Bush: Temporary Like Achilles
Bush: Temporary Like Achilles
All savvy politicians, regardless of their unique abilities, have one gift in common: luck. And George W. Bush, throughout his career in public service, has had four-leaf clovers growing out of his ears.
He defeated the popular Democratic governor Ann Richards in Texas amid the nationwide Republican 1994 landslide. After Bob Dole's disastrous '96 campaign against Bill Clinton (talk about luck), GOP powerbrokers immediately anointed Bush as the most likely nominee, by dint of name recognition, relative youth, immense popularity in Texas and fundraising ability, to win the presidency in 2000. Despite an economy that was perceived as robust and a global terrorism network still not considered a threat to the U.S., Vice President Al Gore conducted one of the most inept campaigns in modern history, unable to capitalize on any number of Bush's strategic blunders. Had Bush disclosed his innocuous DWI arrest in the 1970s early in the campaign, instead of allowing Democrats to spill the beans the weekend before the election, he'd have won the popular vote.
Currently, with the media and Congress awash in an avalanche of contradictory (and confusing) reactions to the burst of corporate scandals, Bush has almost matched his politically motivated detractors with a lot of mush on the subject. Why in the world did the President give his speech about cleaning up Big Business on Wall Street last week, during the day?when it could and did affect the markets?instead of addressing the nation in a primetime address televised from the White House? I had little quarrel with his actual rhetoric, and he's correct to tread more lightly than Rip Van Sarbanes (D-MD), the Eliot Spitzer of the U.S. Senate who hasn't made headlines since the Watergate hearings, but Bush insulted the American public by not speaking to them directly.
However, despite the obits written daily about Republicans in the November midterm elections, and Bush's own campaign in 2004, the soothsayers forget that it's July, probably the best month of the year for unfavorable publicity to be spilled across the front pages of The New York Times. I suppose it's possible that the uproar over criminal activities in the boardrooms of blue-chip, and less prestigious, companies (and when, I wonder, will the questionable accounting practices of the entertainment industry be put under the microscope?) could continue until this fall, but it's unlikely. The Dow and NASDAQ will probably stabilize by Labor Day; the overall economy is slowly improving; and the media, once it's tired of rehashing Bush's small-beer involvement with Harken Energy, will turn to other targets.
Like moral crusader Dick Gephardt's unsecured $125,000 loan in 1988 from Federal City Bank, founded by current DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Or Joe Lieberman's cozy relationship with insurance firms, military contractors and pharmaceutical companies in Connecticut. Lieberman, appearing on ABC's This Week last Sunday, put on his customary holier-than-thou mask and claimed, "Because of the President's involvement in the Harken Energy case, there is a large cloud hanging over his head. I am afraid if he doesn't eliminate it soon by giving full disclosure [the suspicions] will diminish his moral authority..." Commerce Secretary Don Evans said on Fox News Sunday: "This [the Harken nonstory] is nothing but political garbage that the American people are sick and tired of."
In the latest Gallup Poll, conducted July 9-11, those surveyed gave Bush a 73-percent job approval rating, and 61 percent said that the President did nothing wrong in the Harken matter or had no opinion about it.
And, as the New York Post's Deborah Orin reported on July 11, Tom Daschle's personal financial record isn't pristine. His lobbyist wife Linda does business with dozens of major companies, including American Airlines, Boeing, Northwest Airlines, L-3 Communications and Loral Space. The Daschles, unlike Bush, won't release their tax returns. But although Linda Daschle's 2001 $460,000 fee from Loral?which paid a $14 million fine for illegally sending missile technology to China?may be completely honest, it's a bit rich when the Majority Leader insists Bush release every document relating to his Harken loan.
The Washington Post's Thomas Edsall, on July 13, ran a short item on page five about 16 U.S. senators flying from DC to Nantucket on corporate jets "for a weekend retreat with 250 major campaign donors." It happens that these members of Congress were all Democrats, otherwise it would probably have been on page one in the Times that day.
Edsall reports: "Asked about the propriety of Democrats?many of whom have criticized President Bush and Congressional Republicans for their ties to corporations accused of accounting abuses?voting to close debate on corporate-accountability legislation and then flying to a resort on corporate jets [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokeswoman Tovah] Ravitz-Meehan said: 'I don't think there is any tie between the vote and their mode of travel.' Getting to Nantucket, she said, is 'logistically difficult, and expensive to reach commercially.'"
