Panic Among the Democrats: Looking for at Least One Scalp
I'm no fan of Lott's, and believe he should've been toppled after the '98 midterm elections, but he was wise to let Democrats share almost equally in the division of U.S. Senate power.
The GOP has to face reality. Sure, Dick Cheney can break a tie, but the body is now 50-50. What's more, it's possible the Democrats will regain control even before the 2002 elections. Strom Thurmond, who's 98, can't live forever, and when his day is done, the new South Carolina senator will be appointed by that state's Democratic governor. Lott's appeasement?vigorously protested by colleagues like Phil Gramm, a Lone Star State hero?has nothing to do with "bipartisanship," a word that ought to be banned along with "disenfranchisement." It's just common sense. There are so many upcoming battles between the two parties that wasting time on this power-sharing issue doesn't make sense.
As Newsweek's Evan Thomas might say, the "wing-nuts" are out in force. For example, Mike Tomasky, a political columnist for New York, is generally an evenhanded liberal, and not given to the hyperbole of his yachting-populist contemporaries at The Nation. But his Jan. 15 piece was so uncharacteristically loony that one has to assume he had a ghostwriter, maybe Paul Begala or an old hippie at Mother Jones.
Tomasky has been brainwashed by the Jesse Jackson-Maxine Waters fringe faction of the Democratic Party and is still chewing his cud over the Florida vote. Tomasky claims that once the media-directed recounts of that state's ballots?an impartial verdict, to be sure?are completed, it'll be proven that Gore actually won the state, probably by some 20,000 votes.
He adds, for flavor: "Among other things, the undercounts in Miami-Dade have yet to be counted, the same votes that county commissioners were brownshirted into not counting over the Thanksgiving holiday, the same votes that that Boss Tweed operation formerly known as the Supreme Court said didn't matter. It will be too late to do anything, but at least we'll know."
I've got the feeling that Santa didn't fill Mike's stocking to the brim this year.
Tomasky figures Bush's tax cut proposal, after the skirmishes over his Cabinet selections, will be his first crisis. But in writing that "the trick for Democrats will be in keeping them down to around, say $600 billion over ten years, instead of Bush's $1.6 trillion," the reporter is already behind the curve. Not only have leading Democrats, such as Dick Gephardt and John Kerry, indicated that the acceptable number will be higher, but there's also a growing consensus that the cuts will be accelerated?perhaps retroactive to Jan. 1?so that they'll have as quick an effect as possible on the sinking economy.
After the requisite swipe at Bush?he's "not worth hating" because he's "an accident"?Tomasky goes full throttle as a speechwriter for the Democratic Party. Get a load of this: "The opposition's attitude should instead be one of optimism... The good guys won, even though the other guys swiped the prize. The right lost. The Scriptural blowhards have had their day... In other words: The real moral majority voted for Gore. The levers of power may belong to the other side, but the mandate is ours [italics mine]. Everyone, from members of Congress to street agitators, should proceed from that assumption. This opposition will be fun."
2. A Partial-Birth Nomination? John Ashcroft, given a stable political climate, would take a few lickings from Democrats in confirmation hearings and then be ratified by an overwhelming vote. But the Jackson-Mfume-NARAL-Sierra Club choir won't allow that; their ability to bait normally sensible men like Joe Biden and Daschle is a sad display of cowardice on the latter's part. It's increasingly likely that one of Bush's Cabinet picks will become a sacrificial lamb to the memory of Florida. My bet right now is that it'll be Linda Chavez, which would be an unconscionable travesty.
Ashcroft's credentials are impeccable. He's served as attorney general, governor and U.S. senator for Missouri; if he were the racist that detractors claim he is, then that Midwestern state must be the home of more bigots than Alabama in the 1950s. It's true that he's a hard-right Christian who's opposed to abortion and affirmative action, but that shouldn't have any bearing on his qualifications to serve. His charge will be to enforce the law: if his moral beliefs interfere with that mandate, Bush will be obliged to fire him.
