Cheney Reaction: Gephardt Starts Talking Nonsense; Camelotta Baloney; Meatball-in-Chief

You know, it's just a shame House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt isn't running this country, since he alone has figured out why the markets are tanking. It's not soaring energy costs, it's not overeager speculation, it's not inventories outrunning demand. No, it's simply that the Bush administration has a bad attitude. They're not chipper enough! If the President would just put a smile on his face, we'd still be in a boom economy.

Last Wednesday, with stock prices falling so fast they whistled, Gephardt complained, "Part of this was started when Dick Cheney a few months back said we're in a recession... We've been talking ourselves into this. Now it's happening." Leaving aside that stocks have been going south for a year, the Gephardt attitude is offensive in a number of ways. It tries to carry the Washington assumption that spin always trumps reality into even the nontelevised walks of life. But the lowliest runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange knows more about markets than 95 percent of national politicians, and, more important, he knows he knows more. If there are investments that he believes will turn him a profit, he won't wait for the president's nihil obstat.

What's more, if our economy is one that will collapse the first time a bald coronary patient from Wyoming looks at it cross-eyed, then it's a corrupt economy and we're living in Malaysia. This, in fact, is what the more radical opponents of the global economy believe, and it's what makes Gephardt's and Reich's comments so significant: they're the first irruption of the spirit of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests into American big-party politics.

Camelotta Baloney

In its anti-(small "r") republican assumptions, its pseudo-religiosity, the Gephardt line fits one of the more disturbing patterns of our time. Last week, Sen. Ted Kennedy and his niece Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg made a lunatic attempt to assert that their family exercises what power it does in American life through Divine Right.

The occasion was an ad aired in Louisiana by three Republican hacks?Greg Mueller, Scott Reed and Bill Dal Col?who called themselves the "Issues Management Center." Narrated by Steve Forbes, it strongly urged passage of George W. Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut. It used a clip of President Kennedy urging deep cuts at a conference of the Economic Club of New York in December 1962. Defending his proposal to cut the maximum income tax rate from 91 to 65 percent (it would wait until Lyndon Johnson's presidency to pass), Kennedy had said, "Our present tax system, developed as it was in good part during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime."

Ted and Caroline called the ad "intellectually dishonest and politically irresponsible." Their reasoning was that "if President Kennedy were here today, he would vigorously oppose President Bush's irresponsible tax scheme." Well, who can say? He probably wouldn't have started the Vietnam War, either. He probably wouldn't have made the assassination of Third World dictators one of his hobbies. But at least Ted and Caroline were on firm ground when they cited the "entirely different economic conditions at the time," since 91-percent rates retard investment in ways our 39.6-percent rates don't.

They have every right to say these things, but then they took it a step further. Calling the advertisement "rather indecent," Ted demanded that the Issues Management Center pull the ads?or, as he put it, that they "cease from using President Kennedy's image and voice in any political advertising you are running in support of President Bush's proposed tax cut." Any journalist who has ever signed a contract realizes that this is the language of intellectual-property law. JFK was able to shift America's tax policy forever not because he was born a Kennedy but because he was elected president. Ted and Caroline have no more claim to his oratory?on taxes or anything else?than the guy who takes out your garbage. The Kennedys, choosing not to understand this, present themselves as the heirs and assigns not just of JFK but of the executive branch.

Meatball in Chief

A New York Times/CBS poll last week showed that 54 percent of Republicans consider George W. Bush a conservative?an amazingly high figure, considering he's not one. And doubly shocking since the same poll shows 18 percent of Democrats think he's a liberal. I still wouldn't copy answers off the guy's SATs. But how many times does George W. Bush have to emerge, not just unscathed but popular, from an impossible political trap before we admit he's a clever?even a helluva smart?politician?

Democrats tried to hammer the President last week for his decision not to treat carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants as pollutants. They were absolutely right to call it a baldly broken campaign promise, and probably right to say he was putting the wishes of his utility-company cronies over those of environmentalists. And yet, the more column inches liberal pundits devoted to the issue, the louder the public shouted, "Who cares?"

Bush's EPA director, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, was revealed to have little influence on the President's thinking. She had, after all, spent the preceding days explaining that the administration would obey the Kyoto protocols that called for carbon-dioxide regulation. But exposing Whitman's powerlessness, far from the "embarrassment" press accounts claimed, may have been the whole point of the CO2 reversal. Whitman is now "learning the difference between being a governor and being an employee," as one administration source gleefully told the Daily News.

