Reason Magazine - Contributors

The Silence of the Cats

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST

Accidental Genius

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Gone With the Vote

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 EST

New Criticism

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Dick Gephardt's Beautiful Mind

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 00:00:00 EST

House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt recent called for an economic summit aimed at figuring out how to "simplify the tax code." The Missouri representative also said "the first $10,000 of your education should be tax deductible." If that sounds a tad inconsistent, consider what he said a few days earlier in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council.

Gephardt urged tax incentives for partnerships between universities and small businesses, investment in renewable energy, the purchase of fuel-saving vehicles, and improved energy efficiency in new buildings. He would also increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, make refundable the $500 child tax credit, and make permanent the credit for contributions to retirement savings plans.

Simplifying the tax code means getting rid of deductions and credits in exchange for a lower rate. It's tough to do that when you're adding deductions and credits.

Gephardt is hardly the first politician to take contradictory tax positions. In 1996 GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole called for "a fairer, flatter, simpler tax system" while simultaneously pushing for adoption tax credits, IRAs for homemakers, and other preferences. But Gephardt is unique in that he has been contradicting himself so brazenly for so long.

As a junior House member in the late 1970s, he supported tax credits for private and parochial school tuition. In 1987 he told The New York Times he no longer favored such credits because the Internal Revenue Code should not be "cluttered with credits and deductions." Now he's back to pushing tax deductions for educational costs.

In 1981 Gephardt voted for the Reagan tax cuts. When he ran for president in 1988, he defended that position, which his aides saw as a winner. "[Sen. Paul] Simon and [Gov. Michael] Dukakis stumbled into it, criticizing us on taxes," his deputy campaign manager told the Los Angeles Times. "If they want to talk about how Dick Gephardt voted to cut taxes in New Hampshire, we said, sure, we'll talk about that."

Last year Gephardt cited the Reagan cuts to denounce the Bush cuts. "People like me got calls from my constituents in 1981 saying, 'Give Ronald Reagan a chance,' " he said. "Well, after we lost our alternatives, people like me gave him a chance. I voted for the Reagan tax cut in the end in 1981. It was a mistake."

Speaking in Iowa in July 2001, Gephardt suggested that the 1993 tax increase was a model: "I'm glad we did what was right in 1993, and I'll do it again because I believe in being fiscally responsible with the taxpayers' money." A few days later, he issued this statement: "I never addressed the future of taxes in my remarks because I don't believe they need to be raised."

In the 1980s, Gephardt sponsored legislation to overhaul the tax code by scrapping tax preferences. He told a group of business executives in 1985, "I feel more comfortable with the free market system deciding where capital should be allocated than with Dick Gephardt planning it."

In the 1990s, Gephardt proposed another major overhaul, which would have reduced tax rates by repealing nearly all itemized deductions. In a debate with Jack Kemp, he explained that he wanted everyone on a level field. "If you go out and earn your wages every day by working, you get taxed at a certain rate," he said. "If you earn by investing in capital...then you will pay at a similar rate. Why do you want to prefer one set of actions over another?"

A striking feature of this proposal was a requirement for a national referendum before any increase in tax rates. In 1995 Gephardt said such a requirement was necessary to block costly tax breaks. "When people look at tax reform," he said, they think, " 'Oh, sure, there they go again. They're going to lower my rates and they'll be back in two years opening up some more loopholes for rich people, and I'm going to pay through the nose.' "

Yet even before his 2002 tax credit fusillade, Gephardt was supporting tax preferences for individuals and businesses. The Web site for his 2002 re-election campaign includes this boast: "Dick Gephardt has consistently co-sponsored the Historic Home Ownership Assistance Act, which provides a Federal tax credit to individuals who rehabilitate historic homes."

Such wild contradictions could prove a handicap if Gephardt seeks the presidency again. His spinmeisters might try to contain the damage by recalling a famous quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Khaki Socialism

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

A few years back, I coined the term khaki socialism to refer to the tactic of promoting bigger government either by invoking military necessity or by dressing domestic initiatives in the language of war. Since 9/11, of course, the term has gained new and greater significance.

Literally before New York could clear the rubble of the World Trade Center, lawmakers were trying to spend more on anti-terrorism measures than even the administration wanted, prompting President Bush to threaten a veto. The Republican chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said that his $71 billion railroad bill was vital because the terrorist hijackings "demonstrated even more the need for transportation alternatives."

We've been down this rhetorical road many times before. World War II and the Cold War spawned far-flung constituencies that sustained useless or obsolete military bases and weapon systems. Time and again, the word defense was the lubricant that helped unlock the Treasury doors. Hence, the National Defense Education Act and the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

History suggests other paths the khaki socialism will take in the months and years ahead. Noting that Soviet propagandists liked to talk about America's slums, liberals in the 1960s said that solving domestic social problems would help win our psychological war with communism. The first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 was about domestic policy, but JFK began by saying that such issues "involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival."

Five years later, Lyndon Baines Johnson said: "All you have to do is look at the morning paper this morning to see the rockets that were paraded down the avenues in the Soviet Union yesterday or the day before, and realize that until we banish ignorance, until we drive disease from our midst, until we win the war on poverty, we cannot expect to continue to be the leaders not only of a great people but the leaders of all civilization." In the late 1960s, even peaceniks got into khaki socialism by expanding the definition of "national security" far beyond anything that could plausibly become a GI Joe accessory.

Their sons and daughters are at it again. The National Association of Social Workers says on its Web site, "The social work profession can contribute to a redefinition of national security that includes healthy children, the prevention of poverty, an adequate education for all residents, and a productive economy." Writing in USA Today, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind warn that current bills "ignore one of the weakest links in our homeland defense: the armies of Americans without health insurance."

That metaphor points to another variant of khaki socialism, one that goes something like this: If big government can win World War II, the Cold War, and the Gulf War, then surely it can win the war against poverty, illiteracy, or disease.

When the United States does manage to crush Al Qaeda and its allies, the War on Terror will become part of this refrain. The argument will be that we can solve domestic problems if only we apply national resources as massively and single-mindedly as we did in the military struggle. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently told the Los Angeles Times: "You know, the president's getting good marks for the war against the terrorists, but he is neglecting the domestic war." Of course, the federal government did declare wars on poverty and drugs, with deeply disappointing results. In both cases, the domestic D-Days turned into stateside Vietnams.

Although military metaphors do help us understand many aspects of politics, they are not a literal guide to public policy. Put a little differently: If we've learned one thing in the past 40 years, it's that government cannot always help people by daisy bombing them with tax money.

It would be a shame if we followed military victory with khaki-wrapped pork-barrel spending--and elaborate, if misguided, metaphorical wars.

Chad All Over

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Aug 2001 00:00:00 EDT

Getting Right with Bobby

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 EST

Sen. Moynihan, Wet and Dry

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 EST

Ways to Be Wrong

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 EDT

All Too Empty

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 EDT

That '70s Candidate

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 EDT

The decade of the 1970s is like a low-grade virus: Whenever we think we're over it, the symptoms return. This past season, the Fox network launched That '70s Show, a sitcom whose plots revolve around such things as Todd Rundgren concerts. At every wedding reception I've attended lately, they've played "YMCA," triggering that obligatory dance where you're supposed to mime the letters. (I always do it wrong, and end up looking like Koko the sign-language gorilla.) Even flare pants are back.

And Jimmy Carter is running for president again--only this time, his name is Elizabeth Dole.

It stands to reason. In Watergate's wake, people wanted the most un-Nixonian leader possible, and they found him in a Georgia peanut farmer who spoke of love, bragged of his status as a Washington outsider, and could say with a straight face, "I'll never lie to you." A similar phenomenon is at work today. Although Clinton's job approval numbers soared throughout Monicagate, Americans correctly judged his character to be the moral equivalent of a toxic waste dump. So in place of the wizard of id, they might be seeking someone who is utterly self-controlled--a leader who would again make the White House safe for interns.

Who better than Elizabeth Dole? Not only is she a woman, but it is hard to picture an immoral thought taking root beneath her hair helmet. Like Carter, she sports a smarmy manner and humorless grin that spell "the opposite of sex."

At this point, you may be wondering whether the Carter comparison is overdrawn. Like Carter in 1976, Dole can claim moral superiority to the winner of the last election. But in 1999, so can every other candidate. In fact, so can nearly everyone else on this planet, with the possible exception of Charles Manson. And come to think of it, Manson hasn't bombed any aspirin factories lately.

In Dole's case, however, the similarity to Carter goes beyond the ability to surpass a pitifully low moral threshold. It is with words that presidents govern, and her words bear a creepy likeness to Carter's.

Start with slogans. After Dole filed with the Federal Election Commission, her homepage (www.edole2000.org) featured these words: "The United States of America deserves a government worthy of its people." That's mighty close to Carter's promise of "a government as good as its people." In her announcement speech, she said, "We're beginning to lose faith in our own institutions. It's only a short step to losing faith in ourselves, and then we would be lost." She added that we "must renew faith in the goodness of our nation."

In 1976, Carter told the California Senate, "If I had to sum up in one word what this campaign is all about, the word would be faith. The American people want to have faith in their government. And it is our responsibility, as public men and women, to do everything in our power to help them regain the faith that they have lost."

At first glance, these phrases sound nice enough, fitting with the give-'em-heaven religiosity we associate with both Carter and Dole. But that's also a problem. The notion that we're all basically good clashes with the concept of original sin, as the Gospel of Matthew puts it, "No one is good but One, that is, God."

Theology aside, an emphasis on individual goodness implies that the main challenge of politics is not to limit government but to find angelic leaders who will use that power for good ends. "If angels were to govern men," wrote Madison, "neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Since the political world is short on angels, he reasoned, we need strict checks on what government can do.

Madisonian ideas took a beating in the 1970s, just as Carter and Dole were coming into prominence. In the Georgia governorship, Carter enlarged government as much as the state's political culture would allow; and when he became president, he signed the bills establishing the Departments of Energy and Education. In the White House Office of Consumer Affairs and at the Federal Trade Commission, Dole favored increased government regulation and even wanted a Consumer Protection Agency.

Both went so far as to vouch for the virtues of bureaucrats. During the 1976 primary campaign, Carter's rival Jerry Brown criticized government administrators. Carter replied, "That is wrong. I have seen at first hand that most government employees want to do a good job." In her 1988 joint autobiography with Bob Dole, Elizabeth fondly recalled her FTC years: "I believe now what I believed then. Perhaps no one is more unjustly maligned than the bureaucrat."

