But there were a couple of events over the weekend that indicate this Eurosis is of a much more virulent strain than the type we’ve had to deal with any time since WWII—at least the strain of it that has struck Germany and France. On Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld was appearing at a press conference with his German counterpart, Peter Struck, when a journalist sandbagged the pair of them with a question. He asked Rumsfeld for his reaction to a new "Franco-German plan" to resolve the Iraq crisis that was due to be announced in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel this week. Rumsfeld said that the existence of such a plan was a new one on him, and turned the question over to Struck. Struck didn’t deny that there was such a plan. He merely said he wasn’t terribly keen to talk about it at just that moment. The plan, does, in fact, exist, and its details emerged over the weekend. Its main feature is a massive UN occupying force—so massive that it would seem to require the resignation of Saddam Hussein as a precondition for being put into effect. Which seems to bring us back to Square One. But the unworkability of the plan did not make it any more palatable to Rumsfeld.

A few weeks ago, Rumsfeld famously dismissed the French and the Germans as "old Europe"—merely two biggish countries in a federation that will soon include twenty-five. More recently, he has included Germany on a list of three countries—the others are Cuba and Libya—that are unwilling to help in the war effort at all. A battle continues to rage for the sympathies of Europe’s other twenty-three members. France and Germany have been routed. The United States has always had Britain at its side. But the letter of solidarity written by Blair and seven other statesmen was a slap in the face to the Franco-German alliance. In the French papers, these countries were referred to as the "Gang of Eight." But that didn’t seem to be scaring anybody, because the eight-country letter was followed by another breaking of ranks. A bunch of Eastern European countries calling themselves the "Vilnius Ten" issued a similar communique. That doesn’t leave many countries left to march to the Franco-German drummer, and as of this writing, they seem to have picked up exactly one: Belgium. Even the Dutch, wedged between the two countries, have not got on board. Their new center-right government did not sign the Blair letter, but only because they are newly elected and still in the process of forming a government. (One French strategist I saw in Washington recently called the Paris-Berlin alliance the "Axis of Irrelevance.")

New Europe may be running roughshod over Paris and Berlin just now, but this doesn’t mean French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are out of cards to play. Along with Belgium, they have been obstructing NATO’s movement of materiel into the Iraq region, so much so that NATO secretary-general Lord Robertson has been scrambling to find ways to resolve what looks like a major crisis. And last week, the Netherlands reportedly took the extraordinary step of shipping Patriot missiles to Turkey country-to-country, circumventing usual NATO procedures. This appeared to U.S. officials to be a sign that the French and German opposition might be about to move from the rhetorical level to the concrete one.

It is important to remember when looking at situations like this that the Germans and French are not doing what they’re doing simply in order to be pains in the ass. They sincerely believe that rushing into war in Iraq is a bad idea. But that doesn’t mean they’re opposed to us for identical reasons. The French have long looked at "Europe"—i.e. the inchoate European Union—as their vehicle to regain their lost great-power status. With the only other great continental power in the EU, Germany, frozen out of geostrategic ambitions by its history and the rest of Europe small and fragmented, France has always stood a fair chance of being the heart and brains of the EU.

Now that chance looks like it is not going to pan out, for several reasons: first, Europe has grown too big for France to run; second, France is so dependent (for domestic political reasons) on milking European institutions for agricultural and other subsidies that it has grown unpopular within the EU; and third, Germany has decided it wants a bigger role.

This last reason is why Germany and France have been driven together in a kind of shotgun wedding over the past few weeks. Gerhard Schroeder’s breaking with Bush’s Iraq policy was insincere in the sense that he has no vision of his own about Iraq; but it was also sincere, in that he (and his voters) have long been looking for some pretext to break from their dependence on the United States and affirm themselves a "normal country" again. In brief, Schroeder’s unwillingness to go to war in Iraq, although advanced under a pacifist pretext, is actually a nationalist move.

German nationalism, of course, however ultimately benign, scares the bejesus out of the world. That is why it needs France so badly. France is Germany’s designated driver. And that has led to a bizarre sidelight of the Iraq situation, in which the foreign policy for 140 million of Europe’s 400-some-odd is being directed by one of the stranger characters on the world scene: French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin.

Pretty much all I knew about de Villepin until recent days is that he wrote one of the most pompous books about la gloire de la France ever penned. It’s called The Cry of the Gargoyle, and it sold pretty well when it came out last spring. De Villepin is deeply, deeply French. Americans who assume this means he is a relativistic, intellectually constipated foreign minister in the mold of Warren Christopher do not know France. De Villepin is of a Napoleonic cast of mind, and if one were looking for an American secretary of state to whom he could be compared, it would not be Warren Christopher but Al Haig.

De Villepin is in hot water in France just now, because the mini-intervention in Ivory Coast is going badly and is getting bad reviews around the world. Ivory Coast is another topic I haven’t exactly earned a doctorate in, although I do know that the Gs are silent in "Laurent Gbagbo." But I’ll take the word of the French press that the so-called Marcoussis Accord—the strategy of helping the rebels wring concessions out of Gbagbo in exchange for a pair of vocalized consonants—was de Villepin’s idea. Now that this strategy has resulted in Ivorians appearing on international television carrying signs reading, "Help us, Mr. Bush! Chirac is a new Bin Laden!" it’s fairly open season on de Villepin in French newspapers and magazines.

An absolutely dazzling profile of de Villepin that appeared last week in the newsweekly L’Express gave a huge sampling of de Villepin’s "I’m in charge" Al Haigery. "This ambassador is an idiot!" he recently said in front of some of Chirac’s top advisers. "Who named him?" He described his predecessor Hubert Védrine (who, for all his anti-American truculence, is among the most brilliant European ministers of the past decade) as "no genius." He explains his cowboy approach to the Ivory Coast by saying, "It’s by taking the initiative that we have the best chance of succeeding… One must always take the risk of peace." But, I hear you ask, isn’t that what the United States is proposing to do in Iraq? Villepin has an answer to that, too. "Making two wars, one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq," he says, "is like having two women: it’s totally unmanageable!"

The point of this plan is purely geostrategic. It’s true that the president announced it in the context of the environment. "Join me," he said, "in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy." But the initiative–again–makes no sense as an environmental measure. For one thing, American clean-air standards for gas-powered cars are already among the strictest in the world. Today–as compared to, say, 1970–our air simply is not that polluted. There’s always room for improvement, but if Bush were really worried about the levels of pollution that remain, he would have been more sympathetic to removing the exemptions from CAFE car fuel-efficiency standards that sport-utility vehicles enjoy. Bush’s environmental record up until…ohhh, eight days ago…would suggest that "making our air significantly cleaner" is not a policy priority that has caused him many sleepless nights. No, this is about buying less Saudi oil, and about not putting money into the pockets of those who foment and bankroll Binladenism.

It is tough to tell whether Bush really wants energy independence. It would certainly harm the economic interests of the state of Texas–which are identical to those of Saudi Arabia. His administration has struck down California efforts to seek alternatives to gasoline vehicles. And $1.2 billion is chicken feed. So the program could merely be a shot across the Saudis’ bow, or a way for Bush to defuse environmentalist pressure to do what he decidedly does not want to do. Creating a new means of private transport for this country will require a commitment on the level of the space program: hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If Congress thinks this is a good idea, it should hold the president’s feet to the fire by budgeting 10 times what the president has requested.

It has been something of a mystery in the last 18 months that Green parties, in America and abroad, have not done more to present our differences with the Arab oil states as a reason to embrace their own anti-pollution agenda. Particularly in Germany, the Greens have been keen to tout their willingness to use arms in the Kosovo conflict as evidence of "political maturity." But when you ask them about taking the initiative to win public support for just making oil matter less–which would seem to dramatically reduce the possibilities for serious armed conflict–they’re less voluble.