Again, Bush doesn't have the cranial capacity for Bill Clinton's mastery of detail or Ronald Reagan's meditations on the direction of history. But his mind is a perfect fit for what P.J. O'Rourke used to call "management meatball" messages: The Leadership Secrets of Winston Churchill, that kind of thing. It's increasingly clear that Bush's favorite managerial tactic is the simple one of divide-and-rule, and that he has a positively Rooseveltian genius for it. The more powerful the Cabinet member, the more vigilant the President is about messing with his head. Since getting picked as secretary of state, Colin Powell has been hung out to dry à la Whitman at least monthly. A few weeks ago, Powell announced that the U.S. would continue the Clinton policy of engagement with North Korea. Bush issued a clarification, to wit: "No we won't." Last week, Powell hinted that normalization of relations with Iraq would hinge on the readmission of U.N. weapons inspectors. Bush has let it be known that he agrees with Vice President Cheney that the inspectors are negotiable. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who was chosen over Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge in the first place largely because Powell preferred Ridge) has received the same treatment. He was sent to the Wehrkunde weapons show in Munich to announce that the U.S. would beef up its military budget, and came home to a State of the Union in which Bush announced the budget would stay roughly the same. Detractors are right to complain that Bush has failed to establish himself as consistent, but he's not interested in that. He's interested in establishing himself as the boss.

Those who tried to make hay out of the CO2 flip never quite explained who the chickens were that were going to come home to roost. That there aren't any is a paradoxical penalty for Democratic Party strength. The Democrats have been so successful at co-opting grievance groups?in gender and race, of course, but also the environment?that a Republican president has no incentive to buy them out. If there were a single Sierra Club member inclined to switch his allegiance to Republicans, Bush would have had a reason to stick to the Kyoto protocols. But there wasn't, and he didn't.

Bush asserts that he changed his carbon-dioxide policy only because "circumstances have changed." He blames "energy problems" for his backing down, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has said that blackouts are likely in California this summer. (Before long, Dick Gephardt will accuse him of "talking down the energy supply.") According to a Gallup poll, 31 percent see the country's energy situation as "very serious," while 59 percent see it as "fairly serious." Such poll numbers could reflect a widespread ignorance (like those recent polls on a missile defense that show two-thirds of the public thinks we already have one). Or they could be evidence of a trumped-up energy panic, of the sort we last saw during the Gulf War. Either way, Bush has already won this one.

Whassup, Breaux?

And he's in a stronger position on campaign finance than one would have anticipated. Bush does not particularly want campaign finance reform. While he hasn't threatened to veto the popular McCain-Feingold plan, he has insisted on "unseverability." That means that if the Supreme Court rules the law unconstitutional?as it probably will, since it would violate the free-speech principles laid out in Buckley v. Valeo (1976)?then the whole law goes, not just the offending parts.

With Democrats locked in the fantasy that they remain a party of the poor, Bush is managing to use their own demagoguery against them. The Bush alternative calls for regulating soft money for corporations and unions, but not for individual citizens. This is a clever trick, a fool's mate, but the one that Democrats might fall for. Unions back the Democratic Party, period. But it's only in Democrats' imaginings that corporations are rock-solid backers of the GOP. Corporations back whoever's in power. Right now, Bush's offer to trade corporate restrictions for union ones looks fair. Should Democrats ever get back in the saddle, though, it will amount to a deal along the lines of If you tie your left hand behind your back, I'll tie your right hand behind your back.

And now, Democrats who have berated Republicans for years as resistant to reform are themselves getting cold feet, as they've come to realize their own party is better at raising soft money. In the most brazen deployment of the oops-I-never-read-it defense since Bill Clinton professed himself shocked by the writings of Lani Guinier, Louisiana Sen. John Breaux announced that "a careful reading of the bill" had convinced him that McCain-Feingold would do more harm than good. Translated out of politician-ese, this means a careful reading of the bill has shown Breaux that without the money he rakes in from Louisiana's energy moguls, thanks to his seat on the Senate Finance Committee, he'll get his jockstrap handed to him when he comes up for reelection in 2004.

Newly elected Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson has already bailed, and a spokesman for Washington's Patty Murray said, "She will wait to see how it shakes out." Murray's equivocation is telling. Since her election in the "Year of the Woman" (1992), she's built her reputation as a reformist. But once she has to move from rhetoric to legislation, that reputation is easily seen through. Two-thirds of soft money comes from about 800 donors, who contribute hundreds of thousands apiece. Some wise and blunt adviser has finally got to Murray and said: "You know what, Patty? You have no constituents. Nobody in your state is particularly crazy about you, or particularly willing to go to the barricades for you. Your real constituency is Emily's List, plus a couple dozen wealthy feminists on the Los Angeles west side."

If it's McCain-Feingold or bust, my money's on bust.