Gore and the Democrats Get Dopey

First out of the box was Brian Lopina, a lobbyist for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America?that nest of hustlers who have made billions from the product- and occupational-safety laws that Democrats designed specifically to enrich them. The trial bar has repaid the favor by becoming the Democratic Party's biggest contributors. What did Lopina do? Well, the Golden Rule of Washington Voicemail states that the only message you should ever leave on anyone's machine is Call me?and Lopina broke it. Lopina tried to intimidate Sen. Rod Grams, the Minnesota Republican, out of backing a bill that would scrutinize asbestos suits more carefully. Big bucks are at stake here. Peter Angelos made enough out of asbestos to buy the Baltimore Orioles; Trent Lott's brother-in-law Dick Scruggs made enough out of asbestos to become one of the richest men in Mississippi and launch his career as a tobacco pest. So Lopina warned Grams that ATLA was bankrolling a set of highly effective ads against senators (like Montana Republican Conrad Burns) who weren't dancing to the lawyers' tune. He offered to send over a transcript of the ads, "so you'll see exactly how hard-hitting this stuff is. I think you really ought to get off this bill."

Lopina claimed to have been calling Grams as a "friend," and ATLA denied that he'd made the calls at its request. Yeah, sure?he works as a lobbyist but makes threatening calls about legislation in his spare time. Big mistake for ATLA. Up till last week, Grams had looked like about the most moribund senator in Congress, widely viewed as ineffective and embarrassed week to week by the ongoing legal travails of his son Morgan, who was arrested after a spectacular disappearance last summer that involved fraud, an unreturned rental car, forgery and bags and bags of dope. But now Grams has a cause?he's the anti-blackmail candidate, the clean-government candidate, the stand-up-to-the-special-interests candidate.

E-Gregious In a bad week for Al Gore's party, Gore fared as badly as anybody. The drip-drip-drip from the Buddhist temple fundraiser continued, with the discovery of an old FBI memo calling for Gore to be investigated. And the press began to ask why?at a time when the newly McCainized George W. Bush is talking to reporters every day?Gore hasn't held a news conference in almost two months.

But the very messages that Gore is crafting in his press-free seclusion looked likely to harm him over the long run. The Federal Communications Commission announced that it had decided to pork up its "E-Rate" by $2.25 billion. This is the new surcharge on phone bills?in effect, a tax enacted without Congress?that Republicans have labeled "the Gore Tax." Gore pretends to be proud of it, because it gets students on what he used to call The Information Superhighway. "The E-Rate program to wire schools and libraries has brought millions of children across this nation into the 21st century," he said. "I am pleased to report that the Federal Communications Commission is committing an additional $2.25 billion to further connect our kids to the information age."

A less euphemistic way of putting that would be to say: "The E-Rate program will keep your children under constant surveillance, will drive your child away from books and reading, will foster the time-honored American habit of spending one's entire adolescence drooling slack-jawed in front of a television screen, and acquaint our young people with the best way to buy pornography and guns over the Internet. And all it's costing the average American family of four is 50 bucks a year."

Clinton but Crazier In short, Democrats look less appetizing than they have in six years. So what are the Republicans doing? Imitating them.

The Republican congressional leadership came up with a prescription-drug plan last week, and Speaker Dennis Hastert actually bragged about setting aside $5.2 billion more for it than the President did. Republican congressional committee chairmen spent the rest of the week working to arrange waivers of the term limits Newt Gingrich imposed on them in 1995. Both moves were inimical to everything the GOP has stood for over the last two decades, but at least they were grounded in (liberal) reality. That couldn't be said of George W. Bush's Midwestern spending spree. In Cleveland, Bush announced a $42 billion help-the-poor program focusing on a bunch of Clintonesque health proposals. A day later, in St. Louis, he proposed federally funding 12,000 community health centers, at the cost of several billions more. Bush says this is about "ensuring that the social safety net is available for all who need it."

All this was done amid much talk of the American Dream?a phrase that will cause any seasoned voter to reach for his wallet. "Never in history has there been a nation with such a close connection between dreams and reality," Bush said. That's true, but not in the sense that Bush means it. It's true in the sense that Bush's program is a total fantasy. He wants to raise spending through the roof while dropping taxes through the floor?and he hasn't identified a single government program he would eliminate or a red cent of the federal budget he would cut.

Either he's Clinton (1992 version) or he's crazy. What Clinton did in 1992 was promise Democrats the entire Democratic program (government so robust it included national health care and gays in the military), while promising Republicans a half-dozen of their own most popular planks, from tax cuts to welfare reform. He delivered everything he could to the Democrats, governing as a genuine leftist for about 18 months; all he delivered to the Republicans was the message of "Tough luck, suckers." If Bush is lying to those left-leaning centrists, then he's going to be punished in 2002 with landslide Democratic gains in the House and Senate, of the sort pissed-off voters inflicted on Bill Clinton in 1994. Thereafter, Son of Bush will either follow the Clinton formula and govern against his party, or his presidency will unravel into one of the least popular in American history.

But if Bush really believes he can enact his tax cuts and his mammoth government expansion at the same time, he's out of his mind, even dangerous. The Bushies claim Ronald Reagan built up the military while cutting taxes. Well, yeah, but at the time, we had top marginal rates at the capital-repelling level of 70 percent. Cutting taxes lured enough money from Europe and Asia (and out from under people's mattresses) that economic growth could cover the shortfall. That won't happen now. Today, top income tax rates are south of 40 percent and capital gains taxes are the lowest they've been in a generation. Add that to a number of sluggish foreign economies that were supposed to be booming, and we'd seem to have about as much capital as we could reasonably expect to attract. Cutting taxes means cutting revenues.

So Al Gore is absolutely right to claim that Bush "cannot pay for any of [his] proposals, since he has already exceeded the available surplus by nearly a trillion dollars." In fact, Bush is making Gore sound more and more like the economic conservative in this race. Perhaps that's why, even with Bush running half a dozen points ahead in the polls, Washington Republicans have never been so down on him. It's partly that Bush has been bruised by his primary battle with John McCain. It's partly all his stupid programs. But it's mostly that people are getting to know him.

Pat Me Down Word began to leak around Washington last week that Rhode Island Congressman and DCCC Chairman Patrick Kennedy had been detained in a Los Angeles airport for an incident involving "physical contact" with a baggage-scanning lady. Kennedy claimed he was guilty only of acting "impatiently," but any news item linking a Kennedy to physical contact raises eyebrows, particularly when it's captured on video. That's why, even though no one had seen the video at press time, Kennedy's chief of staff Tony Marcella was imploring the Congressman's constituents to watch it. Kennedy's behavior, Marcella told the Providence Journal, "may not be the most polite behavior in the world, but it's going to be nothing?repeat, nothing?like the press has been reporting."

But at that point the press had reported next to nothing. What seems most likely is that young Pat was involved in an episode of typically Kennedyesque Do-you-know-who-I-am-bitch?-I'll-get-your-ass-fired behavior, of the sort that's designed for Republican television spots in November. So what was Marcella trying to say? What he meant, I assume, was: "Hey, it ain't like he flogged the broad or nothin'!"