How come? When I pressed this point with some German Greens last September, they mumbled that there would be something cynical about piggybacking their environmental concerns on the back of a foreign-policy agenda. But the upshot of their silence is that a conservative president now has the opportunity to claim the centerpiece of the international Green agenda. They must be mighty confident that he is not at all serious about seizing that opportunity. By budgeting 10 or 20 million dollars for the hydrogen car plan, Congress can now challenge the president to show that cynicism to be unfounded.

’Oomble

When people trash politicians for "saying one thing and meaning another," it’s usually a particular politician’s dishonesty they’re referring to. But the job of politician so often entails saying what everyone knows to be nonsense that the very language gets corrupted. In Washingtonese, there are all sorts of words that now mean their exact opposites. An old classic is "interesting." When a Senate staffer comes up to you at a party and tells you he has just finished an 1100-page report on depreciation schedules for school-lunch equipment, what you say is: "That’s interesting!" What you mean is: "That’s uninteresting!"

A new classic is "humble." A couple of weeks ago, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry got an informal semi-endorsement from his fellow Massachusetts senator, Ted Kennedy, during a speech the latter made at the National Press Club. "I expect he will be announcing his candidacy," Kennedy said, "and I expect to support him and I expect him to win." Kerry’s staff, per form, rushed out a press release touting this as an endorsement. In it, Kerry said: "It’s humbling and gratifying to have his support as a friend and colleague."

Really? In what sense is it humbling to have one of the lions of the Senate describe you as the person best fit to fill his beloved, martyred brother’s shoes and run the free world?

Other politicians would have understood. Take Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who after her appointment by the governor last December said, "I am honored and I am humbled at the trust and confidence that has been placed in me." Well, yeah, placed in her by her dad, Frank (for it is he who is the governor). That would really make a person feel "humble," wouldn’t it? To be asked by one’s father to run the half of the state he doesn’t run? It’d make you feel like a real lowdown bug.

Janet Napolitano’s election as governor of Arizona last November left her in a similar fit of self-loathing, prompting her to describe herself as "gratified and humbled to be Arizona’s choice for the next governor." And that same month, when she was locked in a tight Senate race against Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, the Republican nominee Susan Haik Terrell was visited by Vice President Cheney: "It’s humbling," she said, "to have the support of the administration." Oh, yes, how humbling it must be to have the most seasoned strategic thinker in the Bush administration sent away for an entire weekend, dropping a diplomatic and military portfolio on which the fates and fortunes of six billion people depend, to devote himself to bettering the career prospects of a Louisiana hack politician. What a comedown for Susan Haik Terrell! How "humbling"! I am scum, Terrell must have been thinking. I cannot bear to look at myself in the mirror.

See Ya, Lisa

Farewell to Lisa Kearns, one of the finest editors I’ve ever worked with, who leaves New York Press this week. Good writers are a dime a dozen, but good editors combine punctiliousness with creativity, and that’s something rare. Lisa is one of those. She may be moving on to bigger things, but her writers (and our readers) will be the poorer for it.

Six Democratic presidential candidates had their first high-profile get-together last week at a celebration of the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, staged by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). They didn’t look good. How could they have? In a month or so, Congress will pass–and President Bush will sign–a ban on partial-birth abortion. Once that measure goes through, it will be irreversible, since Americans oppose end-of-term abortions in majorities that resemble those in Iraqi presidential elections. So pro-choice forces are set to suffer their first major abortion reversal ever in Congress. (We can leave aside such Carter-and-Reagan-era pro-life victories as the Hyde amendment, since they mostly involved such window dressing as abortion counseling and abortion on foreign military bases.) No one at NARAL has much of a plan for what to do next.

With the ban on late-term abortions, NARAL ought to begin to ask itself whether its judicial–rather than legislative–strategy for protecting abortion rights has not maybe taken them down the wrong path. In the great wave of liberalization a quarter-century ago, other countries got abortion rights the American way–by decree–but virtually all of them subsequently passed some sort of enabling legislation. The United States stands alone as an advanced country whose abortion laws rest on no democratic legitimacy whatsoever. Manipulating the courts to secure abortion rights made political sense in the early 1970s, when majorities of voters opposed the procedure–but abortion activists have stuck with this strategy even through 20 years in which any Congress that had seriously limited abortion rights would have been punished. This is the behavior of a political system that is scared to death of democracy.

Now public support for abortion has started to wane. This is just what one would have predicted as the baby boomers (who make up over 35 percent of the voting population) move out of childbearing age. And the fact that America has no laws protecting abortion rights now presents itself as a problem for feminists. Making the Supreme Court–and not Congress–the custodian of abortion rights has put these rights on shaky ground. You can chant "Roe v. Wade is the law of the land" all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a law but a court decision. And this is not the biggest problem with our abortion regime. The biggest problem is that it has politicized the court on all matters, not just abortion, turning it into a mini-legislature, with democracy-warping effects. The entire moral and legal system governing sexual relations between people of childbearing age is now contingent on which of the nine sitting justices dies first, or whether George W. Bush wakes up with indigestion the next time he has to nominate someone. The result is that there really is no Supreme Court anymore. It’s more a super-Senate, which is elected by the (regular) Senate, in much the way that the (regular) Senate was, up until the 17th Amendment, elected by the State houses. It was acting in this super-Senate capacity that the Supreme Court decided the last presidential election. It ruled as wisely as it could have under the circumstances, but the circumstances weren’t exactly designed to enhance the court’s legitimacy as a court.

As an elective branch of government, the court over the last two decades has evolved its own two-party system, which pits the Abortion Party against the Anti-Abortion Party. In one of the unsung historical turning points of the last election, Al Gore gave formal sanction to this arrangement by violating a stubborn taboo. Asked in one of the debates the hackneyed, cliche-inviting question of whether he’d have a "litmus test" for Supreme Court nominees, Gore broke form. Rather than just respond with the usual palaver about just wanting justices who would "apply the law of the land," Gore said he sure as hell would apply a litmus test, though he continued to shy away from the term.

In so doing, he lifted American presidential politicking out of a slough of hypocrisy. But he also condemned the Democrats to stand forever as the party of legislative abdication and politicized law. This election cycle, abortion advocates are much less equivocal in what they demand of candidates. From the senators who are running for president (Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards) NARAL president Kate Michelman last week demanded nothing less than a promise to filibuster the confirmation of any court nominee who does not positively "affirm" a pro-choice stance. Woe betide those who don’t. Kerry and Edwards jumped immediately on board. So did Joe Lieberman, but–strange politician that he is–in such a way that he would get no credit from NARAL for his stand. Lieberman, according to his own press release, "would not apply litmus tests, but a nominee’s position on the constitutional right to choose would be one of a group of important factors." In other words, he will apply a litmus test, but he’ll get hopping mad if you call it one.

The NARAL rules are just as strict for non-senators. Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt has two big problems as far as his feminist base is concerned. First, he opposes partial-birth abortion. Second, he came to his own pro-choice position relatively late, as he was preparing to run in the Iowa caucuses in 1988. In 1986, Gephardt was not just pro-life, but prominently, stridently so, a regular at pro-life conclaves and one of the leading proponents of a constitutional amendment banning abortion. So Gephardt now feels like he must issue a mea maxima culpa. The way he did so at the NARAL event dropped one of the most revealing hints heard in years about the true social base of the Democratic Party. Gephardt was pro-life for so long, he now says, because he was too low-class to know any better. "At the beginning of my journey in public service," he confessed, "I didn’t yet realize the full consequences of my beliefs…I was raised in a working-class family of Baptist faith… Abortion was wrong, I was taught. There was a moral reason it was illegal." But then, as he found out more, his "eyes were opened."