Besides, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first secretary of labor, is an honorary pinko, and he didn't have any trouble sneaking by the Republicans. And when you consider the tenure of Janet Reno, the worst attorney general of this century?yes, including John Mitchell?Ashcroft's confirmation would be a restoration of integrity and dignity to the office.
Ashcroft's religious piety is a little too rich for my blood, and I'm not sure he'd be a lot of fun to have dinner with. I definitely don't adhere to his strict social values. For example, I'm in favor of legalized prostitution and gambling, decriminalization of drugs, and first- and second-trimester abortions. Straight Arrow John would surely wince at that. But there's not a scintilla of evidence that he wouldn't uphold the laws of the land.
Consider this: Forty years ago, Bobby Kennedy, then 35, was approved as his brother's attorney general. He attracted just one nay vote, that of Sen. Gordon Allott of Colorado, despite his paucity of legal experience, his close association with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the obvious charges of nepotism. (Frankly, despite Kennedy's complex record in that Cabinet position, I think it was smart for JFK to yield to his father's insistence on Bobby's selection. No matter what you hold against the Kennedys, the bond between the siblings made RFK indispensable to the young, distracted and untested president.)
Another charge against Ashcroft is that he once gave an interview to Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised Confederates such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Southern Partisan is a wacko journal, much like The Nation, but it's not as if Ashcroft is an editor there.
Here's another question for pious journalists to ponder: Suppose Sen. John McCain, a pro-lifer, were nominated as attorney general? Does anyone believe there would be a single vote against him? Yet back in the South Carolina primary early last year, McCain engaged in some ugly campaign tactics?which have been erased from the record by now?that, but for his sainthood, might lead the same people who are criticizing Ashcroft to express misgivings about him.
I quote from Jacob Weisberg, a onetime McCain apostle, in his Slate dispatch from Feb. 26, 2000: "McCain displays a similarly egregious double standard when it comes to his contention that the Bush campaign courted bigots in South Carolina. All the time he was blasting Bush for campaigning at Bob Jones, McCain himself was paying $20,000 a month to South Carolina political consultant Richard Quinn, a neo-Confederate revanchist who is one of the leaders of the state's pro-flag faction. Quinn is editor in chief of Southern Partisan, a magazine that publishes apologias for slavery and sells paraphernalia celebrating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln...
"When asked about this background on Meet the Press the day after the South Carolina primary, McCain didn't distance himself from Quinn. Instead, he professed ignorance about Quinn's writings, just as Bush did about Bob Jones' policies, and argued, as Bush also did about Bob Jones, that Ronald Reagan had done the same thing he had. But where Bush criticized Bob Jones in stringent terms after the fact, McCain continues to describe Quinn as 'a man of integrity' who isn't responsible for what appears in his own magazine. Though McCain's Richard Quinn connection is arguably worse than Bush's Bob Jones faux pas, it never turned into a big deal for one simple reason: The press let McCain get away with it, even as it held Bush's feet to the fire on Bob Jones."
Then there's the lightning rod of Ronnie White, the black Missouri judge whose nomination for a federal post was torpedoed by Ashcroft. Despite the fact that Ashcroft, as a senator, voted to confirm 23 out of 26 black Clinton candidates to the federal courts, he's still unfairly tarred as a racist by Democratic enemies. White's dissent over the death penalty for a heinous cop-killer?he was the only one of seven Missouri Supreme Court judges who dissented?was the prime reason Ashcroft led the charge against him. In a Jan. 3 article for MSNBC's website, John Fund noted that, as Missouri's governor, Ashcroft appointed the first black woman to the state court of appeals, and signed into law the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. The racism label simply has no legs.
But that's not good enough for Jim Dwyer, an ostensibly local columnist for the Daily News. Citing Ashcroft's minimal Southern Partisan connection, as well as the Senator's impolitic acceptance of an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, Dwyer zeroes in on White.
