The Week - news of the week

National Review, June 28, 1999

* Barney Frank has an interview in the current Playboy, along with "The Girls of Hawaiian Tropic." Think of it as coalition-building.

* George W. Bush is touting the budget he recently signed into law as a triumph of compassionate conservatism that demonstrates he is ready for the White House. Really? The good news is that Bush cut property and business taxes by $2 billion over two years. But this achievement must be measured against a $6 billion surplus. Spending is scheduled to rise from $89 to $98 billion over the next two years. Much of this spending will go to raising teacher pay-the biggest component of Bush's vaunted education reforms. This step is popular, but there is no reason to believe it will do anything at all to improve student achievement. Teacher pay has risen for the last 20 years without such an effect, and many private schools manage to perform better than public schools despite paying lower salaries. It's a decent finish to the legislative session. But the fact that Republicans are congratulating Bush so heartily suggests that their expectations for him aren't so high after all.

* So why aren't more people outraged by the Clinton administration's lackadaisical approach to Chinese espionage? Maybe because they haven't heard about it. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center points out that the top three networks treated the Cox report as a one-day story. NBC's coverage was typical: The Nightly News ran a story the day the report was released, and the next morning Today interviewed two Democrats on the subject-and that's it. No attempt to push the story forward. No grim anchors on the White House lawn saying, day after day, "The administration continues to be dogged by serious allegations . . ." The only way to get the media to do their job may be to elect a Republican president.

* When congressional Republicans struck a budget deal with Bill Clinton in 1997, we protested that its "spending limits" were much too high and predicted that, even so, they would quickly be surpassed. Two years later, Republicans are engaged in the delicate task of pretending to adhere to those limits while preparing to break them. Still at issue: whether to raid Social Security to fund other domestic programs, which Republicans even yesterday pledged not to do, or to raid the defense budget instead. It does not help that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, is also the chairman of one of the appropriations subcommittees designed for the sole purpose of spending money. Come to think of it, the entire budget-writing process was designed by Democrats to promote bigger government. No surprise, then, that Republicans are behaving like Democrats.

* Mrs. Clinton has taken the first steps in offering herself to the voters of New York as a candidate for the Senate. Why on earth are the Democrats so gleeful? Consider the possible outcomes. Alternative One: Her non-moderation, non-residence, and non-warmth will generate a winning turnout for Mayor Giuliani, an old hat, or whomever the GOP puts up. Alternative Two: New Yorkers will revert to liberal type-this, after all, is the state that produced Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, and John Lindsay, and they were Republicans-and put her in the Senate, in which case the Democrats will suffer through years of rehashing the Clinton legacy, feverishly chattering about 2004, and experiencing the balm of the Mrs.'s personality.

* For two years, Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, resisted conservative entreaties that he force a political debate on judicial imperialism rather than rubber-stamp Clinton's nominees. That would be too radical, he said, and would politicize the judiciary. Now Hatch is holding up all of Clinton's nominees-but only because Clinton refuses to nominate a Hatch ally, the chief of staff to Utah governor Mike Leavitt, for a district-court vacancy. Hatch may well be tempted to make a deal in which Clinton yields and he agrees to confirm Clinton's nominees to the far more important courts of appeals. If Hatch must have this judgeship, he should charge it to Clinton for services rendered.

* New York City police officer Justin Volpe pleaded guilty to torturing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima; by the time these words appear, the jury will probably have ruled on the cops who allegedly colluded with him, and lied about it. Justice done? Not according to the city's racial profiteers. They do not object to lying per se (Al Sharpton still endorses Tawana Brawley's fantasies), nor are they strangers to violence (one of Sharpton's colleagues in protest killed half a dozen shoppers at the white-owned Freddie's Fashion Mart in Harlem). What they cannot abide is a white mayor who has ignored their theatrics while bringing down the number of homicides by 1,600 per year. What New Yorkers must fear is a shift from crime-fighting to racial posturing and moral paralysis. That will lead, as it did throughout the Seventies, Eighties, and early Nineties, to disorder and death.