The speech is astonishing. It has that unconvincing, phony-folksy cringe that reminds one of West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd explaining away his early membership in the Ku Klux Klan, or President Bush explaining away his youthful drunkenness. There’s nothing wrong with changing political opinions. What’s wrong is that Gephardt drags his poor family in and treats the evolution of his views as a conquest over their low-class ignorance. Anyone who still seriously doubts that the Democratic Party is now the party of the white social elite ought to get his hands on the Gephardt speech, which was excerpted in last Wednesday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

What should soon grow obvious to Democrats, though, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Support for abortion may have slackened a bit in the last half-decade, but it remains above the threshold where it helps candidates. It is a solid winner for Democrats in national elections. Note, please, that this renders the whole Supreme Court debate poignantly pointless–if Roe v. Wade were ever overturned, Congress would begin writing a law to relegalize abortion before the day was out. Michelman and others were right to gloat that President Bush spent the week of the Roe commemorations avoiding those who might goad him into making pro-life statements. He gave evidence of the weakness of the Republican position by hiding out in the Midwest on the day of the Roe anniversary, discussing his economic stimulus package, and then phoning in a message of support for anti-abortion marchers rather than joining them on the Mall. This is the old Ronald Reagan trick. Democrats–and the public–are on to it.

The great obstacle to America’s having an abortion law has always been that Democrats had something to lose from it. America is the only advanced country with an essentially unrestricted abortion regime, of the sort the Democrats’ feminist base insists on. For these activists, the attitude has been: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. A majority of Americans want liberal abortion laws, too, but they insist on having them fringed about with itty-bitty, conscience-salving regulations. Americans say they are against late-term abortions, but they favor, by wide margins, allowing abortion for the "health of the mother." A significant number of those who call themselves pro-life would even grant exceptions for the mental health of the mother, which is a third-trimester loophole you can drive a truck through.

About the only kind of abortion Americans reliably and sincerely find repugnant is partial-birth abortion. There, all the good-of-the-mother excuses break down, since the baby basically gets murdered as it emerges from the birth canal, after the mother can in any way be helped or harmed. That’s why a ban is coming. But, for all their agitation against it, Democrats could find it a boon once it’s passed. Because as soon as the president gets his bill through Congress, our de facto abortion regime will be more congruent than it has ever been with the kind of global abortion law that our elected representatives would actually pass if they were forced to. At that point Democrats may find it in their own interests to force them to, in hopes that a debate over an abortion law would cleave the Republican Party into its two halves–the lifestyle libertarians and the religious moralists. It probably would do just that. But it is unlikely Democrats would put forward such a bill. If the party’s legislators ever proposed to make the law of the land, rather than just sit back and receive it from the Supreme Court, they wouldn’t be able to spook voters with the fear that the Supreme Court would be stacked with zealots. NARAL and others have built too profitable a lobbying industry around stoking that fear to give it up blithely.

Supporters of the president have hailed the briefs as inaugurating a new era of race-blind, quota-free aid to the nonwhite. It would replace a bean-counting reverse racism with "what the Army has done," as Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander hopefully put it. But Democrats went berserk. According to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, the administration has proved itself willing to "side with those opposed to civil rights and opposed to diversity in this country." University president Mary Sue Coleman complained, "It is unfortunate that the president misunderstands how our admissions process works at the University of Michigan."

Alexander, Daschle and Coleman are–in their different ways–completely wrong. The Bush memos are the most important substantive defense of affirmative action ever issued by a sitting president. If the Court accepts the president’s reasoning, it will have rescued affirmative action from what appeared to be a terminal constitutional illogic. More than that–it will have secured for this rickety program an indefinite constitutional legitimacy.

Affirmative action has been fragile since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Back then (if I may simplify), the Court ruled that race-based quotas were illegal, but permitted race to be taken into account as a "plus factor" in admissions. Increasingly over the last two and a half decades the rationale for that plus factor has been "diversity." Diversity, in fact, is the stated rationale behind the University of Michigan’s modus operandi. Unfortunately for proponents of affirmative action, "diversity" has always been a vague concept–and it has never been clear whether, as a matter of law, it was sufficient grounds for flirting with racial discrimination against majorities. In Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), a plurality found against an affirmative action program justified on the grounds of diversity. And in the current controversy over the University of Michigan, many conservatives–including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush–have taken Wygant as a starting point for rejecting the diversity rationale. In an amicus curiae brief of his own, filed last week, the Florida governor noted: "This Court specifically indicated that such a theory has no logical stopping point, and would allow discriminatory practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose… Racial diversity is no more compelling a goal in the higher education context than in the context of other institutions or areas of state decision making."

That is not the view of our president. One of his briefs specifically endorses the diversity criterion. It runs: "Ensuring that public institutions, especially education institutions, are open and accessible to a broad and diverse array of individuals, including individuals of all races and ethnicities, is an important and entirely legitimate government objective. Measures that ensure diversity, accessibility and opportunity are important components of government’s responsibility to its citizens." It would be difficult to find a more hardline defense of the doctrine of diversity-for-its-own-sake anywhere in the Democratic Party. It would also be difficult nowadays to name a school that violates these ideals, aside from maybe Bob Jones. (Didn’t the president campaign there once?)

This is where the president’s brief gets tangled up in either its own illogic or its own dishonesty. The White House, again, is appalled by "quotas," and it has a smoking gun to prove that Michigan was using them. From 1995-’98, Michigan had an actual, explicit quota system. And in discussing the program that replaced it after 1998, the university admitted openly that it wanted, in the brief’s words, to "change only the mechanics, not the substance, of how race and ethnicity were considered."

The problem is, this is precisely what the administration wants to do itself. Nowhere does it express the slightest gripe about the demographic or academic outcomes generated by Michigan’s race-focused policies. Indeed, it promises solemnly to replicate them. It merely wants to obtain those results without saying the dirty word "race." So it recommends a set of bogus procedures that lead to exactly the same end. "[U]niversities may adopt admissions policies that seek to promote experiential, geographical, political or economic diversity," write the President’s Men. Universities can also "modify or discard facially neutral admissions criteria" [in other words, board scores and grades] "that tend to skew admissions results in a way that denies minorities meaningful access" [in other words, admission] "to public institutions."

"The government," according to the brief, "may not resort to race-based policies unless necessary." It sounds like Bush is arguing that race-based policies are always necessary–since elsewhere in his brief he says that diversity is "an entirely legitimate government objective." That is indeed what he’s arguing for, but more disingenuously than, say, Bill Clinton would have.

Bush, to let him make the case in his own words, wants to use "race-neutral alternatives" to achieve exactly the same race-conscious results that Michigan has been obtaining for years. And he has a "race-neutral" model in mind: the "affirmative access" program he initiated while he was governor of Texas. Under this program, the top 10 percent (by grade point average) of students in every high school in Texas are automatically admitted to any state university they choose. This tends to produce college-admissions results that mirror the ethnic composition of the state. But the reason it produces affirmative-action-compatible results is that the state’s schools are so heavily segregated–if they were integrated you would have the same problem of whites being disproportionately represented in that "talented tenth." (Other problems include overcrowding and plummeting academic standards at the state’s flagship Austin campus, but that’s another article.) As Terrence J. Pell of the Center for Individual Rights argues, such programs are not really race-neutral; rather, they involve "reverse engineering the admission system to get a certain racial outcome."

The fancy, legalistic way of describing what Bush’s Texas program possesses and what Michigan’s lacks is "narrow tailoring." Old-fashioned affirmative action, the Bush reasoning goes, uses the broad-brush criterion of race. "Because it operates much like a rigid, numerical quota," the brief says, the university’s "policy imposes unfair and unnecessary burdens on innocent third parties." Bush-style "affirmative access," by contrast, directly attacks the real problem, which is kids who are for socioeconomic reasons stuck behind the eight ball, regardless of what race they belong to. But on closer examination, Bush’s policy imposes just as many burdens; it merely makes those aggrieved innocent third parties harder to identify and help. The working-class black kid who finishes 29th in a class of 300 at a lower-class school full of dropouts may not be a rocket scientist, but he’s got it made–he’s off to Austin. The identical working-class black kid whose parents have made the fatal mistake of enrolling him in a challenging school full of overachievers and who finishes 31st in a class of 300…well, he’s destined to a life working at the car wash.