This is a hoot. First of all, I've flown to Nantucket some 25 times and it's neither expensive nor "logistically difficult" to get to. Second, among the impoverished senators who needed to hitch rides on the jets of companies such as BellSouth, Eli Lilly and AFLAC, were multimillionaires John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Teddy Kennedy and Jon Corzine. You'd think that Kerry, an all-but-announced 2004 presidential candidate, might've dipped into his personal fortune and paid for the jaunt himself, if only to prove he's not beholden to corporate charity.
I'm not saying it's only Democrats who'll get the treatment from reporters who can't read a spreadsheet: every politician, especially those running for office in November, will be investigated. Already, the Senate race in North Carolina pitting Elizabeth Dole against former Clinton adviser Erskine Bowles (assuming he survives a nominal primary fight) is a casualty of the media's laughable moral fervor.
Gov. George Pataki, on the other hand, is in the pink. Not only has he received union endorsements and snatched Hispanic support from challengers Carl McCall and Andy Cuomo, but as the Daily News reported on Monday, diehard Democrats like Miramax's Harvey Weinstein and DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg have donated close to $70,000 to the incumbent Republican so far. Weinstein, who dined with Pataki and Katzenberg recently at Tribeca Grill, said: "I will be raising a significant amount of money [for Pataki], as will Jeffrey." He added that the names of other Democratic contributors "will be surprising."
More importantly, what are the odds that between now and November a series of international or domestic crises won't occur? Maybe the Democrats do have a bulletproof issue to win back the House and expand their slim majority in the Senate, but I'll wait until after Labor Day before making any predictions. As for Bush's reelection campaign, has everyone forgotten how vulnerable Bill Clinton was (and this was pre-Monica) in the spring of 1995? Just before he effectively mourned with the country over the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton was forced to claim he was still relevant. (Not that Clinton even visited the site of the first attack on the World Trade Center in '93, figuring why bother since New York was already in the bag for him electorally.)
The best commentary I read last week on the corporate panic came from The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger. On July 12, he wrote: "Here is one thing we know to be absolutely, verifiably, provably true about the recent cycle of stories alleging corporate fraud: The Senate on Wednesday voted 97-0 for a bill sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to create a new corporate fraud chapter in the U.S. criminal code.
"Let's deconstruct that true sentence to see what it adds to our knowledge of corporate fraud in America.
"The Senate vote 97 to zero. Ipso facto, this means the Senate's need to think in any serious or detailed way about what they were voting on was also approximately zero.
"The bill was sponsored by Patrick Leahy of Vermont. That is, the Senate's answer to the issue of corporate governance in the United States has been provided by a Democrat from a state whose most famous company is Ben & Jerry's ice cream and where most presumably thoughtful people drive cars made in Sweden.
"Finally, the forbidden action that the Senate's bill would enshrine in the U.S. criminal code is described as a 'scheme or artifice.' I take it back. They did think about this. The members of the Senate all know the meaning of 'scheme or artifice.'"
Henninger's words obviously mean nothing to the partisan, follow-the-pack mainstream press.
On July 14, the Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe all ran front-page stories about the plight of senior citizens who've seen their investments dwindle in the last two-plus years. As the dailies not-so-subtly point out, older Americans vote more than other demographic groups, so Republicans beware!
The Times: "As the owners of an Atlanta advertising agency that billed $40 million a year, Jim and Jan Pringle were featured in a cover article in Inc. magazine asking, 'What's the best time to retire?' In January 2000, with the Dow well above 10,000, they were confident they had picked the right time... The Pringles have since lost about 75 percent of their investment. Far from taking any trips to Europe, they have done what they vowed never to do: mortgaged their house and gone back to work."
The Globe: "Pat and Larry Roop had never expected luxury or riches in retirement. At most, they'd daydreamed about a log cabin in a peaceful Maine town. But three years into a stock market plunge that now rivals the worst crashes in history, they worry that they'll have to work well into old age to pay the bills."
The Post: "In the late 1990s, newsstand operator Louis Taub, like many Americans, learned to treat the stock tables like the baseball standings, eagerly flipping through the business section to see just how high his stocks could soar. Now, Taub, like many others, can barely stand to look."
I'm with William Safire, who in a July 15 column placed blame not only on corporate crooks who deserve jail time, but greedy investors as well. He wrote: "But the capitalist system is not in crisis. In recent months, it has been doing what it is supposed to in the wake of every speculative binge: correcting itself. After a bubble bursts, people who have been deliriously blowing bubbles demand to know: How could 'they' have done this to us? But we, the investing people, have done it to ourselves, as we do in almost every generation.
