Anti-War Gore

Somebody forgot to upgrade Al Gore’s program; he’s still running Anti-War 3.0, the August 2002 version, when most of the Democrats have moved on to limiting the President’s mandate and then quickly changing the subject. Both Gore and (you guessed it) Jimmy Carter are still spitting out cliches that no serious person could value. Gore does nicely encapsulate the theory of the “only with the UN” crowd, when he “accused Bush of abandoning the goal of a world where nations follow laws. ‘That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the president of the United States,’ he said. ‘If other nations assert the same right, then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear,’ and any nation that perceives itself threatened would feel justified in starting wars, he said.”
Of course, the rule of law is also undermined when people who break the law suffer no consequences, as would happen here with Saddam. In that sense, Gore fits neatly in David Brooks’ box: he’s so caught up with Bush that he has nothing to say about Saddam after having argued in campaign 2000 that he would push for Saddam’s overthrow (hey, wouldn’t that violate the law?) But the failure to enforce international law runs to a deeper failing: the all-too-common Left/liberal view that having laws is the important thing, as opposed to enforcing them. Thus, one can push for more complex and all-consuming campaign finance laws but then complain that there is “no controlling legal authority” when caught violating one of them, and hey, everybody does it! (We won’t even get into sexual harrassment law, but you remember that one too).
There’s a legitimate argument here that some of Bush’s preemption principles would shatter the already tissue-thin fabric of international institutions, but as the President has amply demonstrated, this specific case is one where those institutions are under an even greater threat from inaction than action. Any serious person in the governments of reluctant allies like Germany or Saudi Arabia surely, privately, knows this. Perhaps Al Gore does too. If so, shame on him.
I always thought that Gore was a more serious threat to democracy than Clinton, because Gore at least seemed to be an honest man who adopted lying as a deliberate and cynical strategy, premised upon a contempt for the intelligence and attention spans of the voters, in the belief that it had been proven successful, whereas Clinton may well be so steeped in his own deceptions that he really can’t see that what he’s doing is wrong. Here we have another example: Anti-War Gore is no more convincing than Semi-Hawk Al was during the Cold War, or Last Minute Convert To The War Gore was in 1991. They all smell like carefully calibrated examples of opportunism. Except this time, the stakes of opportunism are unacceptably high.

Senate News

Bob Novak’s Saturday column has some nuggets: The Republicans could gain a critical Senate seat in South Dakota by making the war on Iraq a campaign issue; among the fights on homeland security, “[u]nions are insisting on strict seniority, without regard to language capability, for Customs personnel sent abroad for pre-screening”; highly-regarded Tennessee Senator Dr. Bill Frist is contemplating retirement in 2006.

German Shell Games

People complain about the timing and completeness of corporate disclosures in the U.S., but check out this doozy: Germany’s peacenik Social Democrat prime minister Gerhard Schroeder finishes in essentially a tie with his opponent, each garnering 38.5% of the vote (remember this when some Euro-snob pundit gripes about Bush not having an electoral mandate), and Schroder wins the tiebreaker because another team in his division (the Greens) won more games in the NFC . . . anyway, notice this item buried at the end of UPI’s report:
“Even more challenging than repairing the rift with Washington is the looming crisis with Germany’s partners in the euro, Europe’s new single currency. Germany delayed publishing its budget deficit figures until after the election, fearing it would breach the maximum level allowed under the rules of the eurozone’s Stability Pact. If budget deficits exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product, an offending country faces fines of up to 0.5 percent of GDP. In Germany’s case, that means fines of up to $10 billion.
The German economy is heading back into recession, and the higher spending on paying for more and more unemployed. Combined with lower tax revenues, this spending means the Stability Pact is almost certain to be breached. And even though France is also seeking some relaxation from the pact’s tight rules, other members of the euro currency have said they refuse to change it, fearing a loss of credibility in world currency markets.”

(Emphasis added). In other words — leaving aside the fact that the EU apparently operates under something very similar to Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement (“Ach, General von Schroedergrabber, you spent too much on your bureaucrats, we must fine you for breaching the luxury tax!”) — the German ruling party has been hiding the government’s finances to pull the wool over the world’s currency markets, at least until after the election. Say what you will about American politics, even Gray Davis couldn’t pull off something like this.