"In light of these race-neutral alternatives," the president complacently concludes, the University of Michigan "cannot justify the express consideration of race." This sounds like it’s anti—affirmative action, but the "express consideration of race" that Bush pretends to deplore is a synonym for frank consideration of race. And that is all the difference between affirmative action and Bush’s phony alternative. The Bush plan achieves everything affirmative action does, only less honestly. In so doing, it manages to give affirmative action not just a new lease on life, but a good name.

There will be other benefits, too–removing taxes on dividends will make stocks more attractive and almost automatically drive up their value. Although, as is less well understood, this will be a one-time-only bump, and thereafter the dividend benefit will be an undetachable part of the stock price, just as the mortgage-interest tax deduction is now undetachable from housing prices. For just this reason, the dividend tax regime, if enacted, will be eternal–absolutely politically un-undoable–since to repeal it would involve the government’s straightforwardly robbing people of the assets that may constitute their nest egg.

Blowing away so many corporate-governance problems at one stroke is quite an achievement. So why doesn’t the Bush team want to sell their plan that way? Part of the reason may be Enron. The President came to power wading through Enron money up to his thighs. Enron is famous for just two things, neither of them having anything to do with helping the economy in the slightest or bringing a single worthwhile product to market: First, it is the worldwide symbol of exactly the kind of corporate shenanigans that investors will be relieved to see the Bush plan address; and second, it was the single largest contributor to the 2000 Bush campaign.

Instead, the Bushies are focusing on how much money individual taxpayers will "get" out of the plan. I have a press release from the RNC that chuckles about how Democrats want to "target" tax cuts at certain classes of people to make them jump through hoops. It says: "While Democrats Want More Power In Washington To ‘Target’ Tax Cuts To The ‘Right’ People, President Bush And The Republicans Want Tax Relief For All Tax-Paying Americans." (Although it is hard to think of a narrower way to "target" a tax cut than to cut the taxes on dividends.)

This press release continues: "Under The President’s Plan, 92 Million Taxpayers Would Receive An Average 2003 Tax Cut of $1,083." Here is where the President is getting a little too cute for his own good. Because these are mean, not median figures. The mean income of one millionaire and nine people starving to death is $100,000. The median is pretty intense hunger. The four-figure tax cut comes from adding together a few people who are going to get a zillion dollars back, and the vast majority who are going to get close to zilch. According to William Gale of the Brookings Institution, those earning over $1 million get $88,873 back, or 3.9 percent of their incomes. Those earning under $40,000 will get somewhere between .01 and 1 percent.

Bush’s money people present these givebacks as fair, since, as the President’s former chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey puts it, they are "almost exactly proportional to taxes paid." Those making over $200,000 a year now pay 45 percent of the taxes and they’ll get 40 percent of the cut. Those who make under $100,000 pay 28 percent of taxes and will get 34 percent. That’s fine and dandy with me. But talk of fairness is absolutely meaningless, or at least premature, because the President hasn’t told us how his tax cut is going to be paid for. (Although he’s given us a hint, which I’ll get to.)

Thanks to the Bush plan, the deficit will rise next year to $350 billion–that’s the largest in history, and that figure assumes the Iraq war goes off without a hitch. Taxes will have to be raised somehow, somewhere. To discuss the "fairness" of the plan without discussing whom the tax hikes will fall on is like saying a hundred dollars is a "fair price" without specifying what it is you’ve bought or sold.

We’ve established that, for political reasons, there can be no turning back on the elimination of the dividends tax once it’s enacted. There has been no hint of raising the corporate tax. Are taxes going to be raised on the people who benefit most from this dividend tax cut?

Not bloody likely. The linchpin of supply-side logic is that large concentrations of capital are more efficient than small ones. And this is true for the most part: Give a guy a million dollars in tax breaks and he may use it to start a company. Give a guy 25 dollars, and he’ll spend it on…well, maybe not booze, but certainly on nothing more economy-stoking than a pair of lawn clippers. If the Bushies think this taxation logic works when they’re implementing a tax cut, there is no reason to assume they would follow the opposite taxation logic when implementing a tax hike.

So here is the broad hint the President dropped about who’s actually going to pay for the plan: Throughout the argument over the package, the most withering insult Republicans applied to Democrats’ (admittedly lame) alternative was that its stimulus was only "temporary." There is almost nothing temporary in the Bush plan…except for one tiny thing: relief from the incredibly punitive and ultimately extremely regressive "alternative minimum tax" (AMT). This parallel tax regime was passed decades ago to keep fatcats from avoiding taxes altogether. What it does is shut down deductions on people once they reach a certain level of income, and assesses taxes that start at 26 percent and rise from there. It doesn’t matter if you give half your money to charity and have nine children, all of whom are on respirators–your payment does not budge. The AMT has not been adjusted for inflation. So thanks to bracket creep and the changing structure of deductions, it is kicking in automatically for millions of new taxpayers every year. Today it can apply for incomes as low as $30,000. According to the Tax Policy Center, 11 percent of those earning $100,000-$200,000 a year now pay the AMT, but this will rise to 94 percent in 2010. By then, 43 percent of those earning $50,000-75,000 a year will be paying it too.

Within a few years, if nothing is done, the AMT will replace the income tax as the upper-middle class’ major tax. We are now, in fact, in the midst of an automatic shift out of an income-tax regime and into an AMT one. No one seriously expects it to remain in its current form, but (a) bracket creep persisted for years under Jimmy Carter, despite howls of protest, and (b) if we want to do anything about it, it is going to cost an additional trillion dollars to fix–a trillion dollars that we no longer seem to have.

Perhaps Carter’s problem is that he didn’t understand the politics of bracket creep. The temporary AMT relief is scheduled to expire a few weeks after the 2004 election.

North Carolina Sen. John Edwards’ decision last week to run for the Democratic nomination opened up the betting pools. Dick Gephardt was set to announce that he was launching an "exploratory committee" to study a presidential run. "Exploratory committee" remains the strangest term of art in American politics. What’s to explore? ("Let’s get a team of proctologists in here," Gephardt told reporters, "and see if they can find a presidential campaign lurking in my G.I. tract.") Joe Lieberman is ready to go. And Tom Daschle is only weeks away, at a maximum.

An Edwards adviser said last week, "Karl Rove’s worst nightmare is a centrist Southern Democrat who can turn some of Bush’s red states blue." Edwards, it’s true, is as yet the only Southerner in the race. But it’s hard to see how that gives him a better chance of beating Bush than any of the others. This calculation of using a Southern Democrat works when you’re running against a guy from the old Midwestern/New England Republican stock: Carter against Ford, or Clinton against Bush Sr. or Dole. The calculation assumes that regional loyalties will trump ideological ones. When the candidate is a conservative Southerner like Bush, it doesn’t work. (We can leave for another day the argument over whether Bush is a phony or real Southerner.) It didn’t even work last election, when Al Gore, with all the force of incumbency behind him, won the popular vote but couldn’t crack his own state or Bill Clinton’s.

The second key element to the Edwards run is that he is a trial lawyer, one who made his fortune peeling off fees from absurd injury suits. Trial lawyers have long been Democrats’ biggest donors. Increasingly they make up a growing share of Democratic candidates, and they can run a mightily financed campaign. Races with trial lawyers in them tend to run along formulaic lines. The Republicans say: Joe McShark made his pile suing McDonald’s for making its coffee too hot. Democrats reply: Trial lawyers are the only ones who can police Harvey Van Corporate’s polluting campaign donors. So generally campaigns are fought to a standstill.