REASON reader, I hope you weren't sipping coffee while reading that line. If you were, you probably spit it all over the magazine. Take a minute to clean up.

OK now? Back to Dole. Lest you think I got her words wrong, check pages 152-153 of the hardcover edition of The Doles: Unlimited Partners. You'll find that it gets worse: "I tell youthful audiences they can find no higher calling in life than that of the public service." What about the priesthood, the ministry, or the rabbinate? Heck, what about running a business and creating jobs?

"They may not get rich but they'll enrich the lives of countless others." Yeah, like trial lawyers and agribusiness lobbyists. "Because of them, the world is a little better." As Clinton would say, that depends on what the meaning of the word better is. If it includes frustration and impoverishment, she may be right.

If not bureaucrats, who causes policy problems? Carter pointed to special interests, saying that otherwise good people get selfish when they undertake political action. "Schoolteachers love their students," he said, "but when they organize and hire a lobbyist to work with the legislature, those lobbyists don't care anything about the students." Of course, that fine sentiment didn't stop him from promising to set up the Department of Education in return for teacher union support.

Dole is just as consistently inconsistent. In her campaign announcement, she said government is: "paralyzed by special interests." Huh? In the Reagan White House, she headed the Office of Public Liaison, whose sole purpose was to cater to special interests. And then she headed two of the most clientele-serving Cabinet departments: Transportation and Labor. After all those experiences, plus four national campaigns at Bob Dole's side, she had the chutzpah to add, "I'm not a politician, and frankly today I think that may be a plus."

Carter portrayed his devotion to government as pragmatism, not ideology. "In the last analysis," he said in Los Angeles on August 23, 1976, "good government is not a matter of being liberal or conservative.... We want both progress and preservation." Dole plies the same murky waters. In a New Hampshire speech, she said: "Most Americans prefer solutions to sound bites"--which was her sound bite for the evening news. "This makes us naturally suspicious of what I call either/or politics: Liberal vs. conservative. Public school vs. private school. Us vs. them." Or in the immortal words of Yogi Berra: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!"

The story isn't all bad. Just as Jimmy Carter helped deregulate airlines, Dole oversaw the privatization of Conrail. Moreover, she decries the high level of taxation and speaks with pride of her service as a "lieutenant in Ronald Reagan's army." So despite all the bad signs, might she be a closet free market type?

Nah. For any GOP candidate, damning taxes and blessing Reagan are obligatory gestures, more etiquette than ideology. With Dole, you have to think about the words you don't hear. Ponder her statement on education: "I regard public education as one of the glories of American democracy. Which is precisely why the number one priority of any education reform must be this: to restore our public schools to greatness." Would a real free-market Republican have omitted any mention of private or parochial schools?

At the Transportation Department, Dole's best-known accomplishment was a rule requiring that every new car have an air bag or automatic safety belt. Just imagine if she had headed the Department of Health and Human Services: All refrigerators would come with a "Liddy Light" that would flash if we got too much ice cream.

No wonder a former aide once told Fortune magazine, "She's progressive at the core." If she becomes president, we'll probably get what we got in the 1970s: a pro-government agenda clad in polyester fuzzwords.

Dole has one last similarity to Jimmy Carter: the persistence of a childhood nickname. Though she reportedly hates people to call her "Liddy," she's probably stuck with it, at least for the duration of the campaign. "Elizabeth Dole" is a bit long for buttons and bumper stickers. In light of recent costume movies, "Elizabeth" would summon up images of Cate Blanchett or Judi Dench. "Dole" would make people think of Bob, not Elizabeth. And "E.D." would not do, since the initials also stand for "erectile dysfunction." Thanks to a current public service ad campaign for Pfizer, that would also remind people of Bob.

Tongue of Newt

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Mon, 01 Feb 1999 00:00:00 EST

Newt Gingrich may have left the Republican congressional leader-ship, but his spirit survives--on the Democratic side. To understand the link, think back to 1990. At the time, Gingrich was the House Republican whip and general chairman of GOPAC, a committee for the training of Republican candidates. As the midterm congressional campaign got under way, GOPAC issued "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," a linguistic guide for those who pleaded, "I wish I could speak like Newt."

The guide consisted of two lists, both of which grew out of focus group research. "Optimistic Positive Governing Words" such as opportunity, challenge, and commitment would help Republicans define their own vision. "Contrasting Words" such as crisis, threaten, hypocricy [sic], and ideological would help them define their opponents.

After Democrats attacked the guide as cynical and demeaning, Gingrich quickly disowned it as an aide's mistake. But in spite of their public indignation, the Democrats adopted its central idea: that language is indeed a mechanism for shaping the way people think about politics. Sometimes they openly acknowledged their intel-lectual debt to Gin-grich. At a 1995 political retreat, Democratic senators and staff received an information packet that included the GOPAC document.

One reason the Democrats have done so well lately is that they have mastered both lists. These days, any speech by a Democratic politician will contain long stretches of "optimistic positive governing words," along with a few verbs and prepositions that give the illusion of thought. A typical passage sounds like this: "We have a precious opportunity to preserve our commitment to our families and protect the dreams of our children." Thanks to the list, speechwriters do not have to worry about order and logic. String the words together in another sequence, and they sound just as good: "Our families have precious dreams for our children, so we must preserve and protect our commitment to opportunity."

While these fuzzwords are dulling the listeners' capacity for critical thinking, the "contrasting" words are calling forth demonic images. Again, the Democrats have relied heavily on Gingrich's list, making adept use of such standards as greed, selfish, and intolerant. They've also made some additions, including mean-spirited and, of course, extremist. In the 1998 campaign, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) got away with applying the "extremist" label to GOP challenger Matt Fong, who is about as wild-eyed as Mr. Rogers. And in nearly every race, Democrats linked the Republican candidate to the king of the "extremists," Gingrich himself. As George C. Scott said in Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"

The political use of language involves more than the creation of positive or negative feelings. A virtuoso of the art will use wordplay to redefine the very terms of discussion. Here is where the Democrats have outdone Gingrich.

Seldom any more do they say, "We need to increase spending on federal domestic programs." Instead, they follow the lead of President Bill Clinton, who praised last fall's omnibus spending bill for making "critical investments in education and training." Not once in his statement did he use the word spend. Clever trick: "Spending" connotes loss, whereas "investment" implies the expectation of profit. Thus his words powerfully suggested that federal programs will pay for themselves--and then some--by making Americans more productive. Though the evidence points in the opposite direction, the language puts a daunting burden of proof on anyone who would balk at "investing" in workers and children.

Clinton's statement on the spend-ing bill also said that it "added resources to protect the environment, to move people from welfare to work," and to do other nice things. That's typical: Spenders like to describe budget figures as "resources." When we hear the word, we tend to think vaguely of things natural and renewable--like pine cones. If you want to see how specious this language is, just try paying the IRS with pine cones.

Even more Orwellian is the voguish phrase "bill of rights." The term originally meant a set of strict limitations on federal power, but now the statists have applied it to proposals for increasing Uncle Sam's intrusiveness. The "Patients' Bill of Rights Act," for example, would give Washington tighter control over managed-care plans. We've come a long way from "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" to "The Secretary shall specify (and may from time to time update) the data required to be included in the minimum uniform data set under subsection (a) and the standard format for such data."

To regain the political initiative, free market advocates need to regain control of the political vocabulary. We should replace verbal smog with the crisp language of truth.

Take the word surplus, which the dictionary defines as "that which remains above what is used or needed." What do we do with surplus wheat or cheese? We give it away to the needy. So by extension, it apparently makes sense to donate the budget surplus to federal social programs--sorry, "critical investments."

Washington Post columnist (and a Reason Foundation trustee) James K. Glassman suggests that we break out of this mind-set by referring to excess revenues as "the overcharge." Unlike surplus, this term clearly indicates that the money really belongs to the people who paid it, and that they deserve a refund. If the language of "surplus" favors spending increases, the language of "overcharge" favors tax cuts.

Likewise, we should stop talking about the Social Security "Trust Fund." The system does not maintain a real trust fund, but instead a pile of Treasury securities--IOUs from the federal government. So let's call it what it is: "The IOU Account." Politicians can give florid speeches about protecting the "Trust Fund," but they could not muster the same eloquence on behalf of the "IOU Account."

We can take this approach to social issues, too. In recent years, the defenders of color-blind justice have made some progress in substituting the descriptive preferential treatment for the deceptive affirmative action. But the term does not go far enough in emphasizing that these schemes are zero-sum games: Advantaging certain groups always means disadvantaging the rest. Therefore, we should refer to such policies as "discrimination against Italians, Armenians, and Jews, among other groups." Try it: It drives the bad guys nuts.

By making a conscious effort to reform political language, free market advocates will be rejoining an old fight. In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell cataloged some of the linguistic swindles and perversions that had long served powerful people. He wrote that "one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."

Revolutionary History

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Thu, 01 Oct 1998 00:00:00 EDT

The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?, By Linda Killian, Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 496 pages, $28.00

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report, By Newt Gingrich. New York: HarperCollins, 256 pages, $25.00.

When they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans promised to cut spending and transform Washington politics. Since then, they've had good days and bad days. May 22 of this year was especially rotten. On that date, the House approved a six-year, $218 billion authorization of federal highway and mass transit programs.

It's easy to measure just how bad this bill is. First, give a literal interpretation to the term "pork barrel," and reckon how much real, edible, dead-pig pork we could buy with $218 billion. Pork comes in many varieties, so which should we use? In light of how much courage lawmakers showed on this issue, the logical choice is "boneless." Supermarkets sell boneless pork for $3.39 a pound, so the highway bill equals about 64 billion pounds of pork.

That's 237 pounds for every man, woman and child in the United States. Think about that: Unless you are unusually big, your share of the highway bill exceeds your body weight.

No diabolical Democrats force-fed fat into a reluctant GOP. Republicans were the main culprits, gleefully turning from Jenny Craig into Orson Welles. They voted for the bill 143-56. Even the "revolutionary" Republicans first elected in 1994 supported it by a margin of 32-18.