Sex, Drugs and Communism

This Reuters story doesn’t quite live up to its headline, “German Ex-Communists Lure Votes with Sex and Drugs.” More like a case of how Communists are still in the false advertising business. But doesn’t it speak volumes about German humor when the Social Democrats’ satirical website is called “www.nichtregierungsfaehig.de?” I mean, I guess in German that’s catchy and memorable . . .

Tobacco War Profiteers

Dave Barry is back to one of his favorite targets, the War on Tobacco:
“[L]et’s review how the War On Tobacco works. The underlying principle, of course, is: Tobacco Is Bad. It kills many people, and it causes many others to smell like ashtrays in a poorly janitored bus station.
So a while ago, politicians from a bunch of states were scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do about the tobacco problem. One option, of course, was to say: ”Hey, if people want to be stupid, it’s none of our business.” But of course that was out of the question. Politicians believe EVERYTHING is their business, which is why — to pick one of many examples — most states have elaborate regulations governing who may, and who may not, give manicures.
Another option was to simply make selling cigarettes illegal, just like other evil activities, such as selling heroin, or giving unlicensed manicures, or operating lotteries (except, of course, for lotteries operated by states). But the politicians immediately saw a major flaw with this approach: It did not provide any way for money to be funneled to politicians.
And so they went with option three, which was to file lawsuits against the tobacco companies. The underlying moral principle of these lawsuits was: “You are knowingly selling a product that kills tens of thousands of our citizens each year. We want a piece of that action!””

Mitt Romney vs. The GOP

Mitt Romney, running for Massachusetts governor, is in a strange position: he’s fighting in his own party primary to get his pick of running mates against an extremely well-financed challenger who has won the GOP nomination for statewide office once before (both Ronmey and Rapaport have run unsuccessful campaigns for the Senate). Here’s one columnist arguing that Romney will be better off if his choice loses.

Further Inquiry May Be Required

A column on Tech Central Station says the pro-life movement’s latest grasp at scientific support, a study purporting to show a link between women having abortions and suffering death from various causes (homicide, suicide) within the following year has too many holes to prove much. The point is well-taken, but two caveats here: (1) like most findings favorable to the pro-life movement, this one was barely reported in the mainstream press, so it didn’t do the kind of damage we see from left-wing junk science, which often results in blaring headlines, new government regulations, and waves of litigation driving substantial companies into bankruptcy; and (2) the author doesn’t show that the study is wrong, just that it’s inconclusive. Further inquiry may be required, which is basically the conclusion of most stories about science anyway (in fact, that could be a good motto for science generally).

LABELS, ANYONE?

CNN describes conservative critics of Bill O’Reilly as “the same ideologues who helped make the Fox News Channel personality one of the most popular figures on cable television.” Would Donahue’s fan be described the same way? And Kausfiles catches the NY Times calling Pete Domenici, practically the paradigm of the Old Bull Republican who’s often at odds with party conservatives, a “hard line conservative.” Kaus shoots back by calling the NYT editors “blindered Upper West Side rube[s].”

Shifting Control

The indispensable Bob Novak reports that Missouri Republicans are plotting some legal hijinks as payback for the shenanigans that got Jean Carhanan into the Senate and John Ashcroft into the Justice Department, and the result could make Trent Lott the majority leader again before Christmas and force a flurry of votes on judicial nominees:
“If Republican Jim Talent defeats appointive Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan Nov. 5 in Missouri, the GOP is determined to seat him immediately — restoring a Republican majority for a post-election “lame duck” session. Present polls show former Rep. Talent has overtaken Carnahan, the widow of the late Gov. Mel Carnahan who posthumously defeated Sen. John Ashcroft in 2000. Secretary of State Matt Blunt (son of House Chief Deputy Whip Roy Blunt) would immediately certify Talent as U.S. senator. It is considered unlikely that Democratic Gov. Bob Holden, who narrowly defeated Talent for the governorship in 2000, would block the certification from reaching Washington. That would produce a bitter Senate confrontation, particularly if Democrats retain Senate control for the regular session beginning in 2003. A lame duck session is probable because Congress will not approve funding for the government before the election.”
Novak’s last item also shows why New York’s splintered multi-party ballots are so malleable as to be susceptible to all sorts of tricks.

WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES

That was the Election-Day headline that sank Senator Bedfellow in the comic strip Bloom County. Will the jury verdit in favor of a convicted drug trafficker who sued Bill Simon’s investment firm — a verdict that’s now been reversed after Gray Davis used it to paint Simon as a crook? Unlike Senator Bedfellow, Simon now has two months to set the record straight, although doing so keeps him on the defensive and perpetuates Davis’ campaign to run from his own record. I’d still like to know more about this case, which, just from press accounts, sounds like a run-of-the-mill second-guessing-an-investment-gone-bad suit that, if anything, highlights the need for tort reform in plaintiff-friendly California.

BASEBALL/ Look Who Came To Visit

The Hall of Fame’s admission standards are really dropping, aren’t they? OK, forget that stuff about moving on.
Speaking of the Clintons, Eugene Volokh and Instapundit have blown the whistle on what really should be a big story: Viacom’s doctoring of the tapes of the September 11 tribute concert last fall to make it appear that my state’s junior Senator was cheered rather than jeered by the families of the cops and firemen.

Ideas, Anyone?

Speaking of TAP’s political content, this analysis of Cynthia McKinney’s loss is typical TAP stuff — lots of innuendo and a reluctant conclusion that maybe things are as they seem after all — but what dismays me is the tendency, in discussions of politics in the African-American community (I don’t know if this is driven by the media, the grass roots, or just the people disaffected enough to talk to the papers) to look solely at who a candidate’s friends are and a few bellwether issues, and not have any kind of debate about ideas and their consequences.

Federalism’s Edge, Part I

FEDERALISM is often thought of — principally by its critics on the Left, but by some fairly zealous conservatives as well — as synonymous with “States’ Rights” as against a powerful federal government. That’s a big part of the picture, of course, but it’s not the whole story. There’s also what I call “Federalism’s Edge” – the right of the states to be free of overweening influence by other state governments that seek to impose their public policies on the rest of the nation. After all, a distant and intrusive setter of national policy is no less obnoxious if it’s set in Montgomery’ Alabama than inside the Beltway. More so, since at least there are SOME mechanisms for controlling Washington.
Federalism’s Edge, as much as States’ Rights, has been one of the hottest issues of the past decade or so. Whatever you think of the merits, can one state cram gay marriage down the throats of the country? Can one state’s Supreme Court decide who gets to be President of the rest of us? Can one or a handful of State Attorneys General, or juries in a few tiny jurisdictions, prescribe codes of conduct for nationwide businesses?
Liberals have long bemoaned what they see as the opposite problem, the “race to the bottom” where states compete to LOWER regulatory burdens, although at least there there’s market forces at work rather than ironclad mandates. This is where Jonathan Chait’s assault on Delaware, after the fashion of Jonah Goldberg’s French-bashing columns, comes in. Personally, from my experience as a business and securities litigator, I think Chait doesn’t know much about Delaware’s court system if he thinks it’s apt to be lax in imposing liability on corporations and their management. But there’s an interesting point here: is it inconsistent with Our Federalism for one state to create conditions for what is effectively a national corporate governance regime? And does it say something that corporations seem to WANT the efficiency and stability provided by such a regime?
PART II of this comment to follow later.

BASEBALL/ Attack Of The Soysage

This priceless item supports OpinionJournal’s James Taranto’s theory that groups like PETA are actually run by Right-Wing double agents obsessed with getting the worst possible press for their causes. To me, it’s just a desperate cry for help. But I can also imagine the bottomless mirth generated for a crowd of your typical brat-and-brew Wisconsin sports fans of watching the “Soysage” get repeatedly pummelled by the, er, meatier sausages like something from the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

IS SILENCE ON RACE GOOD?

