Tilting at Windmills

...Speaking of West Virginia politics, I sent the analysis of the 1960 West Virginia primary that appeared in this space in our last issue to Richard Donahue, who is now president of Nike but who in 1960 was the person other than myself most knowledgeable about what was done in the Kennedy campaign in Kanawha County...

...H as the radical left disappeared from the American scene...

...You remember that item about the cop whose dog was impounded for the sins of the cop who went free...

...They telephoned voters to determine who was leaning toward Kennedy and called all the leaners again on election day to make sure they got to the polls...

...Well, I've got another story almost as outrageous...

...One factor in our winning a majority of the clean vote in Kanawha County—which you will recall was a majority of the total vote—was the work of several hundred unpaid volunteers...

...But feminists are asking why the tough treatment ended when a man became involved in the scandal...

...No service...

...What is interesting is that a lot became liberal, thanks to the influence of both Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, and stayed that way at least through the rest of the sixties...

...A few facts about the District of Columbia's public school system...

...A .ZjLlthough I generally believe in reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy, some agencies need more people, not less...

...Box 11830 Eugene, Oregon 97440 TEL: 800/247-7421 March 1993/The Washington Monthly 7 people so that they can get the significant anecdotes that give life and meaning to the statistics...

...If they had done so, they would have discovered that both schools are reasonably good...

...Since Dick was actually the man who handled the money, I defer to him on this question...

...But 40 years ago the rate was 91 percent and the loopholes not nearly as numerous...

...Another way to sock it to the wealthy is to require those who earn more than $55,000 a year to pay FICA on the rest of their income without giving them additional benefits, which would produce another $30 billion...

...The grieving family looks to medical professionals for answers that may never come...

...It's about the former Senate sergeant-at-arms, who had pleaded guilty to accepting a first-class, round trip ticket to Hawaii from AT&T after he had recommended that the Senate award the company a $219,000 contract...

...It sounds to me like he's saying, "Well, we sucked up to the Republicans, too, when they were in power...

...My guess is that the hardest-to-pass element of the Clinton economic program (but also one of the fairest) will be the proposal to increase the portion of Social Security benefits that we subject to taxation from 50 to 85 percent for individuals with incomes of more than $25,000 and couples with more than $32,000...

...A classic line in the literature of government is the sentence spoken by the late Marvella Bayh who, just after learning that her husband had been elected to the Senate, hugged her father and exclaimed, "Daddy, this means that I may get to go to Europe...

...This means that the Clintonites are going to have to take on the teachers' unions and the police and hospital and government employees' unions if they're going to put volunteers in jobs that count...

...Unfortunately, the phony ratings protect the incompetent from being fired and guarantee raises for even the most marginal____ . he other night Al Hunt, Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, and his wife, PBS's Judy Woodruff, entertained three powerful members of Clinton's economic team: Roger Altaian, deputy Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, head of the National Economic Council, and Laura Tyson, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers...

...Corporate reformers long ago learned that bureaucratic "layering" should be one of then-main targets as they saw organizations being paralyzed because decisions were postponed indefinitely by deputy special assistants and other superfluous officials...

...Many of them were traditionally conservative, but they were attracted to Kennedy because of Catholic pride...

...He played golf at Scottsdale and returned to Vail the next day...

...Their 8 The Washington Monthly /March 1993 switch from the Republican to the Democratic column was crucial to JFK's margin over Nixon...

...Why would they have any sense of urgency about helping us until they are in the same boat...

...There is a Hemlock chapter near you...

...And if you CD CD don't expect to see him soon, write a letter now...

...Similar expectations about the opportunity to travel seem to afflict practically everyone in the federal government...

...This, as Jimmy Carter discovered much too late, doesn't work in Washington, where vast forces work to insulate you from what's going on down below...

...But just a decade ago the rate for income above $200,000 was 49 percent...

...Yet, Brown emerged from Nannygate unscathed...

...In this case, I can say I have the deepest sympathy for the former president...

...Most of them had names like Higgins and Shaughnessy and O'Toole...