Accordingly, the subtitle of The Freshmen is especially timely: "What happened to the Republican Revolution?" Linda Killian, a former reporter for Forbes, takes a long, anecdotal look at the House GOP class of 1994, focusing on a dozen members. She gives special attention to Van Hilleary of Tennessee, a good case study. Early in 1995, Hilleary helped lead the fight for congressional term limits--which became an embarrassing rout. Republicans wasted energy squabbling over several different versions, including Hilleary's proposal to let each state set its own limit. Many nominal supporters were quietly happy to see term limits die, since they now had the majority and were never serious about the idea in the first place.

At the time, the term limits vote seemed a rare exception: Before their 100-day deadline, Republicans won House passage of all the other elements of the Contract with America. By the following year, however, retreats were becoming more frequent. From a free market perspective, an especially troubling vote came when the House approved a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage. Meeting with constituents in 1995, Hilleary voiced the feelings of most people in his party: "I'm a free-market person, and I think the free market ought to set the wage." Yet 93 Republicans ended up voting for the increase, including Hilleary and 28 other freshmen.

What happened? Despite its subtitle, Killian's book does not supply a detailed explanation, instead putting narrative ahead of analysis. (A more systematic study is Nicol Rae's recently released Conservative Reformers.) Nevertheless, The Freshmen does contain some clues. With a good eye for detail, Killian notices that lawmakers "are yessed, kowtowed to, and generally stroked by everyone, even staffers who work for other members." Who would want to lose such treatment over a little thing like principle?

The lust for re-election can quickly
turn revolutionaries into Romanovs. Take Hilleary's fellow freshman from Tennessee, Zach Wamp. (Say the name aloud: It's the sound of a phaser stunning a Klingon.) He began his congressional career as a zealous budget cutter but soon became a vocal advocate of such classic pork barrels as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Even when Republicans want to do the right thing, they find it hard to make their case to the public. The class of 1994 had soaked up Newt Gingrich's teachings about strategy, tactics, and rhetoric, but balked at his suggestion that they actually read a list of books. Says Killian: "Many freshmen, Hilleary among them, ignored the list, insisting they had no time for reading." Gingrich's list included Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which Hilleary had never heard of.

That says a lot. Some GOP lawmakers, such as Californians Chris Cox and David Dreier, really can engage in high-level intellectual debate. As for the rest, too many start floundering when the discussion moves beyond their staff-written talking points. It's not that floor debate directly changes roll-call votes; rather, C-Span and talk shows influence attentive voters. When House Republicans go on television only to face evisceration at the hands of Barney Frank, their morale plummets and they cave in.

The Freshmen would have been a more useful book if it had spent more time on the political context and less on vignettes that go nowhere. A whole chapter describes the troubles of Utah Rep. Enid Waldholtz, whose career crashed when her husband turned out to be a big fat crook. It's a sad tale, but not representative of anything else. How many other lawmakers are married to 300 pounds of criminality?

For a while, Newt Gingrich was heading for the same weight class. But as he recounts in his memoir-cum-manifesto, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott gave him some chastening advice just before President Clinton's 1997 State of the Union Address. When the camera's on, said Lott, lean forward so as to minimize your girth. An embarrassed Gingrich then went on a weight-loss program and, as the jacket photo suggests, it worked.

Alas, all Washington ailments do not lend themselves to such straightforward cures. In a thoughtful introductory chapter, Gingrich acknowledges that he had underrated the difficulty of changing the federal government. The experience of the 104th Congress reminded him that a speaker must contend with a Senate that gives blocking power to the minority party and a president who wields the power of the veto. Other chapter headings point to lessons both sensible and obvious: "Pick Your Fights Wisely," "Stay on Offense," and "Learn to Keep Your Mouth Shut." Apparently he remembers the title of a 1996 book by David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf: Tell Newt to Shut Up!

This book has weaknesses. First, it's the memoir of an active politician who must still appeal to voters and deal with the colleagues he writes about. Works in this genre lack the candor of, say, The Confessions of St. Augustine. In Gingrich's telling, he regarded last summer's abortive internal coup as a series of misunderstandings among well-intentioned people. Press accounts indicate that he was a wee bit angrier than he lets on here.

Another problem is more peculiar to Gingrich. Though he has a lively mind, he often lacks intellectual discipline, undercutting himself through overstatement. In Lessons, he talks about Washington Post stories "designed to keep us off balance" and approvingly quotes a GOP consultant that media polls are "deliberately" biased against the GOP. Bias yes, conspiracy no. Mainstream reporters surely see the world through a liberal lens, but it's hard to prove that they are intentionally skewing their own stories.

In the same vein, he wisely advises against underestimating the skill and tenacity of Democratic politicians, then proceeds to overestimate their unity. When he depicts the Democrats as a lockstep party "committed to policies and institutions that often violate the public's sense of decency," he is indulging in caricature, not serious political thought.

His policy prescriptions are sketchy. Noting that the federal, state, and local levels of government now take up about 38 percent of our income, he proposes to set a peacetime limit on all taxes at 25 percent. "This should not, however, be done by passing a federal law," he says. "As with social security reform, I think we must have a national dialogue and build a national majority for these goals."

The book is quite specific on one policy issue: the highway bill. Though deficit concerns led him to postpone action from the fall of 1997 to spring of 1998, Gingrich calls it "a meritorious bill." He argues that the money would come not from general revenues but from a highway trust fund overflowing with proceeds from the federal levy on gasoline. That rationale raises an obvious question: Instead of spending all the money on concrete, why not slash the gas tax? Wouldn't that be a big step toward the goal of limiting the total tax take?

Gingrich suggests the answer: "[E]ven in a conservative Republican Congress the pressure for more transportation spending is enormous." He could have stricken transportation from that sentence. Though his own commitment to economic conservatism has been spotty (see "The Many Faces of Newt Gingrich," February 1997), the problem goes beyond the speaker's office. Committee chairs want power, which means bigger federal programs to supervise. Backbench members want re-election, which means more pork to take home. No matter how tight-fisted a leader may be, it is hard to restrain those pressures.

Would Republicans act differently if they had bigger majorities in both chambers, along with control of the White House? Maybe, but if the highway bill is any sign, nobody should expect a revolution. That's a lesson we've all learned the hard way.

Bad Show

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Jul 1998 00:00:00 EDT

Show Time: The American Political Circus and the Race for the White House, by Roger Simon, New York: Times Books, 356 pages, $25.00

Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, by Howard Kurtz, New York: The Free Press, 352 pages, $25.00

In his meandering account of the 1996 campaign, syndicated columnist Roger Simon tells how President Clinton joked about a famous Inca mummy: "I don't know if you've seen that mummy. But, you know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That's a good-looking mummy."

In Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz's look at White House press operations, we learn the rest of the story. During an "off-the-record" bull session with reporters later that day, White House press secretary Mike McCurry topped Clinton's gag with one of his own: "Probably she does look good compared to the mummy he's been [having sex with]."

These two passages illustrate a difference between the two books. Clinton's mummy line is, as the White House likes to say, "old news." It appeared in dozens of press reports, and Simon's account adds nothing to what we already knew: namely, that even a 500-year-old corpse can get this guy thinking about sex. By contrast, the McCurry jab is fresh information, which itself made news when Spin Cycle came out. What's more important, the story offers insight into McCurry's style: By making a naughty side comment about the Clintons, he sought to charm White House reporters, who might thus become a tad more receptive to his pro-Clinton spin on larger matters. He's so good at his work that publication of the remark did not cost him his job, though it probably did earn him a curse from the First Mummy.

Though the lesser book of the two, Show Time does merit attention. One could easily rework it into a textbook on political writing, whose new title would be Don't Do This. The jacket notes call it a "riveting, rollicking, behind-the-curtains peek at the greatest show on earth: the modern American presidential campaign." It's more like a cheap circus that promises a wild-animal show and produces a wretched pack of mangy dogs. Simon has caged every cliché from the 1996 campaign and billed it as a revelation. Dole was an old man who lacked vision and ran a rotten campaign! Clinton was a slippery politician! Perot was a loony!

One might forgive Simon for his trite themes if he compensated with witty prose. He doesn't. A chapter on Dole's war wound bears the title "Arm and the Man." If that high-culture reference is too sophisticated for you, Simon serves up plenty of pop. "On Bob Dole's bad days, he looked like Grandpa Munster. On his really bad days, he sounded like him." To anybody who remembers Al Lewis's role on The Munsters, Simon is saying that fatigue would cause Dole to grow a huge schnoz and adopt a Brooklyn accent. Either he has an exclusive worthy of Weekly World News or he's proving that writers should give a little thought to their analogies.

Simon is sloppy about his facts. In 1992, he recalls, Governor Clinton permitted an execution, figuring that nobody ever lost votes "by electrocuting a black man." Here, his hard-boiled prose has a small crack: Convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector died by lethal injection. In 1996, Simon assures us, Clinton did not want to become "the first president in history to be elected twice without a majority of the vote." Actually, he'd be the third, since Cleveland and Wilson had both scored that dubious achievement long before. Simon claims Republicans have an edge in the electoral college, but in both 1992 and 1996, Clinton won more than two-thirds of the electoral vote while winning less than half of the popular vote.

Where Show Time is not wrong, it's usually derivative. Its observations about Dole's mannerisms--especially his habit of punctuating sentences with a grunt that sounded like "arghh"--owe much to Richard Ben Cramer's masterful story of the 1988 campaign, What It Takes. Even the publisher's flacks cannot find new material here. In 1992, according to a passage featured in the press release, a female flight attendant on Clinton's campaign plane received instructions not to appear on the tarmac with him when photographers were present and to decline his invitations to work out with him at the Little Rock YMCA. So does Simon have a scoop? Hardly. All of this information first appeared in a July 7, 1994, Washington Post story by Sharon LaFraniere.

A couple of times, Simon does start to handle something potentially important--and then drops it. In describing Dole's first swing through California, Simon mentions the state's ballot initiative to ban racial preferences. His sketch of the issue raises the faint hope that he will chuck the trivia and analyze the role of a substantive issue in the 1996 campaign. No such luck. In Simon's telling, Dole cut short his planned endorsement of the proposition simply because bad advance work had botched the arrangements for the speech. Simon misses the opportunity to discuss racial politics and the GOP's continuing inability to articulate the principle of equal opportunity.

