Bush Gives Greenspan the Fratboy Rubdown; Powell Forward; Hillary, Invincible Termagant

The first was the AP's shot of Bush smirking behind bewildered-looking Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan after their Tuesday meeting. Dangling over the lapels of Greenspan's jacket were all eight of Bush's fingers and none of his thumbs. He wasn't?? Was he actually?? Why, yes?Bush was giving Greenspan the time-honored Fratboy Rubdown, beloved greeting of prepsters coast to coast. How well I remember it from college. Instead of saying hello or waving or nodding or shaking hands, your average St. Grottlesex alum would walk up behind you, slap his hands on your shoulders and knead your shoulder blades, while intoning seriatim a half-dozen salutations that hadn't been used in decades?Hey?how's the boy? How's life treatin' ya? What's the good word??and so on.

In Greenspan's case, Bush merely hollered to the assembled reporters, in a binge of lèse-majesté, "This is a good man!" It was a funny moment: The press corps?after years of moaning that Alan Greenspan was too big for his britches, that the Fed was autocratic and unresponsive to our democratic politics, that American monetary policy served the bond market rather than Main Street?suddenly reared back as if to ask, "Who the hell does Bush think he is, treating Alan Greenspan that way?" Whether or not Greenspan enjoyed the treatment?and for a person described invariably as a "guru" or a "wizard," it might be a refreshing change to get called "a good man" once in a while?the meeting was a smashing success.

Most hopeful was Bush's own promise to act to avoid oil shortages, a necessary pronouncement for a Texas governor, since gas crises that punish the country as a whole tend to lead to boom times in the Lone Star State. Greenspan didn't dump on Bush's planned $1.3 trillion tax cut, as he'd implied he would several months ago. Indeed, by announcing a bias toward lowering interest rates later in the day, Greenspan implicitly granted the Bush-Cheney talking point that our slowing economy will soon be in need of some such stimulus.

That's a big break for Bush. He made too many promises during the campaign, and a new CBS poll shows the public doesn't necessarily want what he's promised. Americans are split on whether they want increased defense spending (43 percent favor; 45 percent oppose) or incentivized schools (45-46 opposed). But they'd love privatized Social Security (59-33) and they'd love a mammoth, across-the-board tax cut of exactly the sort Bush advocates (61-28). Since the Gingrich era, Clinton has psyched Republican politicians out of fighting for lower taxes?but the public wants them anyway. Although Dubya may lose this battle, he cannot compromise. Given the way his father's political career foundered on a broken tax promise, Dubya must be seen to fight for every penny.

When Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney if the incoming administration was seriously proposing to go for the whole 1-point-3 trill, Cheney replied, "It's important, I think, to stay true to our principles." The Veep-Elect must welcome this chance to be spokesman on such popular issues. Through much of the recount charade, Cheney was trundled out to assure conservatives that they'll have a voice within the White House. Bush's message, meanwhile, has been to assure everyone else that that voice won't be heard.

Powell Forward For one thing, Bush used last week to make his peace with affirmative action, much as he made his peace with legalized abortion at the very beginning of his campaign in 1999. He did it in an unorthodox way, using for that purpose his future secretary of state Colin Powell and his future national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Each is as highly qualified for his post as any nonblack candidate, yet when Bush was asked whether he hoped to send blacks and women a message through their nominations, he replied, "You bet: that people that work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything they want in America." Coming from a Republican, it was an extraordinary answer, for two reasons: First, it showed how much Dubya has learned from the mistakes of his father. When George H.W. Bush nominated the solid but hardly world-class Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, his entire administration bitterly denied that it had chosen him on anything but merit. That was a transparent lie?Thomas had been picked to fill Thurgood Marshall's "black" seat on the court. (The first Bush administration had an amazing knack for harvesting political opprobrium from its opponents' policies?from affirmative action to tax hikes.)

Second, Dubya's remark showed how much he has learned from his predecessor. Clinton's announcement in 1992 that he would seek "a cabinet that looks like America" was the low point of his transition. Even Democrats worried that such considerations introduced affirmative action into an area where it had no business. And the public at large considered it a devious betrayal of Clinton's centrist campaign rhetoric. The best measurement of how far we've traveled since then is that Bush signaled diversity would be a priority even before the election. It was a campaign promise!

With Powell's approve-disapprove ratings running at 83-6, according to CNN, conservatives have looked elsewhere to focus any displeasure they might feel. There were some crazy comments last week about ALCOA CEO Paul O'Neill, the dark-horse candidate whom Bush tapped as Treasury secretary. (My own preoccupations are (a) Can he hit left-handed pitching? and (b) Should we platoon him with, say, former Fed Gov. Larry Lindsey?) But it would be hard for anyone to sound crazier than the usually levelheaded Terry Jeffrey, a former Buchanan aide who is now editor of Human Events. "He has been the head of the ALCOA aluminum company," Jeffrey said of O'Neill, "which, prior to his getting there, was called the Aluminum Company of America, and under his tenure, the name was changed to ALCOA, simply the acronym, to get rid of the 'America.'"