WARD CONNERLY’S RACIAL PRIVACY INITIATIVE, which would ban the government from collecting data on race/ethnicity or labelling people by their race/ethnicity, is set (if I have my facts straight) to face the California voters this fall. Is it just me, or does it appear that this piece , by a friend of former Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell, is supportive of the goals of the Racial Privacy Initiative (to wit, getting people to stop identifying themselves and others by color), while this piece by National Review Online culture warrior Stanley Kurtz can be read as an eloquent attack on Connerly’s initiative as disarming conservatives of one of the few weapons they have for exposing discrimination?
UPDATE: The Racial Privacy Initiative won’t be on the ballot until March 2004. Lesson: I don’t understand California politics.

NEWSFLASH! BAD CANDIDATES LOSE!

Howard Fineman discovers the shocking truth: candidates have trouble winning elections based on the family name – if the candidate himself stinks and he’s running in a state that ran Dad out of town on a rail! (Of course, the rule may not matter if it’s a Kennedy in New England). But then again, politics is still full of family connections, from Elizabeth Dole to Dick Armey’s son, just as baseball is full of players using an unfair genetic advantage. Cuomo’s whining speech about presenting “too many issues” essentially blamed the electorate for being too dumb to understand him, but there’s a point there: a successful candidate has to meet Winston Churchill’s famous definition of a fanatic: someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Farmacy

I only just recently picked up on this character assassination piece against a Bush appointee to the Department of Agriculture by Will Saletan on Slate. It sounds like there may be no smoking gun legally, but without hearing the other side, Saletan has a pretty good case that this guy shouldn’t be trusted to combat the endemic corruption at Ag. Of course, as Saletan rightly notes, that endemic corruption not only isn’t illegal, it’s virtually the entire point of the Agriculture Department. Yet another example of how Bush is soft on corporate welfare, big spending, and their friends in Congress (i.e., probably about 90-95% of all Members of both Houses).

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Annoy ‘Em

Debra Saunders has an intriguing suggestion for California Republicans frustrated by their inability to dump Gray Davis: elect a Republican lieutenant governor who can do things like appoint judges whenever Davis leaves the state. Of course, her argument is largely premised upon Davis’ White House ambitions, which you have to figure are temporarily in the trash can (I’m betting he waits until 2008 – even Davis has to know his stock is low now and he’s too late starting for 2004).

Laughing Right

Following up on the thoughts in my Bruce post of yesterday, I ran accross this article on Slate arguing that the Left has grown boring and dour while the Right has all the fun. Of course, the author works from a piece that picks on The Nation – which was never exactly National Lampoon to begin with, given the difficulty of finding Stalinists with a good sense of humor – and compares it to The Weekly Standard, which isn’t even the most entertaining of right-wing screeds, not even close. Jack Shafer notes hypersensitivity as a leading cause of this humor impairment, but the fact is that postmodern, oppression-is-everywhere dogma and sackcloth-and-ashes environmentalism are the real culprits. The Left lives in terror of optimism; heck, the entire liberal establishment rests on the idea that the civil rights movement is proof positive that some things, only the federal government can accomplish – yet that same establishment would die rather than admit that any progress has been made on race relations since 1955, since that would prove that maybe the dark, sinister powerful forces don’t impose their false consciousness on everybody after all.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a different form of dishonesty that the Left didn’t create but commonly uses to its advantage: inauthentic emotional one-upmanship. The incomparable Mark Steyn has the goods on this one in his plea to separate the genuine grief and righteous anger of September 11th from the phony, it’s-so-sad sap that surrounded the death of Princess Di. While I may rail, as I did below, against people who rip Bruce Springsteen for his emotionalism, there’s a world of difference between Bruce’s heartfelt emotion and, say, a croon from some boy band over lyrics some staff composer churned out for them, and it’s the same thing here. We can feel our own pain. Sometimes, pretending to feel someone else’s is just bunk.

NEWT FOR SENATE?