...The trick, as William Toby Jr., the new administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, recently observed, is to realize that "Problems arise first at the lower levels," and that people on those levels "are much more aware of the problems...

...An example is the Office of Management and Budget, which is supposed to oversee the entire federal bureaucracy with fewer than 200 budget examiners out of OMB's 550 total employees...

...She sends her child to Wilson, which Chelsea could have attended after a year at Alice Deal if the Clintons had chosen the public school route...

...But the public outcry which the press had failed to anticipate was so strong that the nomination had to be withdrawn the following Friday, January 22...

...We need to double or even triple the examiner staff so that there are enough people to find out what is really going on in the government...

...To be sure, scores of loopholes were available to those who wanted to avoid paying that much...

...Remember that, Bill Clinton, when you want to understand how great men lead...

...When Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post asked about the party, Hunt answered, "Are we trying to suck up to the Clinton administration...

...I urge you to ask your congressman these questions the next time you see him...

...The point, of course, is that the Washington establishment always rushes to "get right"—as we refer to it in West Virginia politics—with the new administration...

...Hemlock is the leadership group in the Death With Dignity movement...

...This helps explain the lack of criticism from the Washington press about the Clintons' decision to send Chelsea to a private school...

...Petersburg than into the actual [business] agenda for the trip...

...If I don't write down a phone number the second it's given to me, it's lost forever...

...She is incontinent, racked with pain, unable to drink, eat or even care...

...The District school system is obviously lying when it claims that 90 percent of its teachers are either "very good" or "excellent"—maybe 30 percent really rate that high...

...But the group did help to explain Kennedy's ultimate nationwide victory in November...

...Thus having noticed the explosion of Clinton/Gore bumperstickers in Washington after the election, I was eager to share the news with our readers in this issue, but before I could do so, Maureen Dowd wrote about it in The New York Times...

...For example, on February 15th and 16th, CNN and the Washington Times both reported that Clinton proposed to raise rates to 85 percent, when what most people will be paying is 28 percent of 85 percent...

...Why the sudden disappearance of the type of attack-dog coverage that followed Wood and (although belatedly) Zoe Baird...

...Although I appear to be the most radical around at the moment, I've never considered myself a radical redistributionist...

...The cost of that trip to taxpayers: $13,700...

...Hunt and Woodruff have children who attend Sidwell Friends, and he and NBC's Tim Russert were recently joking on television about how Al and Judy could run into Bill and Hillary at Sidwell PTA meetings...

...Most of them are bright young policy analysts who know how to crunch numbers but not how to interview When Death is Preferable To Life Someone you love is dying...

...No one in his right mind believes the teachers are that good...

...The reason I ask is that, as the various possibilities for increasing taxes on the rich were being discussed this winter, the highest rate suggested was 38 percent...

...Not in Vista...

...Barbara Franklin, Bush's secretary of Commerce, went to Beijing...

...Back then, most taxpayers paid what they were supposed to pay...

...On December 28, Dan Quayle used Air Force Two to fly from Vail, Colorado, to Glendale, Arizona, accompanied by his cousin Bradley Quayle and another guest...

...In 1979, there were 113,900 students in the system and 511 bureaucrats in the central office...

...On Friday, January 15, a Washington Post headline proclaimed, "Baird's Hiring Disclosure Not Seen as a Major Block...

...Still, since Kanawha County had somewhat more than 10 percent of West Virginia's voters, his figure remains consistent with my conviction that the Kennedys spent less than the $500,000 that was customary in West Virginia's gubernatorial campaigns of that era, an amount that could not have produced the 60-40 margin by which JFK won the 1960 primary...

...Although the volunteers were enthusiastic, dedicated, and in no sense the corrupt pols that outsiders imagine are the only participants in West Virginia elections, there was one fact that I did not hasten to disclose to journalists who were covering the race...

...Certainly the sergeant-at-arms should be punished, but did it not occur to Charles Richey, the judge who took this action, that AT&T should not only not be repaid the amount of its attempted bribe but should itself be punished...

...He agrees with me in all but one respect...