Simon devotes several pages to the policy concessions and ego strokes that Clinton employed to keep Jesse Jackson out of the 1996 Democratic primaries. A key gesture involved campaign help for Jackson's son, who was running for the U.S. House. Simon quotes presidential aide Harold Ickes: "Certain Democratic fund-raisers close to the president gave money to the Jackson for Congress campaign." Simon then mentions that these fund-raisers included the notorious Lippo Group and a mysterious Indonesian landscaper whose huge contributions would later embarrass the Democratic National Committee. So how exactly did Clinton's foreign-money laundromat relate to his effort to appease Jackson? Simon doesn't say; he just moves on to other things.

In his epilogue, Simon recounts an interview with Mike McCurry. Simon asks him about the president's state of mind: "And why is he so at peace, why is he so spiritual?" McCurry takes the question seriously, talking about the Clinton legacy, even though the president's "spirituality" really consists of offerings at the temple of Aphrodite. McCurry also explains why Clinton thinks people will remember his accomplishments instead of his scandals: "He is confident because he has done nothing to besmirch his office in a major way." Ponder those last four words: the Clinton codicil to every ethical standard, including each of the Ten Commandments. (Thou shalt not commit adultery ...in a major way.)

According to Howard Kurtz, McCurry is "the master of spin." He makes such an effective spokesman for the president because he understands a few basic lessons about the press. First, reporters compete among themselves. They will not necessarily aid a colleague in distress, as McCurry demonstrated when he rudely cut off New York Post correspondent Deborah Orin at a press conference, and no one stood up for her. Competition allows McCurry to play reporters against one another: He leaks a breaking development to one, forcing the rest to play catch-up, thereby keeping a story alive through several news cycles.

The second lesson is that a press secretary can avoid outright lying if he avoids learning the truth. To protect his integrity when discussing scandal, Kurtz says, McCurry follows a path of "willful ignorance," repeating only what the lawyers tell him and not quizzing Clinton directly if he can help it.

The third lesson is that reporters, like other human beings, enjoy flattery and dislike criticism. Courting the press does not guarantee favorable coverage, but failure to do so will guarantee bad coverage. Although President Clinton is very good at it when he wants to be, his own hypersensitivity sometimes causes him to lash out against reporters, usually with unhappy results.

Spin Cycle does a fine job of explaining how McCurry and other Clintonistas apply these lessons. Unlike Show Time, it depends mainly on original reporting instead of Nexis searches. Kurtz is especially perceptive in laying out the elaborate effort to defend Al "No Controlling Legal Authority" Gore against accusations of illegal fund raising. Among other things, Kurtz says, the battle involved the generation of sympathetic op-ed pieces. Good point: One of the open secrets of journalism is that many (perhaps most) op-eds and letters to the editor result from professional public relations campaigns.

In spite of the book's virtues, its own "spin cycle" will be brief. Kurtz focuses mainly on White House response to scandal news in 1996 and 1997, and he does not purport to cover most other aspects of the relationship between the president and the press. And within the narrow scope of his research, he had only fragmentary access to important information. For legal and political reasons, White House aides were probably not inclined to volunteer the whole truth. What's more, the story is still unfolding: Just before the book went to press, Kurtz had to add a sketchy epilogue on the Monica Lewinsky affair.

For people interested in how Clinton has spun the news, many questions remain open. Here are a few.

Why have the media overlooked so many harsh personal attacks on conservatives and free market advocates? When Hillary Clinton testified at a 1993 congressional hearing on health care, Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) said he would like to make the debate as exciting as possible. She answered: "I'm sure you will do that, you and Dr. Kevorkian." In most contexts, such a remark would merely be snide, but in this case it was cruel: As White House opposition researchers undoubtedly told her, Dick Armey's father committed suicide. Newspaper stories reported Armey's flustered reaction, but none explained the reason.

How has President Clinton gotten away with gaffes that would have sunk other politicians? On August 6, 1994, he said in Detroit: "The interests--the violent, extremist interests in this country that are trying to keep health care out of the reach of ordinary American working people--are a disgrace to the American Dream." Three days later, a few reporters asked press secretary Dee Dee Myers if she could name any health care groups that were committing violent acts. When they scoffed at her initial answer--that he must have been talking about anti-abortion protesters--she said: "I don't have any better explanation for you." Yet apart from stories in the Boston Herald and a handful of other outlets, Clinton's bizarre outburst got very little ink.

How did the president and his allies manage to put Republicans on the defensive on affirmative action? In 1996, liberal leaders such as Jesse Jackson hinted at a "cultural conspiracy" linking church burnings with efforts to roll back racial preferences. Fearful that some would brand them "racist," Republicans began backing away from the issue, thereby yielding a point that was both principled and popular. Did the White House coordinate the attack?

A final question arises from the opening line of one of Kurtz's chapters: "The White House war against Kenneth Starr was a curious and covert operation." So what are the elements of this "covert operation"? The answer to that question might come out only in court, if it comes out at all.

As of early 1998, Clinton's spin wars were still succeeding brilliantly. One could sum up his performance in six simple words: He lies. He cheats. He wins.

Capitalist Tool Time

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Jul 1998 00:00:00 EDT

Predictions about the GOP's next nominee deserve about as much faith as sworn statements by President Clinton. In recent months, however, it has become clear that the top tier of contenders will include Steve Forbes. Two years before the presidential primaries of 2000, Forbes has been outpacing his rivals with an impressive schedule of speeches, television appearances, and radio ads.

In one sure sign that Forbes has become a household figure, his name recently came up in an argument for an anti-cloning bill. A Democratic state legislator in New Hampshire said to the Manchester Union-Leader, "Do we want to have 10,000 Steve Forbes running around?"

Forbes's emergence is remarkable. Every president from Washington to Clinton has held either elective office or a high-level appointment such as a generalship. Apart from his stint on the Board for International Broadcasting, Forbes lacks government experience. Still, he does pass one key test: Like all Republican nominees between 1968 and 1996 except for Ford, he has already lost a bid for the White House. GOP primary voters like their candidates bloodied and humbled.

Forbes understands that any potential GOP nominee has to navigate the Republican Bermuda Triangle: the party's fractious coalition of libertarians, social conservatives, and office-holders. That's hard to do, and even at this early stage, his positions on abortion and drugs have alienated some elements of his libertarian base. But Forbes is no simple trimmer. Main Street Republicans fret about his forthright positions on issues such as Social Security and affirmative action, fearing that Democrats will brand him--and the party--as "extremist."

One label that people seldom associate with Steve Forbes is "daredevil." And yet he has indeed been taking riskier positions than George W. Bush, Lamar Alexander, and other top contenders. There are two possible explanations. One is that he's a sheltered political naif who just doesn't understand the trouble he's going to get into. The other is that he's a shrewd political leader who is firm in his beliefs and confident of his ability to change people's minds.

Either way, he's come much further than anyone expected a couple of years ago.

The Special Olympics Smile

Forbes suffered from a late entry into the 1996 nomination campaign. Dole had already cornered the support of the blue-haired ladies who do the grunt work of primaries and caucuses, so Forbes had to compensate by waging an air war. His commercials rapidly pumped up his poll numbers, which collapsed just as quickly when the other candidates counterattacked.

In the early weeks, his stump style ranged from wooden to robotic. New Republic reporter Michael Lewis offered this cruel but telling account of how Forbes reacted to applause: "A few years back there was a television commercial for the Special Olympics that concluded with a retarded boy bursting through the tape at the finish line and breaking into a joyous, heart-tugging smile. Forbes now wears exactly the same expression. He has a Special Olympics smile."

Other observers dismissed him as a rich dabbler--Michael Huffington minus Arianna. But after Dole clinched the nomination, Forbes confounded the skeptics. He didn't skulk away like Huffington, or go into full-metal-wacko mode like Perot. He stayed in the arena, learning from his own missteps, and adapting techniques from political comebacks of the past.

Since the summer of 1996, Forbes has been walking the old Nixon trail, campaigning for GOP candidates and picking up political IOUs. In February of this year, for instance, he went to Richmond and praised Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore's initiative to repeal the state's hated car tax: "The governor has proved that you can marry power to perspective." In an interview in these pages ("Happy Warrior," February 1997), anti-tax activist Grover Norquist observed: "Forbes is helping people. Sometimes by helping other people you help yourself."

As Reagan did after leaving the California governorship, Forbes has set up his own political committee: Americans for Hope, Growth and Opportunity. Among other things, AHGO sends out blast e-mails and maintains an impressive Web site (www.ahgo.org). Forbes has also started daily radio commentaries, available in RealAudio on the AHGO site. By coincidence, Forbes's radio producer is the man who produced Reagan's broadcasts in the 1970s.

Forbes is improving as a public speaker. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference held in Biloxi, Mississippi, this February, he delivered many of his lines with simple humor and a natural-sounding inflection. "And so even if you had trouble with math or arithmetic when you were in school, which of course none of you did--See, I'm learning to pander...." The aside got a good laugh, and he responded with a graceful smile, not one of the "Special Olympics" variety.

In May 1997, he gave the commencement address at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, California. He concluded with words that warmed the hearts of professors weary of student grammar: "Just remember, it's not who you know; it's whom you know." Then he did a couple of things that previous commencement speakers had not done. During the distribution of diplomas, he stood up and shook hands with every graduate: a small touch, but a pleasant, unexpected one. After the ceremony, he stayed around for more than an hour to pose for snapshots and chat with anybody who wanted to talk with him. (He gained from comparison with the previous year's speaker, the imperious Vernon Jordan. After giving a harshly partisan speech praising racial preferences and hinting that Republicans were bigots, Jordan did not deign to mingle with the proles. Maybe he was eager to return to his job-referral service.)

Though he is getting better on stage, Forbes still has work to do. Too often, even when he is speaking off the cuff, he sounds as if he is reading a text for the first time. For one thing, he keeps committing the beginner's mistake of pronouncing the indefinite article a with a long-a sound ("ay"). At a New Hampshire town hall meeting, he said: "The IRS abuses...are ay symptom of ay corruptingly complex code."

During the same New Hampshire trip, Forbes toured downtown Nashua, with C-SPAN cameras rolling. At a shoe store, he awkwardly greeted clerks and customers, who seemed more interested in the merchandise. He stopped for a few moments with an 11-year-old girl, saying, "I hope you have a good shopping experience here." She thanked him and walked away. Throughout the visit, he seemed uneasy about getting in the way of market transactions--which, in a way, is a good sign.

