Poll-Axed Dems; Goody-Goodies and Sex Maniacs

Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt face the same crapshoot all congressional leaders do when a president of the other party comes to power. Congressmen who think the economy's going to improve call for bipartisanship, in order to share credit with the president. Congressmen who think the economy's in trouble get confrontational, to make sure the president alone gets left holding the bag. But they're always flying blind: Republicans were so sure Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hikes were going to destroy the economy that they didn't give his budget a single vote in either house of Congress. Only now are they rebuilding their fiscal credibility.

Daschle and Gephardt warn that George W. Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut will throw the economy "back in the ditch." That means they think it's going into the ditch no matter what the President does. They may be right, but thus far, the Democrats' instincts on taxes look terrible. "It looked," said a political analyst friend who watched the Daschle-Gephardt performance, "like one of those movies where the politicians get taken over by aliens from another planet." Daschle tried to liken Bush's program to Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, a bad move, since (a) Dubya's father presents an even fatter target, and (b) to reopen a discussion of the 1980s deficits is to remind the public of what profligates the Democrats were before Clinton disciplined them, and show every sign of becoming again, now that his discipline is gone. Are the Democrats so bereft of talking points that he would grasp at that straw? Or is Daschle so deluded by wishful thinking that he forgets the public loved Reagan's 1981 tax cuts?

They certainly love George Bush's. CNN's first poll after the speech showed 79 percent favoring the tax cut, and 83 percent saying that it should be a high priority for the administration. CBS' poll had 88 percent approving of Bush's proposals, with the tax cut the single most popular item among them. And it showed that two-thirds of the public believe congressional Democrats don't want Bush's programs. The Wall Street Journal, which is seldom a mixed bag?it's either 90 percent right or 90 percent wrong?seems to be entering one of those periods when it's 90 percent right. "The opponents of Mr. Bush's tax cut," the Journal wrote the day after his speech, "couldn't care less about 'fiscal discipline' or 'paying down the debt.' Their real agenda is to keep the federal tax overpayment all to themselves, the better to revive the era of big government."

Make that 100 percent right. Democrats claim they support a big tax cut on principle; they just think Dubya's is poorly targeted in practice. The sullen, stone-faced, applauseless silence with which the Dems greeted every single tax-reducing proposal that Bush ticked off (starting with, "The people of America have been overcharged, and on their behalf, I'm here to ask for a refund") was evidence that they don't want any tax cuts at all. Only Robert Byrd of West Virginia broke from the official Democratic fiction that the party is open to giving a single, freakin' cent of taxpayers' money back, calling Bush's budget "sheer madness." If they have a compromise tax-cut plan of their own, it's only because pollsters have dragged them into it kicking and screaming. You could hear a kind of primal anguish in the loud, low, rolling involuntary moan that came from the Democratic side after President Bush said, "Unrestrained government spending is a dangerous road to deficits..." What they were saying is: No fair taking our deficit talking point!

As with most State of the Unions, the boob-bait in it?the stuff aimed at Sentimental Ignoramuses in the Hinterland?appealed less to the SIHs than to the press, who took their own cringing embarrassment for evidence that the SIHs (the media's diametrical opposites, after all) must have lapped it up. Such a moment was the President's tribute to popular 14-term Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Joe Moakley, who has a fairly advanced case of leukemia. "I can think of no more appropriate tribute to Joe," Bush said, "than to have the Congress finish the job of doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health..."

One almost expected Bush to finish the sentence with, "...before Joe kicks it."

Goody-Goodies And Sex Maniacs

The most mystifying interpretation of the night was that of Tom Brokaw, who apologized for Bush's occasional clumsiness by saying: "You are not going to get Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan soaring oratory out of this guy." That's like describing a sports franchise as a New York Yankees-Vancouver Canucks type of dynasty, or a general as a George Patton-Pee-Wee Herman type of military leader. Reagan was a good orator. Clinton?while entertaining to watch, largely because he generally had to use his major speeches to dig himself out of scrapes, and masterful at assembling programs to appeal to finely targeted audiences?was well below the presidential average. "Soaring" is exactly what he was not.