It seems to have eluded Jeffrey's notice that practically every corporation in America changed its name in the 1990s, generally to some hideous single word with a capital letter in the middle, like "CadStar" or "ShrinkTek" or "BankFast." Jeffrey continued, undeterred, "You might have some Republican senators asking [O'Neill] in confirmation what he didn't like about the word 'America' in the title of his company." Yeah, you might. And then again you might not.

Redbook I almost forgot. The second picture that captured something essential about the week was The New York Times' front-pager of the ceremonial Hillary Clinton-Laura Bush meeting. It's usually the sitting president's wife, polished by four or eight years of state dinners and public appearances, who looks well-groomed and under control, while the newcomer looks like a frump, a tourist. What a role-reversal! Here it was Hillary who was yapping, awkward, giddy?and decked out in what looks like the black battle-flag of some Himalayan guerrilla insurgency. Laura Bush, meanwhile, in an elegant and understated lavender dress, looked on, demure, amused and (heroically) patient. Hillary is turning out to be an even more potent symbol of Clintonian hubris than her husband, particularly in her persistent assumption (not disproved yet) of personal invincibility. Last week, when she signed an $8 million advance to write her memoirs for Simon & Schuster?a subsidy of Viacom, which has constant business before Congress?no Republican in the Senate did a thing. John McCain explored the possibility of filing an ethics complaint, but the Republican Senate leader Trent Lott shot him down. "I don't want to get into that," Lott said.

Democrats claim that Hillary's deal is not similar to the ethically catastrophic $4.5 million advance Newt Gingrich got from Rupert Murdoch in late 1994. And it's not "similar." No: It's exactly the same deal?except for the larger sums of money involved.

Strictly speaking, there is no illegality here: senators are permitted to accept book advances. But House members were permitted to do so as well, back when Gingrich signed his own contract. The ethical problem arises from a political hack's enriching himself personally by selling off something that properly belongs to the American people, and has merely been entrusted to him: in Newt's case, the speakership; in Hillary's case, the White House.

Constipational Amendment In the final electoral tally, Gore's margin of victory in the popular vote rose to 540,000 votes, almost five times the size of JFK's win over Nixon. That gap may explain why Gore, at his perfunctory 11-minute meeting with Bush, was so ungracious and dyspeptic that Jay Leno remarked, "He looks like the guy in the constipation commercial." "New revelations" about the 2000 election will continue to appear for months. Last week's include: (1) Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' cellphone bill shows a call to the Texas governor's mansion on election night. (2) Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had wailed at a dinner party when she heard Gore won Florida. (3) The Orlando Sentinel found a net gain of 130 votes that would have gone to Gore, due to the failure of optical scanners to read marked ballots on which the candidate's name had also been penciled in.

But the allegations that we'll eventually know that Gore would have won a "fair" count are nonsense. Other irregularities point to a Bush victory. The Center for the Study of the American Electorate found that Florida did not have an unusually high number of undervotes. This claim underlay Democrats' insistence on liberal standards in counting dimpled chads. In five states, votes in down-ticket races "exceeded the presidential vote." Florida wasn't one of them, but the belief that something supernatural was preventing voters from punching the presidential box led to Broward County Judge Robert Lee's notorious insistence on looking down-ticket for evidence of mystical Gore sympathies.

Besides, Republicans did not even scratch the surface of Democratic irregularities. The New York Post found that 14,000 voters in metropolitan New York alone were also registered in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties. As for the more political allegation that the Bush campaign stole the election for its wealthy backers, the Tallahassee Democrat demolished it with a report on postelection fundraising. That tally showed Gore to be the candidate of the plutocracy, at least in Florida. Bush had almost 22,000 donors to his postelection legal fund, averaging $216 per donation; Gore had 1258 averaging $1265.

Still, as predicted last week, posterity is beginning to drift toward the Gore narrative of the events. On Dec. 10, the Washington Post asked voters whom they had personally preferred for president. By a margin of 47-39, they said Bush. A few days later, the paper asked the same question and the numbers were exactly reversed: Gore 47-39. How to explain this? There was some indication from the very latest polling that voters never quite understood what the Gore camp was trying to pull off in Florida. Newsweek asked about the role partisanship played in Florida courts. Fifty-four percent of Gore voters said it played a major role, versus 38 percent of Bush voters. Ten percent of Gore voters said partisanship played no role at all, versus 19 percent of Bush voters. Strange: Since it was the Florida courts that changed election rules to keep hope alive for Gore, and since not a single Republican judge got to pronounce on the case during its Florida phase, it's the Bushies who should be accusing the Florida judges of partisanship, and the Gore-ites who should be denying it.

So it's another triumph for American exceptionalism: here, history gets written by the vanquished.