The Thinking Man as Candidate

In May 1991, long before Forbes even thought of seeking office, REASON asked him to describe his political philosophy. "I'm pro-growth," he answered. "If that means enterprise zones, I'm supportive, and if it means increasing the earned income tax credit as a way of enabling people to get off the welfare treadmill, I would be for it. That's really the guiding compass: How do you let people develop their talents with a minimum of interference?"

When it comes to broad free-market principles, Forbes "gets it." At the Claremont McKenna commencement, he said: "In times past, we thought of wealth, as land, armies, piles of gold and jewels, and, sadly, slaves. This new era has made clear what has always been true--that the true source of wealth is the human mind, human imagination, inventiveness, stick-to-it-iveness."

Earlier this year, he wrote an obituary for Julian Simon, the economist who debunked dire forecasts about population and pollution. "In an environment of freedom, more people mean more knowledge and, thus, more breakthroughs and inventions. In no small part due to Simon's work, the Chicken Littles were routed." Perhaps looking ahead to a race against Al Gore, Forbes added a caveat: "But Malthusians never stay down. They are at work today propagating a new menace to frighten us--global warming."

Both Gore and Forbes spoke at the Microsoft CEO summit in May 1997, and their remarks highlighted their philosophical differences. Gore compared free-market types to the heartless Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. Today's Tin Men, he said, "have a cold, calculating bead on the facts and figures and theories that measure the rise and fall of markets," and their economic policy "is simply to slash taxes and get the government entirely out of the way." Their approach failed during the Reagan years, Gore argued, and it cannot work in a high-tech age: "The Tin Men offer no prescription for upgrading the skills of workers or for sparking innovation."

Forbes offered a different vision, calling the tax code "a real dead weight on the economic life in America." Whereas Gore proposed a federal plan to wire classrooms to the Internet, Forbes reached deeper: "Technology won't make a fundamental difference in education as long as the old monopoly is running it." He backed a variety of reforms, including school choice, to "blast those systems open."

Within the party, Forbes is scarcely alone in endorsing such policies. His rhetoric, however, suggests a more sophisticated understanding of government power. When other Republican leaders mention the Cold War, they usually limit their discussion to President Reagan's successful fight to bring down the Soviet Union. That part is true enough, but Forbes stands apart from the others in noticing that the struggle also had a dark side. In a speech at the Cato Institute last year, Forbes said that the Cold War had harmful effects on social and political life. National security, he said, gave the federal government a rationale for enlarging its power over education, research, transportation, and many other fields. By the early 1960s, people concluded that if the government could win two world wars and contain communism, it would do other good things, too. "And thus we got the War on Poverty, Jimmy Carter's moral equivalent of war on the energy crisis, and the war on drugs. War, real or metaphorical, has been the motif of this century." (We'll shortly return to his stand on the drug war.)

Forbes has repeatedly stressed the moral dimensions of his economic beliefs. You don't succeed in business through coercion or deceit, he said in his Claremont McKenna address, "You succeed in business by providing a product and service that people are willing to buy voluntarily from you." He has also discussed the need for honesty and integrity at the highest levels of politics. Many libertarians have praised this line of argument. As Edward Crane, president of the Cato Institute, has written: "I applaud Forbes's decision to include a call for moral leadership along with his libertarian policy proposals, ranging from the flat tax to school choice to Social Security privatization."

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Forbes told the Heritage Foundation, are the "moral basis of a free society." Government's role is to secure those rights--in the order that the Declaration lists them. "Switch the order--putting happiness before liberty, or liberty before life--and you end up with moral squalor." From this belief, Forbes has derived some positions that have pleased social conservatives while disturbing many of his libertarian allies.

Abortion and Drugs

Speaking to the Christian Coalition last September, Forbes got a rousing reaction when he said of America's national creed: "Remember, life begins at conception and ends at natural death." Many news reports quoted that line, but by itself, it carried less significance than reporters thought. They forgot that Forbes had used similar language in the 1996 campaign: "I believe that we should protect life from conception to natural death."

Pleasantly surprised social conservatives speak of Forbes's "conversion experience" while pro-choice Republicans complain about a sell-out to the religious right. In fact, he's been more consistent than either side thinks. On February 10, 1996, he said on CNN's Evans and Novak program: "I think that we have to bring public opinion along each step. I think we can start with a consensus by banning abortions in late pregnancy--barring a life-threatening emergency--barring abortion for purposes of sex selection, no mandatory government funding, parental consent in the case of minors." Robert Novak asked him if he would support a constitutional ban on abortion, provided that public opinion came along. "I wouldn't oppose it, if you have the culture with you," Forbes said.

That's largely his position today, but he has made some adjustments that have major political consequences. When the constitutional issue resurfaced during an Evans and Novak interview earlier this year, Forbes's answer suggested a crucial shift in tone: "I believe in life. I want that constitutional amendment."

Whereas he once downplayed abortion, he now emphasizes the issue. Earlier this year, he even supported a Republican National Committee "litmus test" on partial-birth abortion, which would have denied party funding to candidates who didn't oppose the procedure. (Many anti-abortion Republicans, most prominently Rep. Henry Hyde, opposed the test for dividing the party.) "We should not fund a Republican candidate who opposes partial-birth abortion bans unless there are special circumstances, as determined by a majority of the 165-member RNC," Forbes told The Washington Times. He added that there "may be circumstances, such as support for Rudolph Giuliani in New York, where you might want to make an exception."

Forbes's comments illustrate the risks of finessing the issue. Former Republican national chairman Richard Bond wrote: "Forbes has alienated activists on both sides of the abortion issue; encouraged Republicans to engage in an internal fight at a time when President Clinton and the Democrats are on uncertain footing; further driven away women and other potential supporters from the party; and encouraged further attempts for litmus tests to be foisted on Republicans by those who believe in single-issue candidacies."

On another social issue, Forbes has campaigned hard against medical marijuana. "What's going on?" asks Clifford Thies, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus. In an open letter to Forbes, available on the group's Web site (www.rlc.org), he continues: "Has he become so fixated on becoming president that he has adopted Bob Dole's failed strategy of trying to beat Clinton on the drug issue?" Libertarian writer Doug Bandow is even harsher: "Treating the sick and dying as the enemy is a particularly cheap way to win votes."

Forbes's supporters argue that his support for tough drug laws, like his abortion stand, is less a new position than a new emphasis on a longstanding and sincere belief. On July 1, 1996, he wrote in his magazine that "the beguiling notion that decriminalization of the use of `mild' narcotics such as marijuana would allow authorities to crack down more effectively on hard drugs still persists (even in a recent Forbes story about the Netherlands). Alas, the idea is destructive nonsense."

Thies, however, argues that it's possible, indeed necessary, to have a separate discussion of medical marijuana: "As Republicans, we understand the importance of what we communicate to others, especially to youth. But it is immoral to hold sick people hostage so we don't miscommunicate our concern for drug abuse."

Some libertarians share Forbes's opposition to abortion. (Murray Sabrin, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of New Jersey last year, attacked Republican incumbent Christine Whitman for her support of partial-birth abortion.) Some may even favor curbs on certain drugs. Inevitably, though, his high-profile stands on these issues will create friction between Forbes and the libertarian movement. If he is to hold onto at least a share of libertarian support, he has to take bold, pro-liberty stands on other issues. And he does.

Steve, the Vampire Slayer

Forbes has imported his favorite applause line from Transylvania: "Rather than further complicating a failed federal tax code, we should abolish it--kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it, and hope it never rises again to terrorize the American people." He urges Congress to take a "bold and radical step" by passing legislation to scrap the tax code by a date certain, a move that he hopes will trigger debate about "a new tax code for a new century."

Forbes thinks that the best alternative is a straightforward flat tax. His proposal features a 17 percent rate on wages and salary, with simple exemptions: $13,000 for singles, $26,000 for married couples filing jointly, and $17,000 for single heads of household. Taxpayers could also deduct $5,000 per child. He would not tax personal savings, pensions, Social Security benefits, capital gains, or inheritances. (Businesses would pay the 17 percent rate on net profits, and could write off investments in the first year.)

The flat-tax idea is compelling. For decades, Washington has used the tax code as an instrument of social and economic engineering. By getting rid of tax preferences, a flat tax would free individuals and businesses from a pervasive form of government power. With the elimination of most deductions and credits, taxpayers would no longer have to supply Uncle Sam with excruciatingly private information. Compliance costs would plunge, since people would no longer have to spend disproportionate sums on record-keeping and accountancy. And what's more, many people would see their taxes go down. Currently, an average family of four owes about $3,000 in taxes for the first $36,000 in income. Under the Forbes plan, they would owe nothing up to the $36,000 level; after that, they would pay 17 cents on the dollar.

The proposal might seem an automatic winner, especially since abusive IRS activity has received massive publicity, and the total tax burden has reached unprecedented levels. There's a catch, however: To slay the vampire, you also have to kill a sacred cow. On NBC's Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Forbes if he would allow a deduction for mortgage payments. Forbes answered: "I think in order to make change...you have to go with a strong and pure proposal, or else the essence of it will not survive the political process."

Nearly 30 million households take the home-mortgage deduction. Even though many of them would do better under the Forbes plan, they balk at giving up an existing benefit. When the 1986 tax bill ended a number of tax breaks, Americans suspected that Washington would eventually renege on the promised payoff: reduction of the top rate to 28 percent. Guess what: They were right. People don't like Democratic tax increases, which is partially why Republicans took Congress in 1994. But courtesy of the Bush-Darman tax betrayal of 1990, they don't trust Republican pledges about tax cuts.

Even Republican primary voters are skeptical, especially when it comes to proposals that would touch the mortgage deduction. Dole effectively used the issue against Forbes in New Hampshire. In the general election campaign, Dole got his comeuppance when nobody believed his proposal for a 15 percent reduction in income tax rates.

Dan Quayle, among others, has hedged by calling for a "modified" flat tax that would retain the mortgage deduction. That one key word, of course, represents the difference between radical reform and another round of incremental change. The contrast shows that Forbes's stand is gutsier than it may first appear. He's betting that he can lead public opinion and overcome the attacks that will surely come both from Democrats and his GOP rivals.