He writes on Jan. 7: "The slimy defeat of Ronnie White is the defining moment of John Ashcroft's public life... With all this history, John Ashcroft couldn't beat a dead man, and didn't." Talk about cheap shots. The Missouri Senator was heading for reelection?Bush won the state?when his opponent, Gov. Mel Carnahan, was tragically killed in a plane crash. Democrats pressed his grieving widow into service, just days after she buried her husband and oldest son (who also perished in the accident), and Carnahan won by some 50,000 votes. Ashcroft immediately conceded?unlike Al Gore?even though he could've made an issue of the result, since the deceased Carnahan was no longer a resident of the state.
The Washington Post's Richard Cohen is typical of the Beltway pundits who refuse to acknowledge Bush's right to form his own government. On Jan. 2, Cohen wrote: "[Ashcroft] is, in short, the sort of nominee you might expect from a president who had won a mandate. This president did not even win the election. Bush seems to have forgotten that... Ever since Election Day, Bush has proceeded as if he were president by divine right. Ashcroft is evidence of that delusion. He is the choice of a man who does not yet know his own limitations, who sees a single vote in the Supreme Court as a landslide, who cannot or will not appreciate that he must earn his mandate after he takes his oath of office, not before."
In 1992, Clinton didn't receive a mandate either. In fact, he won 43 percent of the vote in a three-man race. Yet he wasn't ridiculed, despite a very checkered ethical past, as Bush has been by the Georgetown party set. And the men and women Clinton chose for his administration?mostly pygmies who wouldn't outshine their boss?didn't have nearly the breadth of experience or the real, not token, diversity of Bush's team. Even had Bush won a decisive victory?perhaps by the same margin by which his father defeated Michael Dukakis in '88?the liberal media and flimflammers like Jackson would be squealing just as loudly about his Cabinet selections.
The New York Times' William Safire, although sometimes given to excessive conspiracy theories, wrote most clearly about the Ashcroft witch hunt in his Jan. 8 column. Just the first paragraph says it all: "No partisans are more eager to derail the Bush nomination of John Ashcroft than high officials of the Clinton Justice Department. They much prefer someone who will not flip over the flat rock of the blocked prosecution of heavy Clinton contributors."
3. The Smear Commences. Secretary of labor nominee Linda Chavez is in a heap of trouble heading into her own confirmation hearings. A target from the beginning for her conservative bona fides?against quotas, dubious about hiking the minimum wage?Chavez is now in the midst of an unfolding story that concerns her sheltering an illegal immigrant from Guatemala for several months in 1991. Democrats immediately raised the Zoe Baird "Nannygate" marker, which sunk Clinton's first choice for attorney general in '93 when it was revealed that Baird, who employed an illegal alien as a babysitter, didn't pay the mandatory Social Security taxes.
At press time, it's unclear what Chavez's relationship with Marta Mercado was: Tucker Eskew, a Bush spokesman, as well as Mercado, claim that she simply did occasional odd chores for Chavez, and sometimes was given money for food. Concurrently, Chavez employed housekeepers, for which she paid the requisite taxes. Teddy Kennedy was "troubled" by the revelation; Jesse Jackson called Mercado's relationship with Chavez "indentured servitude."
Who knows. John Fund writes in Monday's Wall Street Journal: "If Ms. Chavez's account checks out, her involvement with the Guatemalan woman looks far more like a personal act of charity than an exploitative situation like the one Mr. Jackson describes."
I'd say the brewing catfight is an apt metaphor for how stupid Washington politics have become.
But you can wager that John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, has a new spring in his step this week. On Jan. 6, Sweeney told The New York Times in a phone interview: "[Chavez] has spent the past 20 years opposing just about every important program, from the minimum wage to affirmative action to so many things important to working families. It is very difficult to think of working with someone who is opposed to some of our basic labor laws, yet says she's going to enforce those laws. She's just not the right person to be secretary of labor."
On the other hand, I'm not sure Sweeney is the ideal leader of the AFL-CIO. Despite the lack of union leaders' support, Bush won 37 percent of the union worker vote. In addition, he defeated Gore by 13 points among white voters with incomes under $75,000, as well as non-college-educated white voters by 17 points. Conversely, the Vice President, who campaigned as a populist, fared far better than expected with affluent voters.