...What has happened to the idealists who believed in redistributing income from the rich to the poor...

...But a good number of them are on the faculties of Deal and Wilson, making these schools superior to most others in the District...

...Why not get the voters to write their congressmen demanding that Members give up their own generous health insurance programs until the rest of us enjoy similar protection from the fear of illness and disability...

...The next night only one of the five panelists on CNN's "The Capital Gang" foresaw any trouble for Baird...

...Our best guess is that 49 percent will pull in $35 billion a year...

...Not in the military...

...One reason is careless reporting in the media that frightens the elderly into thinking something far worse is being proposed, as was the case with the catastrophic care act five years ago (see "What Clinton Could Learn from the Catastrophic Care Catastrophe," p. 39...

...Just a day after the White House and the press sank Attorney General candidate Kimba Wood—despite the fact that she had fully complied with immigration and Social Security laws—Commerce Secretary Ron Brown admitted he had violated the law by not paying Social Security taxes for domestic help...

...You can leam more about Hemlock...

...After all, the elite of his generation thought it had done its part by listening to Joan Baez sing at antiwar rallies...

...They might be interested to learn that the Post editor who made the decision to bury the Brown story is male...

...Sad scenarios like this are played out every day all over the United States...

...Al is a splendid fellow, but his logic escapes me in this case...

...So again, journalists were slow to see the problem...

...By 1991 the number of students had dropped to 83,000, but the number of central office bureaucrats had increased to 1,037...

...Eleanor Clift is a notable exception...

...They don't have the time...

...My complaint against the Clintons is that they did not even look at Deal or Wilson, meaning they never seriously considered the public choice...

...He says we finally gave the local organization $25,000, instead of the $12,000 I knew we had originally committed...

...During another national emergency, FDR proposed limiting incomes to $25,000...

...Not in the Peace Corps...

...system's present method of evaluation...

...But the unfortunate truth is that his failure to serve in the military may have contributed to his inability to lead the military now...

...But in the case of Thomas McLarty, the new White House chief of staff, I fear the opposite—the inhibiting effect of such concern...

...That's why we need more of them...

...Charles Peters...

...They distributed 40,000 copies of that Reader's Digest story about Kennedy's heroism...

...Perhaps the Post felt that the press had overreacted in those cases and was now attempting to practice some self control...

...In the entire city of Washington, there are only 16,000 metered parking places for the rest of us...

...The radical idealists have been so thoroughly coopted by the greed and selfishness of the last 20 years that it's been difficult for us to find a respectable source who has even bothered to estimate the revenue that much higher rates will produce...

...That's not nearly enough people to do the job...

...Medical technology works overtime, even when the body can't go on...

...Clinton demonstrated the same kind of hypocrisy when he appointed Zoe Baird as attorney general despite her having hired illegal immigrants for whom she did not pay Social Security taxes...

...A very high proportion were Catholics...

...ually, as in the case of the Ron Browns and Lloyd Bentsens, we worry about how an appointee's business connections will influence his official actions...

...Ask for Introductory Packet F. THE HEMLOCK SOCIETY U.S.A...

...Why should they be protected while their fellow citizens aren't...

...One problem with the Clintonites' failure to serve is that because few have ever been in the military, they failed to anticipate the outrage aroused by the proposal to lift the ban on homosexuals...

...The average citizen may have the right to petition his government for the relief of grievances, but he's practically certain to get a ticket while doing so...

...Some of her aides also arranged an additional jaunt to Russia where, according to State Department sources of The New York Times, "More planning has gone into the amenities for a luxury train trip from Moscow to St...

...This is another common practice among the elite...

...But we also need a different kind of OMB employee...

...First and foremost, it must have jobs that count—not only because there is real work out there that desperately needs doing in health, education, public safety, and the environment—but because, as I had engraved on my brain during my seven years with the Peace Corps, volunteers quickly become demoralized if they're just doing make-work...

...As Deborah Fallows predicted in our December issue, the Clintons' choice of a private school has been seized by conservatives as evidence of Clinton's hypocrisy in opposing vouchers that would give the average man a similar choice...