A Nerd's Cojones

Forbes's risk-taking doesn't end with the flat tax. He has broken with congressional Republicans whose answer to the impending crisis of Social Security is the time-tested dodge of appointing a blue-ribbon panel. In January, he told the National Press Club that we do not need another commission: "We need action. We need real proposals on the table." Forbes's proposal is to phase in a new Social Security system for younger people, in which most of their payroll taxes would go to their own retirement accounts. In his magazine, he explained: "As things now stand, without major payroll tax boosts the actual return for our under-age-30 citizens will be decidedly negative. A new system would both avoid new levies and give participants vastly more than we are getting now."

Such a commonsensical position shouldn't require courage, but it does. Even though many Democrats have acknowledged the system's flaws, Republicans always invite trouble when they discuss programs for the elderly. In 1986, Senate Republicans lost their majority in part because they supported a modest adjustment in benefit increases. A couple of years ago, Democrats drew blood with their "Mediscare" campaign. In both cases, the GOP sustained damage even though it retreated--or perhaps because it retreated. In light of widespread public support for reform, Forbes believes that a strong, firm position will prevail in the end.

Forbes also differs from Hill Republicans on affirmative action. Increasingly paranoid about charges of "racism," the congressional GOP has been caving in to the regime of racial preferences. House Republicans could not get an anti-preference bill out of committee. While passing the shameful highway bill, Senate Republicans failed to repeal the even-more-shameful program that sets aside up to 10 percent of federal highway construction contracts to minority and female-owned businesses. Forbes, however, has been speaking out against state-sponsored discrimination. His group sponsored an ad campaign to support the Washington State Civil Rights Initiative. Forbes said that the measure would "reassert the moral principle that all Americans have been created equal in the eyes of the law, regardless of race or gender or national origin."

Forbes has criticized GOP congressional leaders for yielding too much ground to the White House on budget issues, and they've hinted at retribution. On CNN's Evans and Novak, Senate Majority Leader Lott recently said: "I've got this to say to some of the people that are using that as a method to get the nomination: They'd better be real careful. They may be surprised whose help they might need....I don't appreciate it, and I'm not going to put up with it, I'll tell you that."

And on one important issue--immigration--Forbes has risked the antagonism of GOP grassroots activists, who see immigrants as burdens instead of assets. Forbes strongly supports legal immigration, because of his belief that human beings are the ultimate resource. He editorialized against California's Proposition 187 (which would have denied government benefits, including public schooling, to illegal aliens), and opposed a national version of the measure during his 1996 presidential campaign. He also came out against a constitutional ban on citizenship for children of illegal immigrants--a position that had enough GOP support to earn a place in the party platform. A leader of a California anti-immigration group told the Los Angeles Times that Forbes deserved special condemnation: "Steve Forbes basically says immigration makes Americans work harder. Here's a guy who inherited all of his money, never had to work for a dollar, and is telling us we have to compete against 4 billion people. Outrageous." (Although he inherited much of his wealth, of course, Forbes is in fact a CEO whose fortunes are tied closely to how well he runs the family publishing business.)

Whether out of courage or naiveté, Forbes is saying what he thinks. It's an unusual way to prepare for a presidential race.

The GOP Field

At the moment, that race appears open. Forbes won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late January. He was the first choice of 23 percent of the attendees, compared with 10 percent for Texas Gov. George W. Bush. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference a few weeks later, Bush led with 18 percent. Forbes placed second with 15 percent, followed by Dan Quayle with 12 percent.

These unscientific results, together with soundings of GOP activists, indicate that Bush is Forbes's strongest competitor. The funny thing, though, is that few Republicans outside Texas can identify anything he has done as governor. Just as Zsa Zsa Gabor was famous for being famous, Bush is popular for being popular. Name identification, of course, has much to do with it, and even that is a mixed blessing. Because of his 1990 budget deal and his humiliating loss to Bill Clinton, the elder Bush has become the "yada yada" chapter of GOP history: "Reagan cut taxes and won the Cold War, then yada, yada, yada, Clinton came along."

At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Dan Quayle praised Reagan extravagantly, but only once did he mention the man who chose him as vice president--and then only as Saddam Hussein's assassination target. The rest of Quayle's remarks were in character, which is to say that they ranged from trite to embarrassing. At one point, he described "the centerpiece of our anti-crime plan: Three interns and you're out!" He held up three fingers, perhaps trying to prove that he could count.

On his geekiest day, Forbes does better than that.

And if Forbes sometimes has a "robotic" speaking style, Lamar Alexander must really be a robot. His total lack of originality or spontaneity suggests an artificial life form that someone assembled from pieces of old politicians, according to a focus-grouped blueprint. Consider the tag line of his Web site (www. lamaralexander.com): "For the new century, America needs not so much a new kind of government--not a Squarer Deal or a Fairer Deal or a Greater Society--but a New Spirit...." This depth of banality is far beyond the reach of any natural-born human.

Libertarians would be hard put to identify a potential GOP candidate (or, for that matter, a Democrat) whose positions are more acceptable than those of Forbes. Like other GOP proto-candidates, Bush, Quayle, and Alexander all oppose drug legalization and support abortion restrictions in varying degrees. Forbes outshines them on other issues, especially in his forthright stance on the flat tax. Compare his position with what Alexander said in 1996: "Taxes need simplifying and some of them need lowering."

Forbes is far from a perfect candidate. In his public style, he will never match the Great Communicator. In his issue positions, he will never completely please all the wings of the Republican Party. But the perfect candidate does not exist. Among the likely contenders, who else is there?

The Seven Deadly Sins of Politics

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:00:00 EST

It's hard to sort out the Clinton scandals. Did Monica Lewinsky ask Webb Hubbell to buy Vernon Jordan a dress? Did Bruce Babbitt win a Tyson's chicken at an Indian casino? Did he bet with Chinese money? And what's all this about Oral Roberts?

To understand the ethics mess, skip the latest scoops. The real explanation came out some 1,400 years ago, when Pope Gregory the Great identified the Seven Deadly Sins. Gregory's list furnishes a concise guide to basic principles of contemporary politics: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

Pride. Chaucer wrote that pride is the "general root of all evils." In politics, this root runs deep. Candidates exaggerate their own virtues, sometimes believing what they say. Once in office, they surround themselves with fawning staffs. Washington is to ego as Iowa is to corn: a place where abundant fertilizer promotes amazing growth.

Pride creates its own ethical logic. "I'm good," thinks the politician, "and since good people don't do bad things, then whatever I do is OK." During his "no controlling legal authority" press conference, Al Gore said: "I'm proud of what I did. I do not feel like I did anything wrong, much less illegal. I am proud to have done everything I possibly could to help support the re-election of this president and to help move his agenda forward." The agenda justifies the means.

Pride is the original sin of public policy. The "anointed," as Thomas Sowell calls them, believe that they know what's best for everybody else--hence such monstrosities as the Clinton health plan. They also think that they can divine long-range trends in economics, international relations, and even weather--hence Gore's crusade against global warming.

Prideful politicians think that they can get away with anything. When their policies fail or their misdeeds become public, they shift the blame or deny that anything has gone wrong. Sometimes these responses fail, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon discovered. Sometimes they work, which is why President Clinton survived his first term.

Envy. What do average Washingtonians want? Better job titles, bigger offices, richer perks, and more one-on-one contact with the powerful. Staffers refer to the last item as "face time." (Perhaps certain politicians offer "designated-body-part time.")

Inevitably, what everyone wants is what somebody else already has. In the White House, such envy helps explain why aides vie to catch the president's eye and fulfill his desires (including the noncarnal ones). The jostling for position includes even the lowliest ranks. According to press reports, intern Monica Lewinsky had a "coveted blue pass," which enabled her to enter the West Wing at will, while her peers labored elsewhere. No wonder some of them seemed quite eager to trash her reputation.

There is plenty of envy in the private world, but it's especially acute in politics because tangible accomplishments are so scarce. When you can't measure your achievements by the number of computers manufactured or customers served, you rate your position by the number of really cool meetings you get to attend.

Anger. Envy begets wrath. Since so much of political life hinges upon petty things, Washingtonians are hypersensitive to slights, snubs, and insults. They might not always remember the size of the national debt, but they do remember the time someone kept them waiting outside a conference room (and for how long). The ultimate example was Richard Nixon, who ended his political career as a congealed blob of resentment.

In a city of vendettas, leaks are a weapon of choice. Such leaks often come from disgruntled staffers and ex-staffers, whose ranks are legion. (Have you ever met a Washingtonian who was gruntled?) Last year, former White House aide Linda Tripp told Paula Jones's lawyers that President Clinton had made a pass at another woman. Clinton lawyer Robert Bennett then accused her of lying. Reportedly, her anger at Bennett spurred her to tape Lewinsky's phone calls.

Leaks and attacks have a profound effect on Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Affairs of State (See "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate," August/September 1997), historian Gil Troy describes their reaction: "The Clintons united in rage. Theirs was the angriest administration since Richard Nixon's." Angry people make dumb mistakes, but the Clintons have usually harnessed their anger to politically useful purposes. When Hillary Clinton complained of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy," she was venting her feelings while simultaneously providing a cue to reporters who were predisposed to believe in such things.

More often, it's Clinton's opponents who lose their heads. Consider the volcanic conservatives who prematurely called for his impeachment. Their reaction was understandable, since Clinton's slickness infuriates them. But from the standpoint of GOP political strategy, a successful effort to oust Clinton would backfire, since it would give Gore the incumbency advantage in the next presidential election.

As Nixon said as he left the White House: "Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them--and then you destroy yourself." He should know.

Sloth. Contrary to the popular myth that Washington keeps bankers' hours, people in the political community put in long days. Physical sloth is not their problem. Instead, many suffer from intellectual sloth, which sets in when they fail to rethink their assumptions. The D'Amato hearings on Whitewater and the Thompson hearings on campaign finance both embodied this kind of sloth. Each time, Republicans were expecting Watergate in reverse, where noble Republicans could take down a tainted Democratic president. Each time, they flopped.

Notwithstanding all their hard work, they failed to take account of one big thing: The other side had studied Watergate, too. The White House recognized that it could hinder investigations by providing evidence at a glacial pace, a practice called "slow-walking." Congressional Democrats remembered that Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) was effective as chair of the Watergate committee because of his reputation for probity. Accordingly, they undercut the GOP chairs, hoping to make D'Amato look like a sleazebag and Thompson a shameless self-promoter. They succeeded.

Like the people they cover, reporters also represent a strange brew of hard work and sloth. They have long toiled to cover campaign scandals and the legislative proposals designed to prevent them. At the same time, they have seldom questioned the premise of campaign finance "reform," namely, that more red tape will produce a "cleaner" and more democratic process.

