Domestic Drift
BROOKS, DAVID
Domestic Drift Our colleague John Podhoretz came to Washington recently and made an astute observation. If you travel in conservative circles, he noticed, all anybody wants to talk about is the...
...In the large scheme of things, it’s the conservatives who have their priorities right...
...This is not only a defense of the executive branch, it is a defense of America’s founding philosophy...
...A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article demonstrating that many of the blacks and liberals who know Pickering best remain enthusiastically supportive of his nomination...
...In other words, Dick Cheney is trying to improve the tone in Washington, something President Bush vowed to do if elected...
...There has been some discussion of these matters—witness the administration’s constructive embrace of AmeriCorps—but still not enough...
...Domestic Drift Our colleague John Podhoretz came to Washington recently and made an astute observation...
...Did they have any impure thoughts that were captured in the minutes of their meetings...
...But is there no domestic issue that is worth getting excited about...
...In fighting this trend, Dick Cheney is defending our governing philosophy and defending the notion that in America legislation should be judged by whether or not it is good for the country...
...One jarring problem that now confronts the country is that, even while most people have rallied around America’s governing institutions and have displayed a selfless commitment to the nation’s cause, some groups in Washington are still firmly in pre-9/11 mode...
...Maybe it is time for a full-scale effort to improve the tone...
...The campaign finance reform bill surged toward passage, against Republican objections...
...What’s needed is not only a passion injection, but a rethinking...
...The Founders believed that since men are not angels, faction should be pitted against faction, self-interest against self-interest, until some compromise could be reached...
...What matters now, as at the dawn of the Cold War, is how the United States carries out its global struggle with terror and the axis of evil...
...In the most intellectually indefensible move of this administration, the president slapped a 30 percent tariff on steel, which will cost more jobs than it saves, raise costs for consumers across the economy, and damage America’s standing around the world by making us look like hypocrites...
...How do the events of this war transform the domestic landscape...
...Who gave the donations...
...But there are other possibilities...
...And when it comes to these matters, the Republican party has not exactly found its mission and its moment...
...It’s also hard to maintain in a period of domestic drift...
...Political debate will devolve even further to the level of Larry Klaymanism...
...Still, domestic affairs can’t be entirely ignored...
...If the GAO gets its way, then no one will try to kill a piece of legislation by arguing against it on its policy merits...
...Any serious energy policy must include some increase in North Slope drilling and some effort to revive nuclear power...
...Maybe it is time to put a lid on the sort of arrogance Robert Byrd demonstrated recently when Paul O’Neill came to testify before his committee, or the sort of incivility Fritz Hollings demonstrates six days a week...
...But among liberals, all anybody wants to talk about is campaign finance reform and Enron...
...Over the past few weeks, in fact, the GOP has suffered a series of defeats...
...Maybe this is inevitable...
...If your conservative antennae are less sensitive than the New York Times’s, you know you are slow off the mark...
...The nomination of Judge Charles Pickering, the victim of a smear campaign that for too long went unrebutted, looks likely to go down to defeat...
...This is not only a policy retreat, it’s also an intellectual retreat...
...The Bush energy plan is being effectively blocked...
...At home as much as abroad, it remains within the power of the United States to mobilize its strength and shape the future...
...Where is the nation most seriously falling short of its promise and ideals...
...Republicans can be seen proposing this or that idea, but conspicuously lacking in their demeanor is any sense of fire and mission...
...Who was at the meetings...
...Here’s a place to do that...
...Is there nothing worth fighting for...
...Why on earth did it take the White House so long to mount a defense of Charles Pickering...
...In short, the Republicans have not been able to translate President Bush’s phenomenally high approval ratings, and the Republican party’s own high ratings, into any sort of domestic policy coherence or momentum...
...When historians look back on this period, they will not care much who bloviated for the cameras when Jeffrey Skilling appeared before this or that congressional committee, any more than we now care about the fight over the Interior Department budget of 1947...
...At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday, several senators noticed that while the national mood is elevated, the judicial confirmation process is still in the gutter...
...Maybe it’s time to welcome an honest foreign policy debate without having Trent Lott or Tom DeLay leap up and start questioning people’s loyalty merely for registering disagreement...
...Similarly, Vice President Cheney is now bravely fighting the General Accounting Office’s efforts to probe into the inner workings of the administration...
...But the GAO, modern Jacobins, are saying that what matters is not what is in a piece of legislation...
...Instead, what matters is that it be conceived by immaculate conception...
...David Brooks, for the Editors...
...In a time of war, national morale matters as much as military morale, and that morale is hard to sustain when good men get smeared, or when every congressional hearing turns into scandal-mongering or a show trial...
...Maybe the political capital President Bush has acquired is denominated in a foreign currency and can only be spent on security and foreign affairs...
...There’s another problem...
...President Bush promised to change the tone in Washington...
...The middle third of the State of the Union address, the domestic policy section, was almost delivered by rote...
...Instead, parties will simply kill legislation by attacking the motives and character of the people who proposed it...
...What problems really plague the nation...
...Fair enough...
...Did presidential aides have any contact with selfinterested sinners while they were crafting the legislation...
...But those measures are dying, while Democratic efforts to raise fuel efficiency standards are gaining momentum...
...It took the administration weeks to roll them out...
...The Congress has adopted a stimulus package that on balance looks a lot more like the original Democratic packages than it does like any of the Republican packages...
...The Republicans don’t seem to feel a sense of urgency on domestic issues...
...Republicans have now embraced Keynesian notions of pump-priming...
...If you travel in conservative circles, he noticed, all anybody wants to talk about is the war...
...The United States has adopted Dick Gephardt’s trade policy...
...The first is that amidst the pressure of the war, the White House has simply become inattentive to domestic matters...
...The war is gripping...
...Ludicrously, they are fighting a recession that is already over, pumping bullets into a corpse...
Vol. 7 • March 2002 • No. 26