But some Republicans are better than others at the rhetorical games in a trial-lawyer race. The Republican National Committee is not too hot at it. Last Friday, after Edwards’ announcement, the RNC was e-mailing around a flier reading, rather lamely: "WHO IS JOHN EDWARDS? An Unaccomplished Liberal In Moderate Clothing And A Friend To His Fellow Personal Injury Trial Lawyers." Bush and Rove, on the other hand, are among the best. Bush made opposition to trial lawyers’ excesses one of the pillars of his 1994 gubernatorial race. And actually following through on his promises to cap outrageous courtroom settlements was one of the few impressive achievements of his governorship. One Rove protege, Republican John Cornyn, launched his national political career by attacking the mind-boggling corruption with which Texas’ part of the federal tobacco settlement was administered. He filed suit against state Attorney General Dan Morales to protest the way the legal "work" on Texas’ $17.3 billion cut was rewarded with $3.3 billion in attorneys’ fees, to be split by five Democratically connected trial lawyers. That comes to over half a billion—with a million dollars apiece. The upshot of this battle? Cornyn was elected last November as the newest senator from Texas. Morales got blown out in the Democratic primary for governor almost a year ago and his career looks to be over.

It’s possible Edwards will be able to neutralize the trial-lawyer issue well enough to run competitively. But to say he constitutes Karl Rove’s worst nightmare is delusional.

The New Dwarves

If Edwards has one thing going for him, it is the extraordinary record of self-destruction that his primary rivals have already assembled. You can go down the list. There is Richard Gephardt, who will have trouble carrying his own rightward-drifting swing state of Missouri in a presidential election. There is Joe Lieberman, who seems to be the last person in America who doesn’t realize that the only asset in his political bank account—his reputation for "honesty," "integrity" and being a "different kind of politician"—was fatally squandered through his jaw-dropping deviousness during the Florida recount. There is Howard Dean, who believes that backing one of the left’s least popular planks (gay rights) can be "balanced out" by backing one of the right’s least popular planks (widespread handgun ownership) to result in a centrist program. There is Gen. Wesley Clark, now camped out in Iowa, who is distinguished from the mooshiest kind of liberal only by his having presided over the disgraceful Kosovo war, which—we can safely say—will be the last war the United States fights on the same side as Al Qaeda.

But the Democratic candidate who has applied himself most zealously to self-destruction has been Tom Daschle. Once he succeeded in blowing his majority in the Senate through lackluster issues management, Daschle had nothing to lose in speaking out forcefully on the Trent Lott case. He chose instead to protect Lott out of Senate collegiality.

Just in case there were two people left in the country after that who might inadvertently vote for him if he ran for president, Daschle devoted the month of December to demonstrating as concretely as possible that he had no idea what a presidential run involved. Discussing Al Gore’s decision to drop out of the race, he told CNBC, "I think he could have won. He won last time, in terms of the popular vote. Nothing has changed in my opinion, except that people have seen what a deplorable record this administration has on the economy. If the economy is the issue, the Democrats are going to win." If Daschle really thinks "nothing has changed" since George Bush’s election except a couple of matters of economic mismanagement, he is unfit to hold office of any kind.

Bad Shots

America Online has recently been running a poll of its subscribers that will result in the selection of the Best Sports Photo of 2002. It becomes clear as one scrolls through the pics that sometime in the last decade or so, we’ve had a revolution in the American idea of what constitutes a good sports photograph. Because these are not sports photos at all. What they are are photos of sports celebrities showing emotion. There is Serena Williams grimacing with a racquet in front of her after winning the women’s singles title at Wimbledon last summer. There is Troy Percival pumping his fists and jutting out his belly on the mound, after the Angels’ World Series triumph. There is Juan Dixon hugging Lonnie Baxter after Maryland’s defeat of Indiana in the NCAA finals.

Whatever happened to photos of Bill Mazeroski rounding third with all the rabble of Pittsburgh running behind him, Lynn Swann at full stride with a 50-yard bomb dropping into his outstretched fingertips, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar following a hook shot into the basket with his goggled eyes? In short, whatever happened to photos of things I can’t do on my living room couch? Because I can definitely pump my fist in the air and say, "All right! Yo! Woo-woo! Yeah! We won! Hey!"

AOL’s choice of photos is an indication that something deep is changing in the way we watch sports. It seems, in fact, like we no longer admire athletes for their athletics so much as we live through their emotions. The shift has made pro sports much more lucrative than they were two decades ago. Franchises now sell for dozens of times what they sold for in the 70s. Where does the value-added come from? If you wanted to be charitable about it, you could say that sports have come to fulfill the role that downmarket stage dramas did in the pre-television age. If you wanted to be uncharitable about it, you would say that all sports have profited by rejiggering themselves to resemble pro wrestling.

Not this year. There’s a lot going on in the world—at least in North Korea and Iraq. Buildings are blowing up in Chechnya and the Turkish parliament is trying to alter the country’s constitution so the Islamist leader Recep Erdogan can serve as prime minister despite having gone to jail for inciting religious hatred in 1999. But the entire American journalistic profession seems to be on vacation. Charles Krauthammer wrote his column this week on chess. Michael Kinsley wrote an Anyway-I-Was-Just-Thinkin’ piece on Trent Lott and Bill Frist. And elsewhere in the papers, the straining to find things to write about is almost painful to watch. Andrew Whittaker Jr., that black-hatted galoot from West Virginia who won $314.9 million in the Powerball drawing, has been made into a celebrity along the lines of Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic solo flight. As if we care where Whittaker worships (the Church of God), what he eats for breakfast (biscuits) and where he buys his gasoline (the C&L Super Serve in Hurricane, WV). Meanwhile, editors across the country were trying to drum up suspense about the volume of Christmas shopping. "Stores, Shoppers Play Their Cards," wrote The Washington Post on Christmas. "Consumers and retailers are counting on gift cards to pay off this holiday season." I was on the edge of my seat until I read in the lead story in Friday’s New York Times, "Growth in Sales for Holiday Period Is Lowest in Years."

A story like this vaults out of the category of "boring" and into the category of "insulting." It rests on the assumption that readers/viewers are so bereft of interests of their own that they will inevitably leap at any readymade interest the mass media devises for them. It used to be that this type of condescension was reserved for carefully targeted audiences of sports fans, who, even if not lugnuts in terms of IQ, can be said to exhibit a Will to Lugnuttery in their collective behavior at sporting events. Note how much of the video entertainment at a baseball game is oriented around similar phony suspense. There are those prerecorded "races" where three Budweiser bottle caps marked "1," "2" and "3" move along a table. There are those "Guess the Attendance" multiple-choice contests, where the tallies are generally so close together—(a) 41,943, (b) 42,063, (c) 42,102—that there is no skill involved, only the chance for people to cheer moronically when "their" number is chosen at random.

That same edition of the Times also produced the single lamest piece of article-assigning I’ve seen since I was a regular reader of my high school newspaper. Under the headline "A Digit and a World Apart: At 565 Park Ave., Living the Dream; at 1565, Still Dreaming," reporter Alan Feuer examined two apartment buildings: one at E. 62nd St., the other at E. 112th St. Feuer is probably not to be blamed for this. Cannily, the Times was able to ferret out that the building in the heart of the east side, across from the Colony Club, was rich, while the tenement known as the James Weldon Johnson Houses in Harlem was poor. The article was full of compare-and-contrast—diamonds and champagne here, urine in the stairwells there! In our edition of the Times the photo caption ran, "At 565 Park Avenue, above, an elegant co-op apartment building at 62nd Street in Manhattan, there is a liveried doorman. At the brick-faced public housing tower at 1565 Park Avenue, several miles to the north, there is a broken door buzzer."

So what next from the Times? Maybe "1492 and 1942… Despite the Superficial Similarities, Two Very Different Years." Or "Greenwich and Greenland: Behind the Names, a World of Difference."

Blair Minimum

I fear that one of the nasty surprises awaiting us in the coming months of war will be the discovery that, sometime in the past decade or so, Britain has turned into a "European" country. Princess Diana may have been the shallowest public figure of recent decades, but her death five years ago should have taught us some profound lessons. The English have become—all cliches about their national character to the contrary—emotional, modern and lifestyle-oriented. In short, they’re like us without the empire, and are unlikely to be terribly game to wade into a gas attack in the Iraqi marshes. Tony Blair has been a brick about this whole Iraq business, but pretty much every opinion poll taken in the past year has shown that his voters are decidedly not in his corner.