I'd make the criticism a bit more general. In retrospect, the truly scandalous thing about President Clinton is that he had the most pedestrian mind of anyone to occupy the White House in our lifetime. If I'm right about this (and I do mean it in earnest), Clinton's great personal "liability"?the fact that he is a sex maniac?may have been what saved him electorally. It blinded us to the fact that he was basically a type we all know and disliked from high school: the blindly ambitious, apple-polishing goody-goody. No, we thought he belonged to a different type, one that most people first meet in college: the young guy who discovers sex and allows it to drag off-center all the human relationships he'll have for the rest of his life.

To view Clinton's large sexual appetite as evidence of a "zest for life" (and therefore proof against the goody-goody charge, which carries a Nixonish whiff) is a rather bizarre mass delusion, given that that appetite is large, even unruly, in most people most of the time. You could even say that the goody-goody and the lecher aren't really two different types but the same type at different stages. The goody-goody, lacking the charisma to make a creative contribution to a classroom, protects his ambition through a strategic, punctilious and excessive submission to the rules. The sex maniac, lacking the charisma to make sex part of the warp and woof of his life, runs his love life according to a strategic, punctilious and excessive submission to his urges. Both are toadies and, therefore, bores.

We were given our first hint of the pettiness of the Clinton mind in the lugubrious, charmless, ass-covering New York Times op-ed he wrote defending his pardon of Marc Rich. But we had to wait until last week's Variety-sponsored speech on politics and the media to see his actuary's soul, in all its lack of complexity and absence of splendor. Clinton complained to the assembled bigwigs that papers and television cover too much scandal and not enough policy. "I gave speeches while president on topics like climate change until I was blue in the face," Clinton complained, "but they were not deemed newsworthy by you." Then the ex-prez mustered the data. Having let some pitiable secretary rip on Nexis, he announced that there had been 24,520 stories in the press about "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and only 8335 pieces on Clinton's "Global Debt Relief Initiative." Now, why would that be? Maybe it's because the global debt relief initiative is largely a public-relations maneuver, while Regis Philbin offers a window into the mass psychology of the world's richest, most influential and most heavily armed nation. Since Americans still enjoy, in theory, a right not to be bored, what's truly shocking is that the "Millionaire"-to-debt-relief story ratio is only 3-to-1. In any country where journalists weren't browbeaten by politicians and policy intellectuals into doing their bidding, the ratio would be more like 30-to-1.

Clinton continued: There have been 12,476 stories about Survivor since it came on the air, and only 2567 about the spread of AIDS in Russia. That's 5-to-1, a higher ratio, but still out of whack; 100-to-1 would be about appropriate. The spread of AIDS in Russia has a few local peculiarities, but otherwise it is the same grim story we've seen in every other country on the planet. Survivor, meanwhile, is a good venue for examining a couple of big trends: (a) the decline of the Western imagination and (b) the extent to which, as we start the 21st century, social Darwinism is becoming less and less a paranoid's description of our society and more and more an eagerly embraced ideology, at least in certain tv-watching circles.

Clinton's is a Zhdanovite attitude. He's disturbed that there might be a corner of citizens' lives that is untouched by politics. He is disappointed by the (incomplete) degree to which journalists serve as politicians' mouthpieces. "Journalism," Clinton says, "can work to inform Americans and give them the tools necessary to change policy." Yeah, it can. It can also share hilarious stories about neighbors' foibles, alert them to where they can find bread and orange juice cheapest, recommend them a worthwhile novel or tell them who won the basketball game last night. The problem with journalism is that it caters to people with interests beyond getting laid and prevailing on their high school history teacher to jack up their grade from a B+ to an A-.