Do Americans Think at All?; Ashcroft Fallout; A Hundred Pols, A Hundred Tax Cuts

The best measure of Washington's Middle-Americanness is "the new rock alternative," WHFS, 99.1 FM, the closest thing our nation's capital has to an underground rock station. For 'HFS, "alternative" seems to mean playing the Top 40 minus Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. But leave that aside: the station is the gathering point of every young kid who considers himself engagé, enragé, epatant or outré.

Every now and then, the station sponsors something called, I think, "Famous for 15 Seconds," in which listeners are invited to call in and declaim whatever they want. You say it, we'll play it. What's extraordinary?especially given the rebellious associations of "alternative" rock, especially given that Washington, DC, is claimed by its residents to be the best-educated metropolis in the country?is that none of these people have anything at all they particularly want to say. An open mike with tens of thousands of listeners and the usual performance is: "Yo!? Um? All right!? Hey, Washington, this is Kenny!? I want to say hello to the guys at the bar? Is my 15 seconds up?? Redskins rule!"

Listening to "15 Seconds" always sets me to wondering whether journalists are wrong to put so much stock in what the American people think about things, whether they're for or against a certain candidate or a certain policy. Maybe they don't think anything at all.

At the very least, it is clear from everything that's happened since the Florida recount that Americans don't have any thoughts one way or another on their own Constitution. And this includes the politicians. In Congress last week, William Delahunt of Massachusetts, President Clinton's summertime representative, submitted a bill to abolish the electoral college. But Congress can't abolish the electoral college! It's in the Constitution.

If Republicans weren't holding Delahunt's proposal up to deserved ridicule, it's because they were getting set to hold their own Festival of Constitutional Ignorance, in the form of Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin's hearings on whether the networks were wrong to call the election early for Al Gore in Florida. This, of course, is none of Congress' business?and what would the listeners to "15 Seconds" care if it were? If Tauzin wanted to make himself useful, perhaps he could pass a Truth-in-Labeling Act for alternative rock stations.

Big, Bad John

Such passing vanities have been going on since the birth-squeals of the Republic; it's only their frequency that's troubling. The most disturbing indication that nobody particularly cares about what kind of government we live under came with the narrow confirmation of John Ashcroft, 58-42.

The debate was carried out on a pretty brain-dead basis. Ashcroft's chief defender, Jon Kyl of Arizona, told the country on tv one night why we should distrust Ashcroft's Democratic foes. "I think you will see an interesting coincidence," Kyl said, "between those who want to run for [president] and those who vote against John Ashcroft." Huh?good thinking, Jon. In other words, these senators who oppose Ashcroft don't really hate him; they're only opposing him because they think voters from one end of the country to the other hate him.

But the Democrats, if anything, were even dimmer bulbs. Particularly Ted Kennedy, who after painting the nominee as a moral menace (though he somehow neglected to ask whether Ashcroft had ever driven any of his secretaries off a bridge), magnanimously announced that he would not lead a filibuster against him?as if shutting down the Senate would do anything other than compound Democrats' extra-constitutional obstructionism with an act of Gingrichian political folly.

Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold made the (true) point that "turning the Cabinet process into another battleground for ideological war in the long run will harm everyone"?and voted for Ashcroft, both in committee and on the floor. Chris Dodd of Connecticut also voted to confirm, but this was due largely to his family history. Dodd's father, who preceded him as Connecticut senator, was subjected to a humiliating censure in the 1960s for embezzling Senate funds. Dodd fils has since then made it a point of honor that a senator should never vote against another senator for any reason, in any context. Dodd cast one of the only Democratic votes for doomed defense-secretary nominee Sen. John Tower in 1989. His after-the-fact self-congratulation for "rising above party," in fact, may be the slender reed on which the press has hung its increasingly untenable cliche that the Senate constitutes a chummy kind of men's club. If there is such a club, then Dodd looks to be its only member.

A more typical Democratic response was that of New Jersey's Bob Torricelli, who, after boldly promising to support Ashcroft in the days after his nomination, pulled out last week, on the grounds that "Ashcroft's fundamental beliefs and values would conflict with his responsibilities." We know that Torricelli was thinking of Ashcroft's "extreme" (as Herb Kohl of Wisconsin put it) opposition to abortion. But what other "fundamental beliefs and values" are now fair game? Vegetarianism? Islam?

Liberals were certainly not reluctant to ask such questions of the Bush administration, once the President's faith-based social service initiative was released last week. The essayist Wendy Kaminer was right to raise the possibility that inevitable abuses, once churches get involved in delivering welfare and medical care and drug treatment, could lead the government to distinguish over the long term between "legitimate and illegitimate religions."

One's instinct is that such programs would help a bit. It's likely that the Catholic Church, say, can get better job training and drug treatment to troubled neighborhoods than welfare agencies can. But so what? This is the strongest argument the Bushies have, and it seems to amount to getting rid of the separation of Church and State because it's more cost-effective.

Nobody in either party stood up to point out the dangers. It was partly out of cowardice. But it was partly because politicians had forgotten what the Separation of Church and State is. It's meant not to protect the state from religious people like John Ashcroft, but to protect religious people from the state.

Board Game

The CBO announced last week that it was revising its estimate of the surplus upwards yet again?to $5.6 trillion over the next 10 years?and President Bush wants to give back the increment in the form of an across-the-board tax cuts. But luck favors the prepared.

Bush's tax cut was always extremely popular in the polls?it was his top issue, even if the press never wrote about. But all tax cuts are popular. That's why every politician in the country, every single one, promises tax cuts: either a "middle-class" tax cut, or a "growth" tax cut, or a tax cut for "those who need it most," or a "tax cut to help working families." That even goes for tax-and-spend liberals like Dick Gephardt, who warned, "We must remember that surplus projections are just that, projections, not fact." (For Gephardt, surplus projections tend to be chimeras when the talk is of taxes, and money in the bank when the talk is of new social programs.) Al Gore had a tax cut. Even Dick Durbin of Illinois, the contemporary Senate's archetypal limousine liberal, says he wants tax cuts?and furthermore, he wants to "make sure that the tax cut that we enact is a sensible one that's directed to the people who really need it."

Bush was almost alone among politicians in realizing that such sensible-sounding language has become a political liability. These promises always get broken, because you can define a working family or a needy person any way you like. At a time when Democrats describe anyone earning $60,000 as "the rich," the typical voter asks: How come I'm always the guy the government thinks doesn't "really need it"? Throughout a Clinton administration during which government revenues soared and no tax cuts ever materialized, Democrats took the hocus-pocus attitude of Monty Python's cheese-shop owner. "There is a tax cut, I swear?you just don't know the people who are getting it!"

Bush understood the mind-set in which taxpayers?even lower-middle-class ones?came to the conclusion that, unless everyone was going to have his taxes cut, no one was. Saying that every last manjack in the country is going to see more of his own income is the only way you can reassure Joe Sixpack and Mary Jo Chardonnay that they'll be included. Across-the-board may have been the key phrase of the campaign. In his debates with Al Gore, this seemingly minor point was the only shred of his program from which he steadfastly refused to retreat. Affirmative action, Kosovo, vouchers, abortion? Bush left the impression he could take 'em or leave 'em. But no matter how many times Gore flung the time-honored accusations that Bush's tax plan meant "tax cuts for the rich," Bush didn't budge. That's why Bush is in the driver's seat now: not because he proposed a tax cut, but because he hit on the only rhetorical formula that could convince voters he would deliver it.