving of the admiration and support of conservatives around the country...
...We’ve doubled the life expectancy for people with HIV in four years,” Clinton roars...
...CLINTON’S PATHETIC LIES ON THE STUMP Bill Clinton is serving up a grand feast of false accomplishments and just plain bull to his adoring fans at campaign rallies, thus giving new meaning to the old Ozark term “chutzpah...
...He basically fooled around with the “right track-wrong track” question so that he could hear the answer he wanted to hear...
...The man loves to brag: “I’m the first president since John Tyler before the Civil War to reduce the deficit in all four years of his term...
...THE CLICH...
...Just to get reporters and pundits to ooh and aah over the change in the “right track” number...
...All Clinton’s gamesmanship means is that an entirely new way of asking the question is going to have to be devised...
...A recent front-page article in the San Francisco Examiner, for example, profiled a 19-year-old southern Californian, Hayley Ulrich, who has just successfully finished her first year at West Point...
...And so-called public interest groups like the League of Women Voters have predictably come out against CCRI...
...No, the term is a sociological one, a polite way for the politically correct to say they want the votes of suburban women...
...A Nexis search turned up 127 mentions of it, and it was whipping around the conventions, almost as catchy as the Macarena...
...Of course, tens of millions of Americans never got a tax cut to raise their kids because of Clinton vetoes...
...That suggests Bill Clinton has done something so bizarrely cynical it seems to have no purpose...
...Married suburban women...
...The question has always been designed so that politicians could find out how people really feel, not how their spin is going over...
...Or 1984, the year of the “gender gap...
...Married suburban women with decent incomes...
...For years, people have been telling pollsters they think the country is on the “wrong track,” and it has always been deemed one of the most important numbers in polling because it’s simple, people understand it, and it gets to underlying feelings about the state of the country...
...But despite the polls and the press, business leaders and Republican politicians are terrified of Proposition 209...
...Apparently, the president believes that if you keep more of your paycheck, the IRS is loaning you your own money...
...This leads us to one inexorable conclusion: that Dick Morris, or our Republican friend, or whoever, did a Nexis search on the word “mom,” looking for inspiration, and came across “soccer mom,” just as we did...
...It is even getting surprisingly friendly press coverage...
...Oh, what the hell—white married suburban women with decent incomes...
...Robert Samuelson points out that Clinton’s claim is “completely irrelevant” because between 1800 and 1996 there have been over 70 budget surpluses...
...OF CAMPAIGN ’96 It happens every four years—a neologism is added to the American political vocabulary, usually put there by pollsters feeding a media hungry for nonsense terminology that will make them sound and feel like insiders...
...Soccer moms” are the year’s most desirable voting bloc, and not because the campaigns are suddenly desperate to find mothers who play soccer...
...But look for opponents of the initiative to claim that David Duke is representative of those supporting the effort to make California’s public policy race-blind...
...This is a very weird situation...
...We thought it was the American pharmaceutical industry and medical system that deserved the credit—both of which Bill and Hillary tried to destroy in their health-care plan...
...Bob Dole and Jack Kemp didn’t mention the issue when they spent a week in California during the Democratic convention...
...Meanwhile, the latest dirty trick on the part of CCRI’s opponents is an invitation from California State University at Northridge to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke—to argue the case against quotas in a debate...
...JUICING THE TRACK Everybody in Democratic Washington is very excited because the “right track-wrong track” numbers are heading Bill Clinton’s way...
...What, exactly, was the point of this exercise...
...Clinton even claims Godlike healing powers...
...Wait a minute...
...Dick Morris supposedly told the Clintons that the margin of victory lay with the soccer moms...
...Maybe we should rethink the whole concept of a database...
...She went to West Point only because she failed to be admitted to the school of her dreams, the University of California at Berkeley— despite a superb high-school record in every respect...
...Clinton is golden, right...
...Because Bill Clinton spent four days on his train trip talking about how “we’re on the right track to the 21st century...
...The Examiner draws the connection between this admissions policy at California’s public university and Proposition 209 (as CCRI is called on the ballot) and makes a compelling case against the current quota regime in California...
...Very few California political figures have made the initiative central to their campaigns...
...Several large California corporations have hurried to express their opposition to it...
...But that really doesn’t mean people are suddenly in a better mood about America or the future...
...Are 215 million Americans breathing dirtier air...
...It makes sense, then, that when Americans are asked whether we’re on the “right track,” more of them will say yes—they became used to hearing the term used in a positive manner by their president...
...It’s an amazing and ultimately pointless trick, but like a lot of Morris tricks (sorry), it seems to have worked...
...A Republican consultant we know says he thought the term up...
...The truth is to be found within our Nexis search itself...
...Remember when, in 1992, we learned about “rapid response” and the “narrowing”—you know, when races get close...
...In 1982, according to the Associated Press, a man in Ludlow, Mass., stole $3,150 from the treasury of his wife’s club, dubbed the Soccer Moms...
...In 1992, according to the Charlotte News & Observer, women in North Carolina started a T-shirt company called “Soccer Mom...
...The good news is that despite all this, and despite a huge disadvantage in money, the initiative’s supporters soldier on in their effort to save California from racial balkanization...
...Every now and then, you have to sit up and wonder: This guy is president...
...Now the “right track” number is up, way up, near 60 percent in one poll...
...What does that mean, exactly...
...Well, the term of 1996 is . . . soccer moms...
...His anti-tax-cut logic is interesting: “Folks, we’ve tried this once before...
...Would you go to the bank yourself and borrow money to give yourself a tax cut...
...Tyler was president from 1841 to 1846...
...Ward Connerly, the chairman of the initiative, promptly disavowed Duke and denounced the university for presenting him as a proponent of CCRI...
...And he has even scrubbed the dirt out of our oxygen: “We’ve got 50 million more Americans breathing cleaner air than we had four years ago...
...Or in 1988, when the term “going negative” became popular...
...Ulrich had better grades than about half of the entering class at Berkeley, the Examiner points out, but she was passed over in favor of students who would add “diversity” to the campus...
...And now it’s everywhere...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 1