This Christmas season, the evidence has been all over the place that the Brits are a bit queasy about the alliance. Colorfully so, it must be granted. The fledgling Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave what must be one of the bizarrest Christmas sermons since the Reformation, looking at the Nativity story as a parable about terrorism. In this reading, the bien-pensants urging a war on Iraq were in the same position as the Three Wise Men. The Birth of Our Savior, the Son of Man, the Lamb of God Who Taketh Away the Sins of the World may have been a good thing on balance, Williams granted, and the Magi may have been right to rejoice, but Williams urged us consider the humanitarian fallout, the collateral damage wrought by those bearing gold and frankincense and myrrh. "Telling Herod about the Christ child," said Williams, "they provoked the massacre of the children of Bethlehem." It’s for such subordination of revelation to human rights that the adjective "post-Christian" was coined.

And then, the Today show on BBC’s Radio 4 asked its listeners to vote for an end-of-the-year list of five people "most deserving of honorary status as a British citizen." Nelson Mandela topped the polling with 50 percent of these votes. Bill Clinton and the Burmese human-rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi also ranked high. But guess who else made the top five? Saddam Hussein.

It would be tempting to take some solace in reports that George W. Bush got a few votes. But according to the Guardian, reasons for backing our President included his "contribution to entertainment" and the consolation that "as a British citizen he would no longer be eligible to be president of the USA."

MUGGER Hugger

As Russ Smith moves on to what we in Washington call "private life," Iwish him every happiness. This is partly for selfish reasons—since so much of Russ’ happiness has in recent years depended on the fortunes of the Red Sox, there is a good chance that if he is unhappy, I’ll be unhappy. Even if the new owners of New York Press prove models of sound judgment, discernment, wit, sex appeal and largesse, it will be tough to lose the owner who came up with the idea of this column and has stood behind it for the last seven years. It’s been an honor to work for him. Sarava!

A few years ago, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote of the conformist nonconformism that is the hallmark of political correctness, "We taunt traditions that are extinct, we delight in fearlessly provoking antiquated prejudices–because we can’t any longer even imagine the human adventure except in terms of a battle of liberation that the living wage against the dead."

Finkielkraut’s words often come to mind as one watches the drowning candidacy of Andrew Cuomo. Last week, Cuomo gurgled and sank, and a Quinnipiac poll placed him 16 points behind the not-particularly-deft campaign of Carl McCall. So Cuomo issued an ad to tell us what he really stands for. "In President Clinton’s cabinet," he says, "I stood up to mortgage rip-offs, gun manufacturers, even the KKK." I love that "even." Oh, the mighty KKK! I remember attending a counterdemonstration against the KKK in Washington in 1990. There were six, maybe eight, men–not one of them under the age of 70–scheduled to march in their bedsheets and sneakers. God, was I scared as I joined the counterdemo of several thousand infuriated black Washingtonians carrying signs reading, "Fight the Power." (For this was in the wake of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.) If the police hadn’t diverted those six dangerous geezers to the other side of the Capitol, we might have been in real peril. Indeed, our "peace demonstration" might have been diverted from pummeling the living shit out of several Asian vendors and stealing their food.

As Cuomo himself puts it, "New times need new leadership." That’s why the Dauphin is so forward-looking. In Andrew Cuomo, certainly, we have a candidate who will stand up to the Spanish Inquisition, who dislikes Hitler and does not care who knows it, and who will oppose Joe McCarthy with every fiber in his being, should reports of the Wisconsin senator’s death prove erroneous.

Young Cuomo, unsurprisingly, is going along with New York Democrats’ ludicrous (and increasingly doomed-looking) plans to exploit the Sept. 11 tragedy with a series of Sept. 10 ads. (Sept. 10, because practically every political organization in the country has declared a moratorium on ads on the day itself.) Several Democratic hacks are planning to recite the Gettysburg address in a series of cuts. They claim they had absolutely no idea that Gov. Pataki was planning to recite the address himself at World Trade Center memorial services that President Bush is scheduled to attend.

Democrats say they planned their own Gettysburg deal months ago. Baloney. The Democrats’ little act of death-exploiting plagiarism would be less suspicious if the Gettysburg address were appropriate to the day. But it’s not. The Gettysburg address is about a civil war that was testing whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. That test has been passed, it would seem. The speech does ask us to honor the dead, but as combatants, as active participants in their fate: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here…the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced…the cause in which they gave

the last full measure of their devotion…" The people in the Towers didn’t do anything. They certainly didn’t fight. They were not advancing any cause. They were just murdered. To forget that is to minimize the crime.

It is Republican tone-deafness that incriminates Democrats, making it crystal-clear that all they are doing is undermining what they see as a mere photo-op. Had Republicans chosen an appropriate speech (or actually conquered their laziness for long enough to write a new one), bad faith would have been harder to prove. But teachers catch copiers with wrong answers rather than right ones. (Two exams that say Montpelier is the capital of Vermont are above suspicion. Two exams that say Albany is the capital of Vermont are a sign that somebody has been copying.)

Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Clinton have already said they want no part of the Democrats’ ad. Even party chairman Herman Farrell says, "I may back out of it myself if it becomes a real stink-a-roonie." As of last week, Cuomo was saying that he would participate, but that the spot "has to be tasteful." Anyone praises the KKK, I’m outta here.

Takes One to Know One

What a week for Democratic flailing. Joe Lieberman went to Minnesota to help radical Sen. Paul Wellstone keep a seat the Democrats stand a surprisingly good chance of losing. Lieberman attended the first meeting of an ad-hoc group called "Business Leaders for Wellstone," meant to dispel the impression that Wellstone was antibusiness. I assume Lieberman is going to spend the rest of the summer launching Immigrants for Buchanan and Miners for Black Lung.

If Hillary was not participating in the New York Gettysburg charade, it was maybe because she can fling malarkey on a larger stage. Last week she laid into the "economic summit" that President Bush held in the dust-blown welfare colony of Waco, TX, a half-hour drive from his ranch in Crawford, which turned into a testimonial-fest. "Being a Democrat," Hillary said, "means that there is always going to be disagreements, and I welcome [it] that, unlike what is happening in Crawford, we actually have debates."

This from a woman who in 1993 stacked her healthcare task-force with industry cronies and then ran it with a secrecy that would have qualified as paranoid even if they were gathered to discuss nuclear launch codes. And I don’t exactly recall that President Clinton’s own Little Rock economic summits–it was he who invented these propagandistic charades, after all–saved a place at the table for Milton Friedman.

Let’s be clear, though, that the "summit" was just as univocal as Sen. Clinton described it. President Bush’s tax cut was studied by participants and found to be…well, just perfectly calibrated and timed, actually; the President is doing exactly the right thing on corporate corruption; and the most likely outcome of his economic leadership is…well, to be frank and perfectly honest with you, more-opportunities-for-minorities-and-the-poor. It was almost as if the President’s economic policy had died and people were eulogizing it at the graveside. Everyone stressed the policy’s wit, its warmth and how fun it was to be around. Not a word was mentioned of its early indiscretions: that let’s-take-Social-Security-and-plow-all-the-money-into-growth-stocks phase. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.

The summit was, in short, a disgrace. But it was a disgrace of a very Clintonite kind. The only innovation of President Clinton-without-the-Brains was to hold it near his summer vacation home. (People are hurting here on the outskirts of my latifundium.) Otherwise, the drill was familiar from the reign of Clinton the First. The Stephanopoulite role was played by a host of GOP hacks. Long Island Rep. Pete King was trundled out to parry accusations that it was a partisan gathering. "You had, I think, more than 40 people there who had contributed to the Democratic campaigns," said King–hardly good news, since that means the gathering was made up of those rich and powerful enough to cover all the bases with their mega-contributions. There was something in King’s protestation that reminded one of the classic Clintonite stonewalling gambit: "We’ve released over 10,000 pages of documents." As if voters will never think to ask, "Which ones?" Which documents? Or, in Bush’s case: Which donors? Which Democrats?

