David Corn's
Loyal Opposition

Wednesday, October 20, 1999

W.'s Comparative Compassion

Do the Republicans in Washington have a secret plan to make Texas Governor George W. Bush appear reasonable? First the House Republicans float the idea of delaying tax credits for the working poor--not, say, corporate welfare subsidies--in order to complete spending legislation that falls within pre-established limits, and W. ends up looking like a prince when he denounces that idea. (Over the fence!) Then the Senate Republicans, with the right wing yahoos fully in charge, vote not just to put off acceptance of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, but to reject it outright. When it became clear that President Clinton did not have the two-thirds vote necessary to ratify the accord, which would ban underground nuclear testing, 62 members of the Senate signed a letter maintaining it was best to push the matter aside. They did not want the rest of the world to view the United States, the number-one nuclear power, as an atomic bully telling other nations--154 countries had signed the treaty--it doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks about nuclear proliferation. But Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, doing the bidding of mad-dog conservatives led by Senators Jesse Helms and James Inhofe, insisted on an up-or-down vote on the treaty.

Given that Washington's west European allies (including the nuclear powers of England and France) had beseeched the Senate to ratify the treaty, that the secretary general of NATO had urged its passage, and that South Korea and Japan--which have more to fear than does the United States from North Korea's reported attempts to go nuclear--had declared their support for ratification, the wing-nuts were shoving a nuclear-tipped stick into the eyes of Washington's strategic partners, as well as Russia, China and others awaiting US acceptance of the treaty. The anti-treaty Republicans could have avoided alienating so many friends abroad by placing the treaty into a coma. Instead, they pulled the plug and jumped up and down on the remains--and uncorked the champagne. Since the treaty was, in their eyes, an extension of Bill Clinton, Helms and his gang could not muster a smidgen of restraint. While there were technical policy disputes as to the efficacy of the treaty and the means to verify it, politics dominated its disposition. The Republicans appeared petulant, adolescent legislators seeking to settle a score with the unconvicted Clinton, even if that meant telling allies to piss off and nuclear wannabes around the globe to let-'er-rip.

W. has to look good in comparison. He, too, condemned the treaty--but without expressing glee at its demise. His party comrades in Washington, with their nasty-as-they-can-be ways, are helping W. come across as a different kind of GOPer. His campaign strategists are probably egging on the congressional Republicans to further acts of infantilism and spite. That will provide W. more opportunity to show he is the un-Gingrich.

Bush began his separation dance when he branded himself a "compassionate conservative." What did that imply about _other_ conservatives? But as the presidential campaign progresses, it's due time to examine how W. has served his supposed compassion. The Houston Chronicle recently reviewed W.’s record as Texas governor to provide guidance on this front. Though the article did not mention this, we should remember that the Texas governor is a constitutionally weak office. And the Texas legislator that Bush governs meets every other year for only 140 days. That means that in Bush's five years in office, he has presided over an in-session legislature for about 400 days--which is only one-and-a-half year's worth of work.

The Chronicle scorecard, cooked up by reporter Polly Ross Hughes, selected several policy areas in which to judge W.'s compassion: health insurance, immigrants, abused children, adoption, welfare, and the disabled. It found that on several fronts he had acted to assist the less fortunate. He signed a bill that would require insurance companies to treat mental illness more like physical ailments. He pushed a measure to speed up adoptions. He added $200 million to the state budget to hire more caseworkers and support staff for agencies handling abused and neglected children. He also recently announced a state food-aid program for old and infirmed immigrants--people who were cut from the food stamps program by the welfare legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1996.