Chavez is Sweeney's worst sort of I-Can't-Believe-I-Ate-the-Whole-Thing heartburn.
I'm told that Bush, barring clear evidence of illegality on Chavez's part, will fight till the end for his nominee, despite the knee-scrapes along the way. As well he should. What better way to prove his loyalty, toughness and determination, while at the same time making his Senate adversaries look small and stupid?
4. Bernie's Gone. Is Wolf Blitzer next? It's no shock that cable political shows are tanking in the ratings now that the election is over, so perhaps it's only a few of us who've noticed how much trouble CNN appears to be encountering. Not only is the station's management in disarray, flailing at assembling a compelling roster of programs, but since the beginning of the year, CNN's paid advertising, at least at night, is almost nonexistent. Watching Capital Gang last Saturday night at 7, you saw that the frequent commercials were almost exclusively in-house promotions; it was an hourlong edition (rebroadcast at 10:30 p.m.), and viewers repeatedly saw the picture of that poor kid who was allegedly killed by NAMBLA members. Jeez, there wasn't even the ubiquitous Gevalia Kaffe spot that runs almost nonstop on every other channel.
Now that Mary Matalin is leaving CNN's Crossfire to flack for Dick Cheney (Tucker Carlson is her natural replacement), I've got a good-luck suggestion to the sales reps for the network. Pink-slip Bill Press and replace him with the repugnant but eloquent Christopher Hitchens. A Carlson-Hitchens matchup is probably too smart an idea for the morons who run CNN, but it'd be a ratings smash.
Michael Wolff, the liberal who writes an often-smart media column for New York, devoted his space in the Jan. 15 issue to a puff piece on Carlson. Never mind that he's about a year late in recognizing the Weekly Standard staff writer's tv-star potential? Wolff couldn't resist taking a gratuitous cheap shot at Fox News.
(Fox's nightly news hour with anchor Brit Hume is easily tops in the biz, although the station should ditch its phony "We Report, You Decide" slogan. And don't simply take my word for it. In last week's Village Voice, Nat Hentoff praised Fox's Carl Cameron and Jim Angle as "the two most fair, incisive, and informed investigative reporters on the Washington scene... [T]hey equal the standard that broadcast journalists Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly used to set for CBS News.")
Wolff obviously disagrees, writing: "Fox, with its wall-to-wall conservative personalities, has pioneered a cheap formula to capture a solid segment of the news audience, whereas CNN is stuck with an expensive formula?i.e., news-gathering and reporting?for trying to hold an eroding segment." Righto, Mr. Wolff: CNN's John King, in Bill Clinton's back pocket for several years, is just one fine example of that bare-knuckled reporting.
5. MUGGER's the Real Slim Shady. My oldest son, who's eight, went to a karaoke party last Sunday and pestered me for a week beforehand about singing an Eminem song. Nothing doing, I replied, and suggested he perform something more suitable, like the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black," or the Smiths' "What She Said," but was derisively hooted down. He settled on a Dub Pistols tune.
Nevertheless, I can't get too worked up about the controversy over the despicable rapper receiving four Grammy nominations. The Grammys, like most entertainment awards shows, are a farce, on the same order as the rigged Pulitzer Prizes. If you were a teen in the late 60s or early 70s it's hard to forget that, with the exception of a few token awards, the deserving artists of the day?the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, Al Green, Joni Mitchell, Martha Reeves, etc.?were shut out in favor of music that was acceptable to the over-40 crowd. Herb Alpert, say, or Henry Mancini.
I find Eminem's lyrics as repulsive as the next sentient adult, and wouldn't be surprised if he's bending over for soap in some maximum-security jail in a few years, but should he win "Album of the Year" on Feb. 21, it won't bug me. His hateful persona is nothing I want my kids to be exposed to, but it's inevitable they'll get their hands on his recordings, or on those of the next jerk who comes along. Besides, I'm still smarting over Mick Jagger being forced to alter the lyrics of "Let's Spend the Night Together" on The Ed Sullivan Show more than 30 years ago.