Instapundit linked earlier to this fine Michael Barone analysis of why Cynthia Mckinney lost and how it was different from the race that brought down Bob Barr. The interesting thing was his speculation at the end:
“The only possible bad news here is that McKinney has said she may run for the Senate in 2004. The seat that is up is currently held by Zell Miller, who never really wanted to be a senator anyway (he was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the unexpected death of Republican Paul Coverdell) and who turns 72 in 2004; he is widely expected to retire. Miller would obviously clobber McKinney in a primary, but she could conceivably finish first in a multicandidate primary. She would lose the runoff, of course.”
I suppose she would, but if the Georgia GOP would have one heckuva golden opportunity if she didn’t. Note Barone’s calculation that McKinney, even running against an African-American liberal Democrat, drew just 5% of the white vote in the primary. With those odds, nearly anyone’s a good bet to beat her. Know any ambitious, young, retired Georgia Republicans who might be itching for a new challenge by 2004? And boy, wouldn’t that be an entertaining campaign.

Rapping Against Wellstone

Here’s a bizarre story from the American Prospect about Citizens Opposed to Racism and Discrimination (CORAD), a conservative group in Minnesota that’s running ads against Paul Wellstone and put out a rap CD (!) full of what can only be described as right-wing propaganda in an effort to break the Democrats’ hammerlock on African-American voters in the Twin Cities. TAP’s problem is that it can’t seem to decide whether or not CORAD is actually accomplishing enough to be newsworthy.

Right To Choose At Stake In Presidential Election

From an email I sent to friends on November 20, 2000:
The Democratic Party now says all pregnant chads must be delivered; all chad pregnancies must be carried to term. I say every chad must be a wanted chad. If a voter has exercised his or her right to control when and whether to deliver the chad, the states should have no authority to force them to be delivered. It is fundamental to the scheme of ordered liberty that the right to decisions made in the privacy of the voting booth stay there. Liberty finds no refuge in a recount of doubt.

LBJ! LBJ! LBJ!

An email I sent in 2000, reformatted for the blog archives. Note the “no great external threat” language from President Clinton.
The Democrats keep telling us that Republicans are the old guard, looking backward, while they are looking forward. But who’s looking backward for inspiration? Re-read this, near the very end of the President’s speech:

CLINTON: “In February, the American people achieved the longest economic expansion in our history. When that happened, I asked our folks at the White House when the previous longest economic expansion was. You know when it was? It was from 1961 through 1969.
Now, I want the young people especially to listen to this. I remember this well. I graduated from high school in 1964. Our country was still very sad because of President Kennedy’s death, but full of hope under the leadership of President Johnson. And I assumed then, like most Americans, that our economy was absolutely on automatic; that nothing could derail it.
I also believed then that our civil rights problems would all be solved in Congress and the courts. And in 1964, when we were enjoying the longest economic expansion in history, we never dreamed that Vietnam would so divide and wound America.
So we took it for granted.
And then, before we knew it, there were riots in the streets, even here. The leaders that I adored as a young man, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, were killed. Lyndon Johnson — a president from my part of the country I admired so much for all he did for civil rights, for the elderly and the poor — said he would not run again because our nation was so divided.
And then we had an election in 1968 that took America on a far different and more divisive course. And you know, within months, after that election, the last longest economic expansion in history was itself history.
Why am I telling you this tonight? Not to take you down, but to keep you looking up. I have waited, not as president, but as your fellow citizen, for over 30 years to see my country once again in the position to build the future of our dreams for our children.
We are — we are a great and good people. And we have an even better chance this time than we did then, with no great internal crisis and no great external threat. Still, I have lived long enough to know that opportunities must be seized or they will be lost.”


Is it just me, or is this basically a way of telling the Democratic convention that after lo these many years in retreat and hiding, if we can elect Al Gore the coast will be clear for Great Society Big Government liberalism to come out in the open once again?