But Bush's compassion has its limits. He waited several years before initiating the food-aid project. The money for the child-abuse programs was significant but not sufficient. "The amount of money was a real big step," said District Judge Scott McCown, who issued a report on child abuse deaths in Texas. "It's not going to solve the problem. It's not enough. It's not going to make Texas a Cadillac agency, but at least you can keep the Chevy running." Bush called for banning adoptions by gay or single people. When it came to his own version of welfare reform, W. wanted to cut assistance to children if a parent had a felony drug conviction or refused to work. Bush also pushed another draconian measure to impose a lifetime benefits ban on a welfare family if one of its members were convicted of a felony drug crime. (Several church groups opposed Bush on welfare legislation, and the state legislature rejected his get-tough measures.) Last spring, Bush tried to restrict the number of children covered under a new children's health insurance program. The Democrats in the state House of Representatives wanted to include families that earned up to 200 percent of poverty. Bush fought for 150 percent--and lost. "The governor tried very hard to make the program serve significantly fewer children in Texas than we ultimately will serve," said State Representative Elliott Naishtat, a Democrat. Critics of W. in Texas point out he devoted more energy to a bill granting a tax break to oil companies than he did to the legislation for the children's health insurance program. Moreover, Bush initially opposed--but eventually signed--a bill that ensured children in families moving off welfare would not be automatically dropped from Medicaid.

Bush's compassion is selective. If you're an abused kid, you might get some attention from him. If you're the provider in a low-income family--but not too-low--don't ask him for help for your children's health care needs. (And he has not displayed much compassion for asthma sufferers. Last week, The Washington Post vetted W.'s boast that air in Texas is cleaner than when he assumed office in 1995. "There is statistical evidence," the newspaper concluded, "that the air in Texas cities is as foul--and perhaps more so--than when Bush took power.") Bush is no kill-the-state Republican, which probably does irritate Steve Forbes and the who-cares-about-compassion conservatives, but he sure is not a champion of comprehensive compassion. Fortunately for him, given what occurs elsewhere in the GOP, it's not hard to appear a saint in that party.

There's Something About Hillary

Call it the Attack of the Bottle Blonde Republicans. In the next few months, Barbara Olson, Laura Ingraham and Peggy Noonan will be releasing books on Hillary Rodham Clinton. (To be fair, I have never seen Noonan's roots. She may well be all natural.) Olson, a former Capital Hill aide who became an on-air Clinton-basher during Monica Madness, has written "Hell To Pay--The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton," which is being published by Regnery, a conservative house that most recently brought us Pat Buchanan's soft-on-Hitler-before-1941 tract. Olson's book jacket promises a depiction of "the real Hillary Clinton--a woman whose lust for power surpasses even that of her husband." (Past law firm and congressional colleagues of Olson note that the author is a woman not unfamiliar with such lust.) Ingraham is crashing on "The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Right Places," which she says is a portrait, not a biography, showing HRC as "a symbol of where women are today, of the conflicts that animate women's lives on a professional and personal level." Hillary as Everywoman? As if being the yuppie-helpmate to a scoundrel pol is emblematic of anything. Noonan, the former Ronald Reagan speech writer, is producing "The Case Against Hillary Clinton." (Is that the book that soon-to-be-gone independent counsel Kenneth Starr never finished?) Noonan's editor at the Judith Regan imprint of HarperCollinis told The Washington Post, "It's not a biography or journalistic piece, per se. She looks at the record and raises a lot of serious questions." No answers, then? Haven't all the serious questions about Lady Clinton already been raised?

Other Hillary books are growing within the computers of biographer/amateur shrink Gail Sheehy and former Watergate muckster Carl Bernstein. But the Olson, Ingraham, and Noonan volumes are likely to continue the right's vendetta against the First Victim. Regular readers know this column is not friendly turf for Hillary Clinton. My wish is that she and her costar in our national soap opera depart the stage once The Bill Clinton Show ends its run in January 2001. I am not hankering for a spin-off. Still, even as a non-apologist for Hillary, I cannot fathom the obsession and hatred that the cons have for the woman. In rightist circles she is scorned as a closet commie who is the real power behind Clinton, an idealistic and ideological radical in the wings, waiting for the moment when she can grab power and impose Mao-like social engineering schemes upon the citizenry.