"Because nobody likes to admit to self-delusion, we are scaping every goat in sight."
Times: Screw the Poor
On July 2, a Times editorialist thought the subject was appropriate for a flash of whimsy. The edit read, in part: "While we applaud anything that encourages New Yorkers to improve their health, we wonder what it would be like living in a city where residents are giving up their habit en masse. The smokers who used to stand outside office buildings in a monsoon will be indoors, twitching, tapping their fingers and snarling at the nice man at the coffee cart... New Yorkers, never known as laid-back sorts, have their share of everyday stress, and the last year has been predictably rough. The longest, hottest days of the year are upon us. Perhaps this was not the best time to test the will power of tens of thousands of people with a pack-a-day habit and limited income. We like the idea of less smoking, but we're worried about frightening the tourists."
So, that's the Times' opinion of some 16 percent of the city's residents, although probably a substantially lower percentage of its own readers.
Following the logic that it's kosher to tax anything that smacks of "sin," I expect the Times to endorse higher levies on alcohol and junk food, two more measures that would have an adverse effect on both small businesses and less-affluent New Yorkers. Executive editor Howell Raines can afford an extra $5 on a bottle of aged bourbon, but as for the people who'd suffer from spending two more bucks on a sixpack, well, let them drink tap water.
Now imagine the outcry from liberals and the likes of Frank Rich if Mayor Bloomberg imposed a $100 tax on abortions?
There are ways for the city to raise money and strike a blow for individual rights as well: legalize prostitution and marijuana. Not only would the NYPD's officers have more time to pursue real crime, but the vast infusion of income would have a substantial impact on the city's budget shortfall.
So Sorry, Mariano
It was nearing 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, with the Red Sox and Blue Jays tied at 3-3 in the fifth and the Yanks slaughtering the Indians 7-0 after only four innings. Smelling yet another Sox loss to Toronto, I took to the couch, muttered, "Bring on the strike!," read the July 22 Weekly Standard, then dozed off for an hour. Sure enough, the Jays won in the bottom of the ninth with a homer by Eric Hinske off Ugueth Urbina, wasting a decent effort by Pedro Martinez (eight Ks, one earned run) and a game-tying blast from Trot Nixon.
The Sox, who'd owned the Jays all season, lost three of four to the fire-sale team this past weekend, and I put a lot of blame on heretofore unimpeachable manager Grady Little. Why he sat down All-Stars Johnny Damon, Shea Hillenbrand and Nomar Garciaparra in three consecutive games is beyond me. Little's reasoning that those players deserved some rest smacks of Tom Yawkey's country-club atmosphere of years ago.
It's not as if Joe Torre didn't play Jason Giambi, Alfonso Soriano and Derek Jeter in every game against the Indians. In particular, if Garciaparra had been in the lineup on Sunday, I'm convinced the Sox would've won. And hey, Derek Lowe: Look in the mirror and do something about that hat size. Apparently Lowe bonded with the Jays' best starter, Roy Halladay, at the All-Star game, and after losing to Halladay on Saturday had nothing but praise for his opponent. Save it for the scrapbook, Derek, or the boobirds will be back at Fenway.
A glutton for bad baseball news, I clicked on the computer to assess the final damage from the Yanks' game, only to find the Indians had the bases loaded with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and were down by just a run, 7-6. And then Bill Selby, just recalled from the minors, hits a grand-slammer off Mariano Rivera to shock all New York fans and win the game for the Indians 10-7. I immediately turned to the YES station to gauge the reaction of the insufferable commentator Michael Kay, and that alone salvaged a crummy afternoon.
The Sox have three games at Yankee Stadium this weekend and I fear with Little's lax attitude the team could be already five games behind in the AL East. There was speculation in Sunday's New York Post (strenuously denied by both teams) that the Mets might deal former Sox star Mo Vaughn for Tony Clark by the July 31 trading deadline. I have no doubt pitcher Casey Fossum would also be included in that trade. What a dumb deal: Vaughn was one of my favorite Sox players, but he's washed up, while Fossum has perhaps a brilliant career in front of him.
Trading Fossum for Cleveland's Jim Thome would make sense, since the combo of Clark and Jose Offerman is a rally-killer in Boston's lineup, and I'd prefer to remember Mo's heroics in the 90s and let him live large on the inflated salary Mets GM Steve Phillips foolishly lavished on him during the offseason.
July 15
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