Gore For Us

You know, I tend to vote primarily on ideology and party lines. But a lot of voters out there are not so inclined, and tend to ask the question, what are you going to do for me? Politicians spend a lot of time honing their message for particular interest groups, tailoring their strategy for winning them over.
What hit me the other day (maybe this is a sign of too much time in the car) was this: Al Gore does not even want my vote. Think about it broadly: white male voters between the ages of 21 and 60 who work in white-collar private-sector jobs and/or earn at least $40,000 or $50,000 per year (or earn susbstantial taxable capital gains) make up, I suspect, a decent-sized chunk of the electorate. There must be at least as many of us as there are so-called “soccer moms,” or unionized blue-collar workers, and the group probably compares somewhat favorably in size to black voters, or college students who vote, or even to elderly voters who take prescription medication. Or maybe I have my numbers wrong, but there must be enough to at least make a dent in a close election.
But what is Al Gore offering us? All his tax breaks, his “Social Security plus” plan, virtually all his economic incentives cap out somewhere around $50,000 per year. He wants to pour huge dollars into schools, but how does that help people like me who want their children raised in schools that are permitted to teach faith and moral virtues? And not only is he neither reaching into the goodie bag for us nor offering to lighten the load of government, but he doesn’t talk to us, doesn’t speak our language, doesn’t even have any apparent strategy to win our votes. When Gore talks about economic growth, he puts on the green eyeshade and talks about balancing the budget, about deficits and debts and surpluses and government “investment.” He always zeroes in on government, never talks about lifting regulatory or tax burdens, about the virtues of private investment and private business, about getting out of the way. When Gore talks about individuals, when does he ever mention people like us?
(As a practical matter, Gore isn’t offering much to nonwhite male voters in these categories either, but at least he claims to feel their pain).
Bush, of course, does — he wants to cut my taxes, he wants to help me save for retirement, and he regularly addresses issues of concern to middle- and upper-income voters, the people who pay most of the taxes and work to pay the bills. And when you look at the polls, that’s why white male voters as a whole — including the blue-collar voters that Gore is at least trying to win over — are flocking to Bush at something like a 2-to-1 margin. How on earth can you overcome a gap like that and be president? How can a candidate win public office by winning only a third of the very demographic group of which he himself (and most of his publicly mentioned likely running mates) are members? And why wouldn’t you even try?
Well, of course, Bush had my vote anyway; obviously I believe that Bush’s plans are better for the public weal as a whole than Gore’s, and while I would like a tax cut I don’t necessarily need one. I tend to focus more on what Bush can do systemically for issues like education and Social Security and Medicare. But when you look at this on a purely selfish level, it’s hard to see why anyone in our position would give their vote to Gore. Hey, he isn’t even asking.
This is an email I sent to friends on August 1, 2000.

McCain For President

This is an email I wrote to some friends on February 14, 2000. Some of it now looks embarrassing in retrospect – particularly how little I was thinking about foreign policy and judicial nominees at the time, and the fact that I failed to foresee McCain’s veer to the left. Other predictions, particularly with regard to the Democrats’ behavior after 2000 and the guilt-by-association problem with Bush’s financial supporters, hold up fairly well.
Here is why, as a conservative Republican, I support McCain for president (in no particular order; I won’t bother discussing the broader policy questions of why I would vote for McCain over Gore, since I would not expect to presuade anyone on that kind of score). I address two topics: why McCain has a better chance of beating Gore in the fall, and why he is better suited to the presidency than Bush.

Continue reading McCain For President

New Hempshire . . .