Where's the evidence? She has been as pragmatic--to be polite about it-- as her husband. When she had her chance to create a comprehensive health care plan, she devised a Rube Goldberg thingamajig designed foremost not to alienate or antagonize the business community. Can't pass a plan in Congress, if the business lobbyists are against it, her aides repeatedly told people throughout Washington. It didn't work. No one could understand her proposal, and corporate America still shot her the finger. Hillary stood by her man as he signed the GOP's welfare bill, broke with labor on Nafta, did little regarding global warming, and engaged in campaign fundraising that defied good taste and decency, as well as the spirit of campaign finance reform law. She reenlisted consultant Dick Morris--the anti-idealist--for the Clinton cause after the Republicans dethroned the Democrats in Congress in 1994. Her pre-White House endeavors at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, her involvement in the Whitewater deal, and her suspicious $100,000-from-$1000 commodities deal illustrate she is no profit-averse leftie antipathetic to the market and free enterprise. Even when the truth emerged about Bill's internphilia, Hillary was not a gung-ho defender. She not-too-subtly advertised her distance. So far, in her all-but-announced Senate campaign, she has separated herself from Bill by denouncing the clemency offer for the jailed Puerto Rican nationalists, by declaring her support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and by urging more federal funds for teaching hospitals in New York. These are not the positions of a wild-eyed, ideologically rigid leftist.

Hillary has shown as much flexibility as her partner. Yet many on the right still picture her as a closet revolutionary coming for your children. There is something about HRC that drives conservatives crazy. That's almost a reason to toss a contribution into her carpetbag.

Ronnie's Kids

The left, too, had its own thing about Reagan. I'll fess up to that. Just as the right cannot believe the American public fell for Clinton _and_ then stuck with him after he defiled the Oval Office, liberals and progressives had a tough time accepting the fact that the public embraced Reagan, a factually-challenged fellow who owned more horses than books. Consequently, they continue to battle with the Cult of Reagan. The Cult of Reagan? In case you didn't know, there are people in Washington and elsewhere who are attempting to attach Reagan's name to federal buildings, mountains, highways and the like across the nation. (In California they succeeded in creating the "Gipperplate," a commemorative license plate and the nation's first to display the face of a real person.) These Reaganauts rush into battle whenever his reputation is besmirched. Since Edmund Morris's factual/fictitious nonbiography of Reagan arrived, they have been in overdrive.

What is surprising is that some cultists are now acknowledging that, yes, Reagan was not always on the ball. They must have calculated that they had to offer this concession (that is, to not challenge the obvious) in order to maintain the credibility required to press the _larger_ point: Reagan won the Cold War and that's what you need know of him. Historians will debate for decades whether the Soviet Union crumbled because of Reagan's rhetorical jabs and his deficit-causing boosts to the US military budget. But it has been entertaining to see how Reagan has come to be defended by his most ardent defenders. I recently debated Dinesh D'Souza, an arch-Reaganite who worked in the Reagan White House and then wrote a book praising the man, and within the opening seconds this leading Reagan cultist admitted that Reagan did employ a "metaphorical rhetoric, if you will, which was sometimes factually inaccurate." Sounds like fancy talk for lying. I don't recall Reagan's spokespeople at the time briefing the press on his "metaphorical rhetoric." ("When the President said that trees cause more pollution than automobiles, that actually was 'metaphorical rhetoric' not to be confused with actual reality....") What truly shocked was that D'Souza's case for Reagan has become so one-dimensional. I asked him about several notable Reagan episodes: his decision to ignore the AIDS epidemic, his "constructive engagement" with the racist government of South Africa, the HUD scandal, the Iran-contra scandal, his support of death-squad-linked armies in Guatemala and El Salvador, his secret dealings with Panama's drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega, and the 239 American troops killed in Beirut after Reagan dispatched them there on an ill-defined mission. "It's all true," D'Souza replied, "and yet none of it matters." Why? Because, D'Souza explained, Reagan "realized Soviet communism was imprisoning millions of people."

That's astounding. Reaganites used to try to defend "Our Man"--as a recent National Review issue called him--on these fronts. Now D'Souza folds and pronounces them trifling topics. So let's put a President who bolstered racists in Africa and torturers in Central America on Mount Rushmore. Fortunately, the American public--which, granted, did elect the ex-actor twice--has not fallen under the sway of the Cult of Reagan. A recent ABC News poll asked respondents to chose the "greatest historical figure in this century." John Kennedy won with 11 percent. (Nothing succeeds like dash and style--and dying young.) FDR placed with 8 percent, and Martin Luther King Jr. collected 7 percent. Winston Churchill, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln (see how dumb people can be) all finished ahead of Reagan, who was cited by 2 percent. Others who fell into the 2-percent category were Adolf Hitler and Bill Clinton.

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