Avarice. No one can take money out of politics as long as people can make money by influencing public policy. With its wide array of rules and programs, contemporary government offers economic interests opportunities to gain subsidies, monopolies, and other advantages. When Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked high-rolling contributor Roger Tamraz if one of the reasons for his donations was to gain access to the White House, he responded: "Senator, I am going even further; it is the only reason."

Even in a rural state such as Arkansas, a governor can be a helpful friend or a troublesome foe. That's why some colorful characters took an early interest in the financial well-being of the Clinton family. The fruit of this interest, of course, is the ongoing Whitewater controversy. And if it were not for Whitewater, Kenneth Starr would not hold the post of independent counsel, and there would have been no federal investigation of Monica Lewinsky's statements.

Gluttony. In its literal meaning, gluttony is not part of the Clinton scandals. Washington has become a nonfat yogurt kind of town, and in 1997, the president got into the act by curbing his appetite for rich foods.

In a metaphorical sense, however, gluttony does play a role. When the media find a hot new scandal, they engage in what political scientist Larry Sabato calls a "feeding frenzy." For a brief period, they compete with one another to gobble up all available bits of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Rather than digesting it carefully, they swallow it whole, often with disastrous results. When the pig-out is over, they feel nausea and shame, and they swear not to do it again.

In their remorse, they may leave some good food on the table; that is, they may overlook credible leads that take time and study to develop. In each of the Clinton scandals, serious questions lingered long after the initial frenzy came to an end.

Lust. This one doesn't require any explanation, except that the connection of sex and power didn't start with Clinton's inauguration. It goes all the way back to King David, who had an illicit affair and tried to cover it up. Bathshebagate broke because of a whistle-blower named Nathan, who shamed David into an apology.

God had warned that there would be days like this. As David Boaz wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, the First Book of Samuel contains an early explanation of the need for limited government. When the people prayed for a king, God answered that abuse and tyranny would ultimately follow.

Like the rest of us, those in power are vulnerable to the Seven Deadly Sins. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary," wrote James Madison. "If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls would be necessary." Angels are pretty scarce in the political world. That's why the framers of the Constitution built a system of separated powers, ensuring that a wayward president would eventually crash into judges, juries, and congressional investigations. The system can get pretty ugly at times, but as Madison asked, "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"

One for the Gipper

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Sun, 01 Feb 1998 00:00:00 EST

Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, by Dinesh D'Souza, New York: The Free Press, 292 pages, $25.00

Most of this fall's college freshmen were born in the year that Ronald Reagan won the White House. These 18-year-olds have only blurry memories of his presidency, which ended when they were in the third grade. Their knowledge about this period comes mainly from books and popular culture, which should worry the Gipper's admirers.

Go to a library's Reagan shelf, and you'll see such titles as The Acting President, Gambling With History, Make-Believe, The Reagan Detour, and Visions and Nightmares. Rent some political movies at Blockbuster, and you'll have a similar experience. Films such as The Pelican Brief and Clear and Present Danger portray fictional Reaganesque presidents in the light that Hollywood sees Reagan: as equal parts faker, killer, and doofus.

Aside from Martin Anderson's Revolution and a few other works, there is empty space where serious defenses of the Reagan administration ought to be. Dinesh D'Souza's new biography is an effort to plug the gap. This concise book offers a useful, if flawed, introduction to Reagan, especially for those who have heard only from the bashers.

D'Souza worked in the White House toward the end of Reagan's tenure. At the time, he admits, he saw the president as a nice fellow atop an administration sinking into scandal and internal strife. Hindsight has changed his view. "Previously I admired the man but had doubts about his leadership," he says. "Now I see that he had faults as an individual but was an outstanding statesman and leader."

Reagan certainly fumbled with details: The book recounts the now-famous story of the time he mistook his own housing secretary for a big-city mayor. But on the large issues and in the long term, Reagan was closer to the truth than his liberal critics. "We're on the edge of a world crash," said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) in 1982--just when we were on the edge of an historic boom. In 1986 House Speaker Jim Wright sputtered at Reagan's "tear down this wall" challenge to Gorbachev: "It just makes me have utter contempt for Reagan. He spoiled the chance for relations between our two countries." You know what happened next.

History has forced the critics to adjust their initial image of Reagan as an economy-wrecking, war-mongering monster. ("The evil is in the White House at the present time," said House Speaker Tip O'Neill in 1984.) Instead, they have adopted what D'Souza calls "the Revised Standard Version," which acknowledges that, well, maybe we did end up with peace, prosperity, and the total collapse of Soviet communism. But that was just coincidence, says the RSV. Reagan could not possibly have had anything to do with it, since he was just a cheerful simpleton with incredible luck. D'Souza points out that even many conservatives have bought this view, at least in part.

This book guts the RSV. Its numerous examples show that the big decisions belonged to Reagan, not his cynical and pragmatic handlers. Rebutting the notion that he passively read the lines that others set before him, D'Souza explains that Reagan was Reaganism's primary author and that he wrote much of his own material. Anyone can verify D'Souza's point by visiting the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. In reading drafts of major addresses, such as the 1983 "Evil Empire" speech in Orlando, you will find that a good deal of the language is in Reagan's distinctive and legible handwriting.

Reagan accomplished so much, says D'Souza, because he had mastered the three basic elements of leadership: vision, a bias for action, and an ability to build support for his policies. Despite his ideological commitments, he was flexible in day-to-day maneuvers and tolerant of intraparty disagreements. His agility reflected his self-confidence: He could afford the occasional sidestep because he knew where he wanted to go.

Though vivid and readable, D'Souza's account falls short of being definitive. In his enthusiasm to paint Reagan in bold colors, he sometimes misses the pastels that are part of the historical record.

D'Souza lists the major domestic and international developments of the 1980s and concludes that "Reagan was the prime mover; he brought them about." That's a stretch, as D'Souza implicitly concedes later in the book. Discussing the 1982 recession, he says that even Reagan's critics "recognized that [Fed Chairman Paul] Volcker was the prime mover and that his agency is independent of executive control." Reagan did provide crucial support for Volcker's anti-inflationary policies, as D'Souza quickly adds. But by definition, any development can have only one "prime mover."

D'Souza's Reagan-centrism distorts his treatment of the massive 1986 tax reform bill, which he briefly describes as a neat compromise between Reagan and congressional Democrats. In fact, the bill had a wild ride through the House and nearly died in the GOP Senate, until Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood rewrote it while consuming mass quantities of beer. In this case, as in others, the constitutional separation of powers limited the president's control over the course of events.

On the broader issue of taxes, D'Souza properly praises Reagan's leadership in winning an across-the-board cut in 1981. The following year, however, scary deficit projections prompted Reagan to push the biggest peacetime tax increase in history. Although describing the move as a mistake, D'Souza says the Gipper learned his lesson: "Reagan wouldn't agree to any further tax increases, which he believed would stifle the incentives of entrepreneurs and inhibit economic growth." But as D'Souza should have noted, then came a nickel-a-gallon boost in gasoline taxes in 1982, accelerated increases in Social Security taxes in 1983, and various tax hikes in the budget pacts of 1984 and 1987. Although the latter tax packages mainly worked at the margins, they set a precedent for the Big Bad Deal of 1990.

The biggest disappointment of the Reagan administration was its failure to slash the Washington bureaucracy. Not only did all the cabinet departments survive, but Reagan signed legislation creating a new one: the Department of Veterans Affairs. D'Souza admits that Reagan flopped on the domestic-spending side but blames interest group politics and the public's appetites: "As a believer in popular government, Reagan had no intention of thwarting the shared preferences of the people." While plausible, that analysis clashes
with an earlier comment: "Reagan did not merely follow the path of public opinion, however. Like a true leader, he worked hard to shape it, so that he could point out the best way for the country to achieve its ideals."

Given all the political constraints, Reagan could not have won a total victory against big government, but he could have done much more. In this respect, free-
market activist Fred Smith got it right: "[T]he Reagan revolution hasn't failed--it really hasn't been tried."

All Things Dull and Ugly

info@reason.com (John J. Pitney, Jr.) — Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 EST

Back from the Dead: How Clinton Survived the Republican Revolution, by Evan Thomas, Karen Breslau, Debra Rosenberg, Leslie Kaufman, and Andrew Murr, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 289 pages, $24.00

Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties, by Dick Morris, New York: Random House, 359 pages, $25.95

Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House, by Michael Lewis, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 299 pages, $25.00

Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America, by Elizabeth Drew, New York: Viking, 294 pages, $24.95

"All Things Dull and Ugly," the title of a Monty Python song, makes a tempting label for the 1996 presidential campaign. Each of the three major candidates was a rerun, as familiar as a Python routine but not nearly as funny. Ross "The Very Silly Party" Perot managed the feat of turning clinical insanity into a cliché. Bill Clinton made presidential sleaziness seem commonplace, even acceptable: "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more!" And poor Bob Dole found himself in a political version of the Dead Parrot Sketch. (This campaign is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! This is an EX-CAMPAIGN!)

Writing a good, readable book about such an election is tough--but feasible. As Raymond Chandler said, there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. The 1984 election ended in a predictable landslide for Reagan, and it still yielded such worthy volumes as Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller's The Quest for the Presidency 1984 and Richard Brookhiser's The Outside Story. This time, however, the literary world has fared less well.

First and least among the campaign books considered here is Back from the Dead. It consists of a main text by five Newsweek reporters, a foreword by Joe Klein (the "anonymous" author of Primary Colors), an afterword by Peter Goldman, and 75 pages of memoranda, mostly by mid-level campaign trolls. Back from the Dead confirms an old bit of Hollywood lore: A long list of writing credits suggests that a production is a patchwork mess.

The book's brevity (only 214 pages before the memoranda) stems less from succinctness than from superficiality. The authors' implicit message is: "We'd rather be doing something else, so we're trying to finish this damned thing as fast as we can." Instead of coming to grips with the remarkable historical forces that resulted in the re-election of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, they concentrate on trivial tittle-tattle. Does anybody really want to learn about the backbiting between Don Sipple and Scott Reed? Does anybody even care who those guys were? (They worked for Dole, if you're interested, which I doubt.)