. . . as Paul Tsongas used to call it, actually meant something this year. I’m actually thinking of donating a little money to McCain — I’m still not sure who to vote for (I haven’t heard enough from him on the three most important domestic issues, education reform, Social Security reform and selection of federal judges) but I’d hate to see his campaign peter out for lack of funds (though it would be ironic). A fight to somewhere close to the finish (which can only happen if there’s a split decision on March 7) would, I think, be good for the party, particularly since Bush (if he wins) has enough cash on hand to keep the machine rolling (unlike Dole in 1996, who was forced into a quiet period after the primaries while Clinton and his media allies filleted him on tobacco and abortion). The bad primary fights are the ones you get when one candidate has no chance, like Forbes or Buchanan. Bradley may be like that, hammering Gore on integrity and ethics rather than engaging an accross-the-board issues debate. But Bush and McCain both need to keep one eye on November, and both fancy themselves civil-minded moderates, so there’s only so bad it will get.
I don’t think Bush will actually move to the right on any issues, as the pundits warn — he’ll just have to learn better how to sell the conservative agenda. If he can’t do that he can’t win anyway. He actually is a real conservative already — “compassionate conservative” is BS, I’ve always thought he should call it “smiley face conservative,” because it’s about explaining the existing agenda’s virtues (i.e., why conservative policies are a better deal for the middle class and the poor) through a nonthreatening candidate, rather than actually changing policy (which is fine with me).
Gore-Bradley, by contrast, is still highly unlikely to be a real race, but it could be a long ugly fight like Dole-Forbes in 1996 and Clinton-Brown in 1992. Bradley has a lot of cash and he’s showing signs of being bitter enough at the direction of his party to stay and fight long after Gore has effectively clinched. Having Gore constantly taunting him for being a quitter can’t help the case of people who want him to bail out early for the sake of party unity. Gore has already moved left but I don’t think he’ll really move any further — but he could take some punishment by the unprecedented spectacle of a fellow Democrat breaking the code of silence on the ethics of Clintonism.
The real message of New Hampshire, as I see it, is that the strong showing of McCain and Gore and the late revival by Bradley proves one thing: the voters are NOT tired of negative campaigning or of strongly and specifically worded appeals to integrity and combat. Bush’s just-the-agenda, forget-the-last-8-years strategy captured the popular imagination in the summer of 1999 because people were sick to death of arguing about impeachment, but a year later the voters are looking for someone to explain how we reached that nadir in the first place and how to avoid a repeat, not of the acrimony, but of the scandal itself. The Clintonites argued that the only really bad thing was GOP insistence on “divisiveness,” on casting judgment (this is the type of logic that says high crime statistics mean cops are arresting too many people). Contrary to what they would have you believe, I think that once people moved past the don’t-rock-the-boat stage of opposing impeachment during a market boom they began to recognize that this was not a morally neutral argument — that there is some virtue in alarming people when their government has grown corrupt and its leaders too accustomed to the habits of deceit. To voters concerned about such issues, Bush’s conscientious objector status on the ethical issues comes accross as unduly timid. McCain roared ahead in the polls late in large part, I think, because he promised GOP conservatives that he would go after Al Gore on Gore’s dubious honesty (don’t forget that McCain voted to remove the president from office), while Bush increasingly looked vulnerable to the kind of one-sided smear campaigning that is being used against Bradley. Bringing out dad — who never did learn to fight back against Bill Clinton — only underlined that.
This is an email I sent to friends on February 2, 2000.

Impeachment and Consequences

This is an email I sent to friends on December 15, 1998
Be it Resolved: If (Big If) the President is impeached and removed from office, Republicans will suffer no adverse political consequences (other than installing a left-wing zealot in the White House in place of the spineless spouse of a left-wing zealot). Why, you ask? Here’s why. Just think — what, literally, is Bill Clinton’s theme song? “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow . . . yesterday’s gone.” Clinton has survived his many scandals and at least as many flip-flops and broken promises by accusing his opponents of living in the past, of dwelling on old grudges rather than looking to the Bridge To The Twenty-First Century, of being the party of scandal rather than the Man From Hope. What he said yesterday is old news, and it’s nothing but mudslinging to compare it to what he is saying today. Live for the moment! Feel your pain! Ideas have a past and a future, but feelings are fleeting, and Bill Clinton operates strictly on feelings. Clinton is truly Orwellian in his commitment to erasing the inconvenient past, always remaining the ahistorical man. In many ways the American public has expressed an unwillingness to face impeachment and removal because the people are driven by fear of the future — concern that the economy is doing just fine and who wants to upset the applecart? And Clinton has few real friends in politics, only people who ally with him out of expediency, as he does with them (think how he abandons allies in trouble so often, leaving them to their own devices. Where was he, anyway, for Mike Espy? Henry Cisneros, who’s being prosecuted for lies about an extramarital affair? Not to mention his personal associates. He was certainly ready to hang Lewinsky out to dry before she opened her laundry basket). Most of his supposedly loyal aids have left the White House; he has not inspired a committed core of true believers because, after all, what would they then believe in? Clinton’s power and popularity thus derive entirely from three things: his grip on power, fear of change, and his appeals to the emotions of the moment. If he leaves office, all these will be gone. Like the leaders of totalitarian mass movements, once he loses both power and the bully pulpit he needs to keep rewriting history in his favor, his following will evaporate, leaving no trace. Why fear impeachment and removal when they are ancient history? What Democratic congressional candidate will want to run ads about Monica Lewinsky two years from now? Who will want to hear it? People will care about whether they want Bush or Gore in the White House, not whether they liked that Clinton fella when he was in office. He’s old news.

