Scrapbook
Dote and the Times Bob Dole has angrily denounced the New York Times for pro-Clinton bias. By all accounts, Dole's audiences have loved this media-bashing. But the working press has laughingly...
...Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke want you to vote yes" on CCRI, its voice-over intones...
...No, it did not...
...But then came the following passage in Dole's address...
...Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as media bias...
...Partners the way "a husband is a partner with his afraid of getting angry calls from black "community lead-wife...
...What was Kemp good for...
...The bias Republican and conservative candidates moan about isn't so much a matter of what the newspapers report as how they report it...
...In another spot, Bruce Springsteen claims (falsely) that CCRI would "legalize discrimination against women and girls in jobs, in education, and in sports...
...For instance: On October 28 in San Diego, Dole delivered a reasonably serious speech about affirmative action and the anti-quota California Civil Rights Initiative...
...This argument, the Times and Nagourney decided, required some clarifying "context...
...Dole's list of "overlooked" or "whitewashed" issues is drawn, after all, from stories appearing in, among other papers, the New York Times...
...North Capitol Street, you see, "runs north from the Capitol through some of Washington's more impoverished neighborhoods...
...The implication of this rather bitchy aside: Dole is a hypocrite who cares not a whit for the poor and is using affirmative action purely as a "socially divisive" wedge issue...
...He then from a garage at Tysons II Galleria mall near Washington: proceeds to prove it isn't unfair at all...
...It's located on Wanniski's Web site, which he uses for the worldwide distribution of his correspondence...
...COLORBLINDNESS...
...Every time I drive to work in Washington, D.C., or drive down North Capitol Street, and I see dozens and dozens of black men, without work, I say to myself: 'What has [affirmative action] done for them?' Absolutely nothing...
...Perhaps Our Last Jack 'n' Jude Item...
...But the police description was too politically incor-and he, Wanniski explains, "have been partners for 20 rect to be reproduced by the Post, which is evidently more years...
...When Michael Huffington spent over $29 million in California for his 1994 Senate campaign, the media charged him with trying to buy the election...
...Compare that with the megabucks spent this year by Mark Warner, the Virginia Democratic candidate for Senate...
...On the day that Dole spoke in California, anti-CCRI organizers released their first campaign commercials...
...to keep an eye out for suspected criminals...
...Jude...
...The devil is in the details, in the little stage whispers a "serious" journalist tucks into his otherwise "straight" dispatches from the field...
...Your blind public policies, but it has embraced colorblindcolumn," he writes to Chait, "only informs readers that ness in an area where color presumably does matter—in we are so close as to be indistinguishable, and that there- describing the appearance of individuals...
...And in an fore Jack is my puppet, a man who believes tax cuts can instance where appearance matters—in alerting readers solve all the world's problems...
...Four radio ads unveiled by the anti-CCRI crowd descend even lower into the muck...
...In fact, the police described the suspect as gies that we blame on the greed of the rich or the poor muscular and dark-skinned, about 6 feet l inch tall, etc., etc...
...Has the Times mentioned it...
...Warner shelled out $8.3 million for 3.3 million voters...
...It looks like Kemp's the puppet, actually...
...In our partnership, Jack's and mine," Wan-niski explains, "we discovered early on that I had a tremendous comparative advantage over him in cooking up political ideas...
...They do: "If we could get tax rates inch tall and about 190 pounds, with short dark hair and and money just right, Jonathan, then the social patholo- dark eyes...
...And those three men are also "all supporting" CCRI...
...That's not really the gravamen of Dole's complaint, though...
...In the long run, "the Republican party's donnybrooks will have helped to identify it as the party that tackles difficult issues...
...Or like "the Lone Ranger and Tonto...
...They have too covered Clinton's "scandals" and "failures," reporters say...
...For weeks now, the Scrapbook has been chronicling the strange, symbiotic relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-side publicist Jude Wanniski...
...Wan- 'nphe Washington Post has editorialized against color-niski was displeased with the article that resulted...
...But the working press has laughingly dismissed Dole's pique as groundless...
...In last week's New Yorker, he argues that "intellectual vigor" is "fast becoming Republican property...
...You be the judge...
...That's $2.50 per voter, but we haven't heard a peep about Warner's attempt to "buy the election...
...Wanniski complains that this is an unfair construc- Thus, we read in October 26's Post of an abduction tion of the two men's paired careers and ideas...
...Kemp day...
...Jonathan Chait of the New Republic recently interviewed Wanniski about the Jack 'n' Jude dynamic...
...Did news of this amazing, repulsive, thoroughly dishonest media campaign find its way into Adam Nagourney's story on Bob Dole and the politics of affirmative action in California...
...You bet...
...Not so for their Democratic counterparts...
...No, it has not...
...Mark, not Huffington_ Big spending on the campaign trail causes tidal waves of criticism for wealthy Republican office-seekers...
...Lind Loves the Right Afew months ago, Michael Lind delivered a primal scream of a book about how the Republican party is intellectually inert and conservatism is a secretive conspiracy...
...People actually like him," Wan-niski points out, with ghastly candor, but "they have serious doubts about me...
...And who's ers" than it is interested in helping apprehend a rapist...
...Never has an author renounced a book so quickly...
...Now comes a piece of primary evidence on the meaning of Jack 'n' vScrapbook to say "who is the puppet and who the puppeteer in a partnership...
...He was the public mouthpiece...
...And a larger question remains: Why is Dole singled out for snotty commentary like this...
...Yes, Virginia, and yet again, there is such a thing as media bias...
...We suspect he sees those unemployed black men fairly often...
...The television ad, produced by Democrat Bob Shrum, begins with images of David Duke and a burning cross...
...would dissolve, as they have throughout history...
...But "Mr...
...After letting his rage out in the pages of Out of Conservatism, Lind is feeling much better...
...Ellen DeGeneres reads one of them and says, apropos of nothing, that Buchanan, Gingrich, and Duke are "all anti-abortion...
...Hey, here's a terrifying thought: Maybe Lind is turning conservative again...
...So, at least, the warning posters at the mall said the next Is Kemp Wanniski's puppet...
...Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported as much, calling it a "sober and tightly argued presentation...
...Actually, Bob Dole's campaign headquarters in Washington is located just off North Capitol Street...
...Do tax cuts solve all "Police describe the suspect as muscular, about 6 feet l the world's problems...
...This cash flow does seem immense, but given California's then 14.7 million voters, Huffington spent $2.03 per voter...
...Dole lives at the Watergate, in one of the city's more elegant neighborhoods, and there is, generally speaking, little visible evidence of poverty between that part of the city and where he used to work...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 9
