GUESSWHO'S NOT COMING TO LUNCH
Scrapbook GUESSWHO’S NOT COMING TO LUNCH No one has done more to roll back affirmative action than Ward Connerly of California, author of that state’s successful Proposition 209. In the...
...Even after the massacre of Srebrenica I was told that my calls for military action were mere ‘emotional nonsense,’ words which, I think, only a man could have uttered...
...Connerly happily met with all three...
...Once Clinton decides that’s what he’s going to do, he’ll sell it...
...Partition would only serve to reward violence and ethnic cleansing...
...And Steve Forbes didn’t include the names or the salaries of any of his staffers...
...The place still smells of death, the windows weep, and the ruins gape...
...All I can tell you is that a meeting has not been arranged...
...But there were also good reasons for taking action early...
...WILLIAM MILHOUS CLINTON...
...We must be prepared to cope with all the changing demands of war— including, if that is what is required, the deployment of ground troops...
...George W. Bush, the Republican front-runner, professes to feel the same way about Ward Connerly...
...Except, as it turns out, Bush could wait...
...And we must expect a long haul until the job is done...
...And there must be no partition, a plan that predictable siren voices are already advancing...
...Does this “senior administration official” know something that we don’t...
...In Kosovo, we can only imagine what depravities of human wickedness, what depths of human degradation, those endless columns of refugees have fled...
...When will they ever learn...
...Connerly doesn’t seem sure what to make of Bush’s elusiveness...
...Coming from those who systematically leveled Catholic churches and Muslim mosques wherever they went, such an argument is cynical almost to the point of blasphemy...
...Mass rape, mass graves, death camps, historic communities wiped out by ethnic cleansing—these are the monuments to Milosevic’s triumphs...
...He said he wanted to meet with me...
...But with all that said—and it must be said, so that the lessons are well and truly learned—let there be no doubt: This is a war that must be won...
...Still, after six weeks, even the gentlemanly Connerly clearly is struggling not to take Bush’s “scheduling conflicts” personally...
...And the only victory worth having now is one that prevents Serbia ever again having the means to attack its neighbors and terrorize its non-Serb inhabitants...
...Kosovo must be given independence, initially under international protection...
...I’m a very loyal Republican who is not out there on the fringes,” he says...
...For eight years I have called for Serbia to be stopped...
...I’ll say this, I don’t want to support somebody who doesn’t want my support...
...It would be both cruel and stupid to expect the Albanian Kosovans now to return to live under any form of Serbian rule...
...So far, Connerly has done his best to see the apparent snub in the best possible light...
...In return, Connerly made something clear to Forbes, Quayle, and Alexander: “I am leaning toward George Bush,” Connerly told them straightforwardly...
...I think the world of him...
...At one point, Bush told Connerly he couldn’t wait till the two of them could get together over lunch and talk about affirmative action...
...According to a fascinating account in the New York Times last week, Clinton administration officials claim their boss could successfully spin a “compromise” on Kosovo: “‘Clinton is a better communicator than anyone else,’ said a senior Administration official...
...It would be to concede defeat...
...Her remarks on Kosovo in an address marking the 20th anniversary of her first election as Britain’s prime minister were tough, well reasoned, and eloquent...
...If Nixon could sell the fall of Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.’” Let’s see now . . . Saigon fell in April 1975, eight months after Nixon’s resignation...
...And I am unmoved by Serb pleas to retain their grasp on most of Kosovo because it contains their holy places...
...The Republican numbers are as follows: Dan Quayle 37, Gary Bauer 26, George W. Bush 25, Lamar Alexander 24, John McCain 16, Pat Buchanan 11, Bob Smith 7, and Elizabeth Dole, just 4. As for John Kasich, he didn’t file a report with the FEC...
...Some excerpts: “Last September I went to Vukovar, a city destroyed and its inhabitants butchered by the soldiers of Slobodan Milosevic...
...Only five other campaign staffers have take-home pay exceeding $100,000, and, interestingly, none of them works for Bush...
...Around Srebrenica, where neither I nor many other Westerners have gone, the bodies of thousands of slaughtered victims still lie in unmarked graves...
...The goal of war is victory...
...SHE, AT LEAST, HASN’T GONEWOBBLY In striking contrast to the pusillanimous Congress, Margaret Thatcher proved on April 20 that she is an Iron Lady for all seasons...
...So here we are now, fighting a war eight years too late, on treacherous terrain, so far without much effective local support, with imperfect intelligence, and with war aims that some find unclear and unpersuasive...
...And that’s after taxes...
...I really don’t know if he’s putting me off or not,” Connerly says...
...That will require the destruction of Serbia’s political will, the destruction of its war machine and all the infrastructure on which these depend...
...But instead we deprived his opponents of the means to arm themselves, thus allowing his aggression to prosper...
...That’s too bad...
...They are also, let’s remember and admit, the result of eight long years of Western weakness...
...The West could have stopped Milosevic in Slovenia or Croatia in 1991, or in Bosnia in 1992...
...Even in 1995, when at last a combination of airstrikes and well-armed Croat and Muslim ground forces broke the power of the Bosnian-Serb aggressors, Scrapbook we intervened to halt their advance onto Banja Luka, and so avoid anything that might threaten Milosevic...
...So how do things look...
...Al Gore has the biggest staff, topping out at 64 (Bill Bradley has a more modest 33...
...STAFFING UP Ask aides to presidential campaigns how their candidate is faring and you’ll get as much candor as you used to get out of the Kremlin: No matter how bad things are, they’re always perfect...
...And has been waiting...
...We look forward to finding out if they’re telling the truth...
...he’s put them all on his Web site, www.griffinsg.com, and, more important, included the estimated annual salaries of these people (extrapolated from the most recent FEC reports...
...And if that be true, it seems to me the logical extension of all that is that he would support efforts to eliminate all of those things...
...I’m an establishment kind of guy: I believe the governor when he says he’s against quotas and preferences and setasides and guaranteed outcomes...
...Even then, Western political leaders believed that the butcher of Belgrade could be a force for stability...
...Some of the mid-level staffers on the Forbes campaign have been talking about their six-figure compensation...
...My staff has been calling his staff for six weeks now, trying to arrange a meeting,” Connerly says...
...All I know is that if I were in his position and I wanted to meet with somebody, my staff had better work it out...
...As for the highestpaid staffers, one stands out from all the others: Mark Tipps, Lamar Alexander’s campaign manager, appears to be making $156,058...
...New Hampshire political consultant Chip Griffin has provided the invaluable service of culling Federal Election Commission reports to compile a list of all the people on the payroll of each presidential candidate...
...His staff certainly knows where I am...
...But the truth is out there, as they say, and it’s just gotten a bit easier to find...
...In the past several months, at least three Republican presidential contenders— Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, and Lamar Alexander—called to set up meetings with Connerly to discuss their positions on affirmative action...
...Every one of them,” Connerly says, “made it clear he endorsed my position...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 32