Censure

From an email I wrote in November 1998, prior to Bill Clinton being impeached by the House of Representatives.
While I continue to be appalled — as a matter of principle — by the prospect of settling for a ‘censure’ of the President (because it is clearly (1) an insufficient remedy (2) an overstepping of Congress’ constitutional authority and (3) an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder), politics is nothing if not the art of the possible, so it is worth thinking about the many things that the House, the Senate (to have any effect, such a bill must be passed by both houses and signed by The Big Jerk), and possibly the Independent Counsel (if such a resolution is to be truly global) could demand:
1. The first nonnegotiable demand in any negotiated resolution of the impeachment proceedings must be a complete acceptance of responsibility and vindication of the rule of law by the Prez. He must not only admit to lying under oath and to — at minimum — failing to dissuade others from lying under oath in ways that were forseeable to him and worked to his benefit, but he must also concede that it was entirely legal and proper for the independent counsel to investigate him and entirely unjustified for the executive branch to carry on a concerted campaign to delay and frustrate the investigation and to smear duly authorized prosecutors who were exercising the executive power of the United States. He doesn’t have to publicly absolve the GOP — this ain’t beanbag, after all — but if he keeps blaming Starr there can be no peace and no true remorse.
2. He could be required to repay the costs of the 7-month investigation.
3. He could be barred from holding office.
4. He could agree to turn in his license to practice law.
5. It had been suggested that he could agree to remove the worst of his cronies from office, but many such as Morris and Carville are no longer formally employed anyway. But it would have to be people related to the Lewinsky thing — asking for Janet Reno’s head (or Bill Lann Lee’s, for example) would likely be seen as overreaching.
6. He could plead guilty in federal court (say, a friendly forum such as Arkansas so the judge would buy the deal) with a recommendation of no jail time and fines & conditions in the amounts specified in the resolution.
7. OR, he could be left open to future prosecution.
8. He could be forced to testify before the Grand Jury, waive all privilieges, & produce documents (without immunity) as to all other subjects under investigation, including campaign finance.
9. He could be forced to agree explicitly not to pardon Susan McDougal or Webb Hubbell (though this too is probably unconstitutional).
10. Or, of course, in fine Washington tradition a backroom deal could be worked out relating to some issue — Social Security reform, Supreme Court nominations, etc. — but he would likely fail to abide by it.
Just some thoughts, to suggest that the Congressional Republicans may have more options than they let on.

Ken Starr and the Great White Whale

An email I sent in 1998, reformatted and slightly edited for publication.
If Bruce Lindsey had an honorable purpose (Ollie North, ahem), he might choose to run on his sword and claim full responsibility to protect the President. Nixon’s people didn’t do that because they didn’t have a just cause, and neither do Clinton’s. Now the President’s only strategy is apparently to flee the country (which may be good for us anyway) until it’s too late to impact the elections; sources say he won’t testify until September because he will be traveling. The devil is in the details — the more witnesses there are, the harder it is for them to all tell the same lies down to the same details.
Starr, relative to the average prosecutor in a white collar criminal case, is at a huge strategic disadvantage because the constant leaks cripple his ability to keep witnesses in the dark about the immunity/cooperating status of witnesses, the order of testimony, and the substance of grand jury testimony. The leaks have also benefitted Clinton by allowing the appearance of a steady drip of unremarkable revelations; imagine if we knew nothing of the Lewinsky thing and it all came out the day after Labor Day in a report to Congress. I don’t doubt that some of the leaks come from low-ranking people in Starr’s office currying favor with reporters, but there’s no question that the White House has tremendous control over the flow of information here.
Starr can question Clinton anywhere he wants, and hell, he can let his lawyers be there too, but he better not settle for anything less than verbal questions, no written notice, and no limits on the scope of his inquiry.