6. Let's Talk Greed. Journalists across the nation recently tut-tutted about the enormous contracts signed by baseball players like Alex Rodriguez, Mike Mussina and Manny Ramirez. On Dec. 13, in an editorial headlined "Good for Alex, Bad for Baseball," the Los Angeles Times complained: "The contract makes the very talented Rodriguez eventually worth more than the current estimated value of any one of 18 major league franchises, and what's going on here is fully legal and utterly rapacious."
The same day saw The Boston Globe publish the following nonsense on its editorial page: "DiMaggio was the son of a Sicilian fisherman, and Babe Ruth came roaring out of a Baltimore orphanage. Their trials and tribulations became allegories of American success. They were separated from the crowds at the ballpark by their talents and Homeric acts of heroism on the diamond?not by a net worth of a quarter of a billion dollars."
This is horseshit. Baseball players compete in a free marketplace. Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, who's hardly a trustfund kid, is every bit as "Homeric" as the sport's Cooperstown legends; he's just fortunate to receive higher compensation.
That aside, I wonder why baseball is singled out for this kind of criticism. Do papers like The New York Times, Globe or L.A. Times lash out at the gargantuan fees?upward of $20 million per film?of some actors? The Backstreet Boys, a bubblegum group currently in vogue, is expected to bag more than $350 million from a yearlong tour. Hillary Clinton has bamboozled her way into an $8 million contract. Some young fashion models fetch more cash for a day's photo shoot than waitresses earn for an entire year's work.
The Times, which has proposed a cap on baseball salaries, was recently called on its hypocrisy by Globe columnist Alex Beam. On Dec. 5 he wrote: "Elite newspapers churn out aristo-porn to lure upscale advertisers who want to sell expensive gunk... And the Times's obscene coverage of the opening of Manhattan's $160 prix fixe restaurant, Alain Ducasse... If only Ralph Nader had set up his campaign headquarters inside Alain Ducasse, the Times editorial board might have taken his candidacy seriously."
Mind you, none of this rampant capitalism bothers me in the least. I say bully for Ramirez, Ralph Lauren, the Backstreet Boys, Hillary, Jann Wenner, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and anyone else who can get it while they can.
It's the contradictory act of isolating baseball stars?sports teams aren't big advertisers?in newspaper editorials, while remaining silent about other entertainers, that seems a little suspect to me.
7. Not a Chance. Nora Boustany, writing in the Jan. 3 Washington Post, reports that Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris is "being considered for the post of the president's special envoy for the Americas." Her sources come from those in the White House and "both Republican and Democratic circles."
It was a short item, but I'll bet Boustany's Post editor didn't press her too hard for the identity of those sources, since it's such a nice jab at the Bush brothers. Harris, unless she runs for office in Florida, won't be a government official when her term expires. Does anyone, except maybe Mike Tomasky or Bob Herbert, think that either George or Jeb Bush would be so politically deaf, dumb and blind to even raise the possibility of such an appointment? One assumes that Jeb would like to be reelected as Florida's governor in 2002. And GWB, not to mention Karl Rove, would be nuts to even mention Harris' name in public.
It's a shame, for Harris was unfairly maligned in the media for her role in Florida's recount, but she's a casualty of the Gore-Daley machine.
8. Me, Myself and I! The only surprising news about George's folding was that editor Frank Lalli didn't find out until Inside.com broke the story on Jan. 4. A touch of class from owner Hachette Filipacchi. No great loss as far as I'm concerned, just an omen for other marginal magazines in the year 2001. Like Talk, Industry Standard, Inside and Red Herring.
But leave it to Newsweek/MSNBC pundit Jonathan Alter?who turned down George's editorship when it was offered?to put in a few words for himself in commenting to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz about the magazine's demise. Alter, never at a loss for cliches, said: "It was swimming upstream, but I think Frank gave it the old Electoral College try and did a good job with it. I was interested in making it more about power generally. I thought politics narrowly defined was too limited a base for a mass-market magazine."
JANUARY 8
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