The authors have odd priorities. They devote an entire chapter to Colin Powell, who chose to stay out of the race, yet they scarcely mention Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, who actually won primaries. Their treatment of Forbes is especially deplorable. "The Forbes campaign deserves little more than a footnote in the history of politics," they say. "But it is worth looking back at as an object lesson in the effects of negative campaigning." That's nonsense. Alone among the GOP candidates, Forbes offered a program that was genuine (unlike Alexander's), coherent (unlike Dole's), and forward-looking (unlike Buchanan's).

When the authors do get the story right, they merely repeat things that political
observers have long known. Over time, Clinton got better at acting presidential. Dole had honor but lacked vision. Gingrich made mistakes that hurt the GOP. And Dick Morris, the consultant who had guided Clinton since the early 1980s, gave cynical advice that enabled the White House to exploit Republican missteps. The book quotes Democratic pollster Pat Caddell: "When Clinton lost the [Arkansas gubernatorial] election in 1980, he sold his soul to the Devil, and the Devil sent him to Dickie Morris."

Perhaps he is not demonic, but Morris is definitely slimy. He originally signed a confidentiality agreement with the Clinton campaign, but right after it expired at the end of 1995, he weaseled his way out of signing an extension while secretly negotiating a $2.5 million book deal. When the deal became public, White House press secretary Mike McCurry said: "It does some violence to the concept of disclosure that we are attempting to establish." Ouch. Having "Stonewall" McCurry criticize your lack of candor is like having Mike Tyson disparage your table manners.

Morris's book, Behind the Oval Office,
is revealing in a peculiar, unintentional way. A notorious tabloid story about his relationship with a prostitute ended his formal involvement with the Clinton campaign in August 1996. Morris writes that the trysts began in mid-1995, after President Clinton gave a Morris-inspired address about fiscal responsibility. Feeling a "sense of triumph," he thought he "could get away with anything." Only in Washington could someone regard a balanced-budget speech as an aphrodisiac.

In the text, Morris tries to stay in the good graces of future Democratic clients by explaining away his past Republican involvements (political, not sexual). He says he worked in the Jesse Helms 1990 re-election campaign because he "misjudged" the North Carolina senator. Yeah, right. By 1990, Helms had served for 18 years and had established a reputation for consistency, if not rigidity. Anyone who can work for both Helms and Clinton cannot care about principle, which is why Washington insiders tell this joke: "Why didn't the prostitute charge Dick Morris for her services? Professional courtesy."

Morris is still trying to butter up Clinton. Notwithstanding some mild pro forma criticisms, he heaps praise upon the president, including this jaw-dropper: "Lincoln and Clinton, it seemed to me, had a lot in common." That statement rings true only to those who can picture an evasive, lecherous, pudgy Lincoln.

Equally preposterous is this statement: "Race played no role in the 1996 presidential election even though anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action ballot propositions threatened to make it the most racial of recent contests." Race played no role? In a way, it decided the election. According to the Voter News Service (a polling service jointly used by many news organizations) exit poll, non-Hispanic white voters favored Dole (46 percent) over Clinton (43 percent). The president won because of overwhelming support among blacks (84 percent) and Latinos (72 percent). In part, his margin reflected the longstanding Democratic advantage among ethnic minorities, but it also resulted from efforts to demonize opponents of racial preferences. While Democrats gained among voters who supported preferences, Republicans scored few points on the other side. Many stayed mum on the issue because they feared that Democrats would brand them church-burning bigots.

Morris is a man of some intelligence, and his book occasionally offers insights. Democratic political operatives, he says, "don't really know many Republicans well and often imagine them to be secretly evil." With his bipartisan experience, Morris
understood how to flank Republican strengths and anticipate Republican weaknesses. After the 1994 election, he correctly argued that Clinton could dilute the GOP's appeal by embracing large portions of its policy agenda. And he also knew that Dole would flop with the tax issue--not because people liked taxes but because they doubted Dole would actually cut them.

Notwithstanding these spurts of straight political analysis, Morris's relationship with the truth was strictly a series of one-night stands. When he fell, many Democrats cheered. As Michael Lewis observes in Trail Fever, this response was "a reaction to being constantly told by people like Dick Morris that gray is white and two and two make five."

Based on a series of articles in The New Republic, Lewis's book is better than the Morris memoir or the Newsweek mishmash. Throughout 1996, Lewis hung around the edges of the presidential campaign, making witty, novelistic observations that other reporters envied. Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar "resembles a mechanical toy into which someone has inserted batteries one size too large." Alan Keyes, the black social conservative, "looks as if his joints could use a few squirts of WD-40." And Al Gore's conversation is "littered with 'frankly's' and 'to-be-honest-with-you's' and 'it-is-my-understanding's,' all of which translate into civilian English as 'I'm never going to tell you the truth about anything, so why on earth are you asking?'"

Lewis has a special affection for wheel magnate Morry "Grizz" Taylor, a minor candidate in the GOP primaries. Lewis calls the inarticulate Taylor "a truly representative citizen, who felt genuinely the same desires and ideals that motivate the mythical average American." Throughout Trail Fever, he uses Taylor's lack of political skill as a counterpoint to the more polished and manipulative figures in the campaign.

Unfortunately, Lewis carries this shtick too far, failing to note that Taylor simply did not know what he was talking about. He touted a demagogic protectionism: "Fair trade, not free trade--look out for Americans first!" And his "plan" for balancing the budget consisted of a proposal to fire one-third of federal managers, "starting at the top, but not anyone who is doing the work." In 1996, personnel costs for all civilian employees of the executive branch came to $73 billion, so
he could not have balanced the budget even if he had sacked everyone down to
the lowliest clerk. Taylor made Perot look like the patron saint of exactitude.

In contrast to his gushing treatment of Taylor, Lewis heaps scorn on the other self-financed millionaire candidate, Steve Forbes. Belittling Forbes's support for supply-side economics, Lewis says the Reagan tax cuts "had no measurable impact on the economy's growth rate." Huh? Where was Lewis during the longest peacetime expansion in American history? Even if he had been in a coma throughout the 1980s, he still could have looked at Lawrence Lindsay's 1990 book The Growth Experiment for a thorough account of how the tax cuts stimulated economic expansion. Guess he was too busy reading Morry Taylor's wisdom.

Lewis makes fun of Forbes's nerdy manner without understanding that it was a tremendous political asset. After all, we nerds are the sleeping giant of American politics. Not only do we cast millions of votes, but we rule large sectors of the economy, such as computer software and biotechnology. Every time Forbes flashed his awkward smile on television, we saw our champion. Each one of us could shout, "I am somebody!"

Apart from its economic illiteracy and anti-nerd prejudice, Trail Fever is generally amusing. Alas, it is no more than that, since Lewis aspires only to serve up a plateful of smirks. In Whatever It Takes, Elizabeth Drew takes a different and more satisfying approach. At the outset, she explains her purpose by quoting anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist (See "Happy Warrior," February.): "This is not going to be a Presidential race--it's going to be a race for the House, the Senate, governorships, the state legislatures--and some butthead who wants to be President."

Instead of focusing on the campaign for the White House, Drew examines the struggle for control of Congress. Her main characters are the party leaders and their interest-group allies. The Republicans worked with organizations ranging from Americans for Tax Reform to the Christian Coalition to the National Beer Wholesalers Association. (If you wonder why the beer wholesalers are in the mix, remember that they work in just about every district and suffer badly when federal excise taxes go up.) The Dems had the AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters, and Emily's List, a feminist group that "bundles" campaign contributions.

Drew's key insight is that the interests of the presidential candidate may clash with those of the party. By mid-autumn of 1996, it was clear that Bob Dole was crashing and that he could take congressional Republicans with him. At this point, Drew reports, Republican leaders and their coalition partners explicitly decided to ditch Dole and concentrate their resources on holding Capitol Hill. In the final days, the Republicans produced an ad that took Clinton's re-election for granted, warning voters not to give him a "blank check" by electing a Democratic Congress. Says Drew: "It was as close as the Republicans could come to not garrotting Dole publicly." On the Democratic side, President
Clinton did eventually decide to devote party resources to congressional races--
but only after his own re-election was certain. Congressional Democrats grumbled
that an earlier and deeper commitment could have put them over the top.

Drew is generally fair, but her own political biases peek out at times, especially in her account of Dole's acceptance speech. He issued a rebuke of Boutros Boutros-
Ghali that "was code for racism," and he "inexplicably attacked teachers unions." Drew's criticism rests on the dubious assumption that the world is better off because of the U.N.'s socialist bureaucracy and the NEA's choke hold on American education.

A more fundamental problem with Whatever It Takes is that it overemphasizes Washington. Drew does offer sketches of the national political conventions and the re-election races of a few House members. But most of the book describes who said what to whom at which meeting inside a Washington office building. If Drew had really taken Norquist's comments to heart, she would have gone to places such as Tallahassee and Sacramento, so that she could explain the historic shift of power in America's statehouses. Republicans made massive advances in the 1994 state legislative elections, in some states winning their first majorities since Reconstruction. In 1996, despite setbacks in California and a few other places, they kept most of these gains. And the GOP trend is even more striking at the gubernatorial level. Republicans now hold governorships in 32 states, comprising three-fourths of the nation's population.

The statehouse shift is crucial. With at least some federal power devolving to the states, Republicans are now in a better position to shape domestic public policy. And unless they suffer unexpected reversals, they will have enormous influence over the redrawing of congressional district lines after the next census.

What accounts for the depth and breadth of these changes? None of these four books comes close to answering this question, because they're mainly about personalities instead of ideas. A far-reaching account of recent elections would explain why Americans grew weary of government intervention and how Republicans appealed to that sentiment. It would also take a hard look at how Republicans are using their newfound power in Washington and the states, and ask whether they are botching their chance to bring about real reform.

To paraphrase an apocryphal Yogi Berra quotation, one can hear a lot just by listening. In the 1996 campaign, you didn't need to be an investigative journalist to tell that Bob Dole's brain was an idea-free zone: All you had to do was catch his disjointed speeches and shallow policy proposals. So here's an idea for would-be chroniclers of the next campaign: Forget about tracking the turf wars among staffers or finding clever ways to describe cheesy political rallies. Instead, just heed what the candidates actually say. When they make sense, explain why. When they engage in flim-flams, expose them by checking their facts and analyzing their logic. Even the most insincere speeches are worth noting, because they have a way of haunting candidates after they take office. If you didn't get that, read my lips.