Bush aide Andrew Card also came to the President’s defense when someone claimed that only a small segment of the American population was represented at the conclave: "That’s an irresponsible statement," Card said, "because anyone who was here and even watching this on tv would have seen that the participants came from all across America. They represented great diversity." Diversity, that is, according to the Clintonite definition: A black guy, a chick and some guy named Garcia who say exactly what I tell them to.

The New York Post is exactly right to hold that Sept. 11 poses "a largely unmet challenge to American ideals…" In trying to evoke those ideals, the President is resorting ever more to the Democratic lexicon. What are we to make of his constant deployment of the word "leadership"–leadership this, leadership that–which always (and properly) reminds conservatives of Tocqueville’s warnings about the paradoxical sheepishness of the democratic citizen. Immediately after the summit, the President went to the northern Midwest to praise the passengers of Flight 93, who last Sept. 11 foiled hijackers’ plans at the cost of their lives. Bush sounded an extremely Democratic note when he said these passengers had wanted to serve "something greater than themselves," and enjoined Americans to do the same. Let’s hope Bush is different, but whenever Democrats use that turn of phrase, they have a very specific idea of what "something greater than yourself" means. It means My Political Interests.

nnn

The great
warning in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, as every schoolchild
used to know, concerns the "tyranny of the majority." In democratic
societies like ours, any specimen of greed, self-righteousness or spite that
wins the support of 51 percent of the people can be deployed to humiliate the
remaining 49. The problem is even graver than it sounds. First, because, as
human fail-ings go,
greed, self-righteousness and spite are fairly infectious ones. Second, because
majoritarian tyrannies are perceived as tyrannies only in retrospect; while
they’re being perpetrated, they appear in most people’s minds as common
sense. Today, most Americans will grant that women, blacks and gays were treated
despotically a half-century ago. But if you tell them that smokers are being
persecuted today, they will reply in good faith that they have no idea what
you’re talking about. The only silver lining is that, every once in a while,
the near-unanimous wrath of the American public gets focused on a class of scumbags
who richly deserve to be deprived of their rights. And today, the scumbag class
par excellence of the Internet economy appears to be on the run.

Last week,
the Massachusetts Senate passed–and Gov. Jane Swift signed into law–a
"do not call" bill tough enough to put a lot of telemarketers out
of business. Citizens can place themselves on a list that will make them off-limits
to soliciting, and companies that call them can be fined up to $5000. Such laws
have passed in about half of all states, and people love them. When Kentucky’s
do-not-call law was enacted earlier this year, a third of the state’s residential
phone numbers were registered within weeks; 200,000 New Yorkers signed up for
their own state’s list in the first month; and when Pennsylvania passed
a do-not-call law earlier this summer, the toll-free number for getting listed
on it was jammed for days. So ferocious is the desire to stop telemarketing
that the Federal Trade Commission is considering a federal law.

No reader
of this column will have to be told that evening phone solicitations for buying
stocks ("I wouldn’t want you to miss out on this opportunity, Mister…er,
Chris") or time-shares or home-security systems are a major nuisance. One
FTC estimate is that the average household receives 130 phone pitches a month.
(We can leave for another column the amazing prolificacy of e-mail spammers:
If I had answered even half of the Add-Six-Inches-to-Your-Penis!!! offers I’ve
received, I’d be able to have sex in Chicago from the comfort of my desk
in Washington.) But equally galling is the way telemarketers lobby Congress
to protect their right to barge in on your dinner (or, if you happen to work
the night or morning shift, interrupt your night’s sleep). The Direct Marketing
Association specializes in fraudulent statistics, claiming that telemarketing
employs six million people and accounts for the absurdly high figure of $660
billion of our GNP. The American Teleservices Association (ATA) supplies the
bogus "common-sense" appeals. Their lobbyist Matt Mattingly, a former
Georgia Republican senator (and failed senatorial candidate last time out),
was recently quoted as saying that, "If no one bought from telemarketers,
there would be no telemarketers." Indeed, if no one wanted to have people
knocked off, there would be no hit men, etc.

Mattingly,
according to some press accounts, is mulling a freedom-of-speech challenge to
these do-not-call laws. I’m a sucker for this kind of framing of the issues–you
could probably convince me to jump off a bridge if you couched it in libertarian
terms–but Mattingly’s line is an absurdity. Most of our communications
laws are based on metaphors we’ve built from our experience in a pre-technological
age. Lobbyists view the telephone as like a right of way, or a sidewalk. Anyone
can go there, and only a tyranny would limit people’s right to "talk
to one another." But we do have laws regarding public spaces and rights
regarding private ones. Just because anyone can use the sidewalk does not mean
you’re allowed to erect a building on it. Just because there is a path
across your land that hikers are allowed to cross does not give them the right
to open a Burger King on it. Joe Telemarketer, posing as a champion of "freedom,"
is actually a champion of usurpation. Yes, the telephone is a way of communicating.
It is also–whether we think of it as a private-sector thing or a public-sector
thing–your property.

New
Model Armey

Every election
season piles up more evidence that the Cold War party structure has become meaningless.
Not just "more fluid," or "harder to read"–meaningless.
Our parties are coming to resemble sports teams in the era of free agency–they
have fans who remain loyal, even if the squad has nothing in common with last
year’s. "Liberal" Bill Clinton abolished welfare and pursued
a more conservative economic policy than any president since Coolidge. "Conservative"
George Bush’s signature legislative achievement is an education package
that betokens the largest shift of power to Washington since LBJ. Only inertia
and habit could explain why virtually all of the people who were Republicans
or Democrats 15 years ago still belong to their respective parties.

First, we
see Republicans criticizing Democrats for acting like Republicans. In the South
Dakota Senate race, GOP Congressman John Thune has been running ads against
the Democratic incumbent Tim Johnson, accusing Johnson of wanting to invest
Social Security funds in the stock market. This is not exactly true–Johnson
merely threw out the idea in the run-up to his 1996 campaign against Larry Pressler.
(And asked what Thune’s own position on the matter was, his spokesman Christine
Iverson replied, "John has no position one way or the other." That’s
nice.) What’s more interesting than one politician misrepresenting another
is that Thune thinks he can get elected by spouting the Democratic line.

Second,
we see Democrats attacking Democrats for acting like Democrats. In the Michigan
gubernatorial primary, Jennifer Granholm won an overwhelming victory over David
Bonior and Jim Blanchard, two giants of Michigan Democratic politics. This shows
that the feminist money bundlers at EMILY’s List–not the labor
unions, which backed Bonior, and not the blacks, who mostly backed Blanchard–form
the red-hot burning core of the Democratic constituency. But we knew that. What’s
interesting is that the slashing late ads that EMILY’s List ran in favor
of Granholm attacked Bonior and Blanchard as "soft on crime." Granholm
thought she could get elected as a Dem by running on Richard Nixon’s issues.

Third, we
see Republicans attacking Republicans for acting like Republicans. In the New
Hampshire senatorial party, incumbent Bob Smith–a conservative so hard-line
that he briefly left the GOP three years ago because he felt it had betrayed
the cause of small government–accuses his challenger, John Sununu the Younger,
of backing tax increases. Okay, that plays to script: Sununu, like his father,
is one of those worst-of-both-worlds Bush Republicans, who pays lip-service
to conservative "values" while favoring Democratic levels of government
interference. What’s interesting is that Smith also accuses Sununu of voting
against adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The facts may be iffy
on this–Sununu says he’s voted for two such bills. Hasn’t Smith
done the same? Smith now thinks he can plausibly sell himself to the GOP rank-and-file
as the guardian of an expanded welfare state.