...I support Clinton on lifting the ban, just as I agreed with his opposition to the Vietnam War...

...T A he disadvantage of working for a monthly instead of a daily is that your ideas sometimes occur to other writers who can get them into print faster than you can...

...But I'm doubtful that Clinton is the man to put it all together...

...We used to have people over from the Bush administration—Marlin Fitzwater, Michael Boskin, once even Jim Baker...

...The economy, in the midst of a great boom, had already flourished for a decade under similarly high tax rates and continued to flourish for many more years under rates much higher than Clinton is proposing...

...These can be tough problems for a president who wants to be liked...

...That this light has not dawned on the federal governmen is suggested by the fact that the number of layers subject to presidential appointment has increased from six in John Kennedy's era to 15 today...

...According to Roll Call, Congress provides 11,000 free parking spaces for its employees...

...The point is that we are in a fiscal emergency and that the people who profited most—especially during the last decade—and are thus most able to afford to make a sacrifice, should do so...

...Changing the amount excluded for the estate tax from $600,000 to $300,000 and closing the angel of death loophole, still another way to help the affluent do their part, would raise $80 billion by the end of this decade...

...His punishment: Repay AT&T for the price of the ticket...

...Write or call today...

...On the other hand, I can promise him that if he can unlock that idealism in the American character, he will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents...

...The elite who came after Clinton's contemporaries, those who are now in their thirties and early forties and dominant in Clinton's staff, haven't even done that much...

...Because they haven't served, they're unlikely to understand how to make a service program work...

...Because they have so little sense of obligation themselves, they think that people have to be bribed to serve, with, for example, a free college education for a couple years of service...

...Bill Clinton, as a former governor of a small state, may think he can find out for himself—after all, he used to keep an eye on everything just by walking through downtown Little Rock or visiting a few county seats and hearing what his constituents told him as they chatted on the streets...

...OMB staffers today do not make a practice of interviewing government employees at the lower levels...

...His background in the natural gas industry should not keep the administration from pushing for more use of natural gas, which will help decrease pollution and dependency on foreign oil...

...However—and this to me is a big however—I do not think abandoning the goal of income equality means we shouki abandon the fight against the extremes of income inequality that developed during the Reagan-Bush era...

...Because West Virginia was supposed to test Kennedy's appeal to Protestants, we did not rush to publicize this fact...

...Indeed, I agree with the statement made by Mickey Kaus, whose book we honor in this issue (Political Book Award, p. 34), that "the venerable liberal crusade for income equality is doomed," and that we should concentrate on attaining another great liberal goal, social equality, by making money less relevant to such essentials as education and health care...

...While television at first gave Brown's violation top-of-the-news play, The Washington Post buried it on page four, giving the networks the excuse to lose interest after just one day of coverage...

...Almost all the Washington elite, including the press elite, do the same...

...T JL here is nothing I would like to see more than a national service program that would awaken the long-dormant idealism of the American people...

...Ninety percent of the District's 6,000 teachers are rated "very good" or "excellent" and only one half of 1 percent are rated less than satisfactory under the D.C...

...A friend who spent a lot of time with George Bush during the campaign tells me that the reason Bush was afraid of debating Clinton on the economy was that he feared his memory would fail him where numbers were concerned, and that Clinton would come up with figures Bush couldn't challenge...

...In fact, since the number of Catholics in West Virginia is tiny—I believe about 4 percent at that time—practically all of them seemed to be working for us...

...A recent audit of the Department of Interior found more than $115,000 in unauthorized and questionable travel expenses, and, even in the closing days of the Bush administration, officials whose duties were about to end managed to arrange exotic trips...

...So while I do not advocate hitting the rich with another 91 percent rate, a return to the 49 percent rate without unreasonable loopholes seems more desireable than letting the affluent off with 36 or 38 percent, especially if such kindness means that the tax burden on families with incomes under $50,000 has to be increased...

...New directions in social legislation are often the result of leadership from the public at large...

...And their initiative was not sapped...