This drifting
away from ideological moorings is particularly marked in the Republican South.
The belief that migration to the Sun Belt would transform the country into some
kind of right-wing bastion has turned out to be wrong. These people are Republicans
all right, but not necessarily of a stripe that, say, Ronald Reagan would recognize.
Dick Armey traveled to Iowa last week, where he gave a speech that vaulted him
to near the top of the Washington antiwar establishment. Saddam Hussein may
continue to refuse to let weapons inspectors into his country, Armey said, but
"in my estimation it is not enough reason to go in." That could have
been Paul Wellstone talking.

In South
Carolina, meanwhile, Lindsey Graham, the Cicero of the Impeach Bill Clinton
crusade, is trying to get himself elected senator by running as Richard Gephardt.
After last week’s Senate passage of fast-track negotiating authority for
the president, Graham said he wouldn’t have voted for it, and set himself
firmly in the protectionist camp. "America is the biggest chump in the
world," he said, "and I’m tired of it." And tired of the
free trade that has been part of the Republican Decalogue since 1980. To judge
from the flurry of agricultural subsidies and steel tariffs that the President
has ordered over the last few months, Graham has company.

Massachusetts
– By last weekend, Democrats were just beginning to realize that the
corporate corruption scandals were not going to result in an automatic electoral
windfall. Republicans have a structural advantage, thanks to the recent census
that adds congressional seats to the Southern states. So if Democrats are going
to take the House back in the fall, they’re going to have
to energize the electorate themselves–by "nationalizing" the
elections, much as Newt did in 1994.

And Republicans
are tying themselves in knots trying to stop them. All over town last week was
a memo sent by Mitch Bainwol, director of the National Republican Senatorial
Committee, the longtime political brains of Florida Sen. Connie Mack and now
among the smartest of the Bushies’ political operatives. Democrats, Bainwol
says, "believe they can convince Americans that, because Republicans have
received campaign contributions from certain corporations, Republicans are responsible
for the criminal activities of people within those corporations."

Bainwol
goes on to lay out a Republican interpretation of the corporate-corruption scandals–put
less grandiosely, a list of talking points. He notes that Democratic CEOs–like
Gary Winnick of the notorious, bankrupt Global Crossing–have bankrolled
favorite pols every bit as assiduously as their Republican counterparts at Enron.
Samuel Waksal of ImClone (Martha Stewart’s alleged tipster) is far more
a problem for Democrats than for Republicans. It’s also true that corporate
corruption is not the only corruption, and that Dems are more than competitive
in other fields of graft. (Although the "letter of admonition" that
New Jersey Democrat Bob Torricelli received last week from the Senate Ethics
Committee is a blow to Republicans. It constitutes a slap on the wrist and a
green light for the fall election. As Torch’s Virginia Republican colleague
George Allen says, it’s a verdict of Not-guilty-but-you-have-to-return-the-horse.)

In general,
Bainwol misses the boat, because Democrats are going to run the upcoming congressional
elections against George W. Bush’s biography–even though, as
it is easy to forget, Bush himself isn’t running this fall. This strategy
falls under the category of cheap-but-legitimate. It’s the political equivalent
of the hidden-ball trick. For whatever party holds the presidency, the president
is always like a stick drawing a kindergartner makes that reads Tihs Is Mee.
And the picture Bush’s biography draws of Republicans is that of coddled
corporate hangers-on. It doesn’t matter if Bush never put an Enron dollar
in his pocket, just as it didn’t matter in 1994 that Bill Clinton had no
plans to burn the country down in the name of Flower (or Black or Solar) Power.
Clinton was a hippie whatever he did, and Bush will be a Fat Cat likewise.

It’s
not that Bush’s life is filled with illegalities. It’s that it’s
now interesting to people who aren’t sure how they’ll vote.
When the Daily News broke a story last week that Harken Energy had "an
offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands," it looked like Bush’s
company had engaged in the very tax avoidance that the White House has condemned
in recent press conferences. Which, of course, it had. Such tax flight is not
necessarily economically un-virtuous. But what makes it particularly irresistible
for the Dems to mention is that the Bush press operation seems to have a gift
for making its own predicament worse. So you watch NBC Nightly News and one
of their reporters intones that "The White House insists what Harken did
was far different than companies like Enron that moved major operations there
to specifically avoid paying taxes." (Oh, do tell me another! says
Mr. Swing Voter. The Cayman Islands banking system exists to help people
avoid paying taxes. What do you think attracted Harken there? The free toaster
and personalized checks?)

In
Any Event

Hanging
around on a breezy beach in Massachusetts since arriving last week, I’ve
got to listen to more rock than I usually do. (This is kind of a forced trip
we’re on. As my wife says, what’s the point of marrying someone from
Massachusetts–and having to endure all the Bay State sanctimony, superstition,
dipsomania, snobbery and stinginess–if you don’t get to go to the
beach there in the summer?)

One staple
on the family boombox has been the children’s album No! that They
Might Be Giants just made. I started the week plunged in Strausbaughian speculation
about whether this is a great next step for TMBG, or whether they’d’ve
been better off just fading into the sunset. But my doubts have passed.
First, because the album is so terrific–a mix of actual new children’s
songs ("In The Middle, In The Middle, In The Middle") and weirdly
beautiful vintage TMBG tunes of the "Ana Ng" variety ("The House
at the Top of the Tree"). It leaves me wondering whether the band’s
appeal to me hasn’t been a children’s-music one all along ("I’ve
been leaving on my things/So in the morning when the morning bird sings/There’s
still dinner on my dinner jacket/Till the dinner bell rings").

But second,
the exploitative behavior of rockers past their prime exceeds even the power
of a Strausbaugh to keep up with. Doing a kids’ album seems like the zenith
of dignity by comparison. In recent weeks, Smash Mouth has prematurely rendered
"Walking on the Sun" an easy-listenin’ tune by peddling it to
GM for use on the company’s Chevrolet summer-sale ads. What’s particularly
galling about this particular campaign is the way it uses the song’s lyrics.
There are only two vocal outtakes: "You might as well be walking on the
sun" at the start of the commercial. That’s okay–it kind of "brands"
the ad campaign, even if it makes no sense in context, other than that the sun
(geddit?) is shining on the tanned shoulders of the bikini babes walking (geddit?)
around Chevy trucks throughout the ad.

But also
in the commercial are the lyrics: "So don’t delay–act
now–supplies are running out." In the original song, that lyric
was meant to sneer at people who say things like, "Don’t delay,
act now, supplies are running out." Whoever produced the ad for GM, though,
heard the lyrics and understood them in a universe in which irony does not exist.
"Hey, guys," he must have said at a board meeting. "These guys
are speaking our language! They are admirers of the soulless multinational corporation!"
Not that the original song is any masterpiece of social protest, and not that
it takes any great depth of intellect to stand against the capitalist hard sell–but
isn’t there something vulgar about selling a work of art to someone who
will use it to convey a message that is the exact opposite of the one
you intended?

My next
encounter with revenue rock came when I heard the scronky beat of the guitar
at the beginning of London Calling. "Hey, the Clash," I thought.
But then a woman with a plummy English accent began a voiceover invoking the
"Call of London." What London was calling us to do, apparently, was
buy a hugely expensive car. London was inviting us to the summer sale (which
the announcer called an "event") for Jaguar (which she called "Jegyuwa").
It turns out you can take your "surprisingly affordable" Jegyuwa and
drive it all the way to Nicaregyuwa.

But weren’t
the Clash, not to put too fine a point on it, communists? Weren’t
most of their songs–including "London Calling"–about class
war in one way or another? Doesn’t the name "The Clash" refer
to that class war? Didn’t Marx say that that clash was a clash of absolutes?
And in that clash of absolutes, didn’t the Clash purport to take up the
cause of the side that did not drive a Jegyuwa?

Without
ever embracing that politics myself, I did love the Clash’s music, and
the politics was part of the music. It’s okay in my book to change your
mind about things, or even to license out your creative work for others to enjoy.
But it seems quite another thing altogether to present a song that was written
to say one thing as if it were written to say the polar opposite.

"Oh,
well," the band seems to be telling those of us who loved their music.
"Never mind!"