The Week

National Review, June 30, 2003

--The editorial material below was checked by Dorothy McCartney, John Virtes, Julie Crane, Sarah Maserati, Emmy Chang, Duncan Currie, and Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky. The stylistic guidelines were set by Fowler and by the King James Bible Committee. The philosophical parameters were set by William F. Buckley Jr., G. K. Chesterton, Fisher Ames, and Samuel Johnson. The coffee came from around the corner. Genius comes from on high.

-- The tax cut that President Bush just signed expands the tax credit for children. Democrats are savaging the Republicans for not extending the credit to millions of low-income families. House Republicans responded that the tax credit shouldn't be extended to people who already pay no income taxes. The credit was designed to offset income- tax liability, not simply to give people money. The sophisticated liberal rejoinder is that the people in question deserve relief because they pay payroll taxes, even if they do not pay income taxes. But the prevailing pretense, supported by liberals above all, has been that the payroll tax is a kind of worker contribution to his own retirement fund -- something separate from the taxes levied to support the general operations of the government. In any case, there is already another tax credit designed to offset payroll taxes. Rather than defend the easily grasped principle that tax relief should go to the people who pay the tax, President Bush and all but two Senate Republicans quickly headed for the tall grass. They have done what they can to foster the impression that they tried to leave poor people in the cold but got caught and shamefacedly backtracked. Nice work, guys.

-- In the late 1990s, the Republican party decided to acquiesce to the apparently irresistible demand for a federal entitlement subsidizing prescription drugs for the elderly. President Bush has insisted, however, that the addition of such an entitlement to Medicare be accompanied by free-market reform. Congressional Republicans now appear to be abandoning even this line. Their leading plans have only a few elements of choice, and those heavily regulated. The danger is not only that the new entitlement will be a budget-buster. It is also that it will give rise to de facto price controls on drugs, just as Medicare itself has led to such controls in the health industry. If that happens, the pharmaceutical innovations that have benefited all of us will come to a halt. Our advice to readers is to start looking into alternative medicine.

-- You have read Mrs. Clinton's book, Living History? You haven't? Why read all 562 pages when the press is already rehashing the sordid story of the Clintons' sexual politics, and the lies they did or didn't tell themselves, and the nation? Either Mrs. Clinton coldly colluded with her dishonest husband, or she is a pathetically damaged soul. Perhaps both are true. If she were telling her tale to save face or to alter the record, we could do the decent thing and avert our eyes. But since a long political career lies ahead of her, she forces us to contemplate her once again. When will we be done with her? When will she be done with us?

-- Many people, and not just conservatives, found occasion for mirth in Bill Clinton's recent proclamation that we need to modify the constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms. Far be it from us to suggest that his comments were anything but the product of self-interest, nay, self-worship; but President Reagan favored the outright repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Whatever the merits of Clinton's modification, it is encouraging that the 42nd president judged constitutional tweaking to be necessary -- there is evidently, even among liberals, a limit to the constitutional legerdemain that the courts can be asked to perform.

-- Sen. Bob Graham may be known for his voluminous, meticulous, and weirdly mundane diaries -- but he ought to be better known for his increasingly unhinged rhetoric. Graham is a moderate Democratic politician from Florida -- but, as he runs in the Democratic presidential primaries, he's forced to sound like a left-wing nut. Here's the candidate on the Bush administration: "There has been a Nixonian stench to the continued practice of putting the American people in the dark." And here he is on the president himself: "[Bush] should stop ignoring the needs of the American people in order to enrich the pockets of a privileged few." Okay, okay, Bob, we get it: You're running for the Democratic nomination. But you don't have to sound like a street-corner Marxist, ca. 1934. You probably won't fool any Democratic primary voters -- they know you're not crazy. And you will have lost the respect of the rest of us.

-- Retail politics can be a transcendent joy. One Maggie North, in Claremont, N.H., explained to reporters that in 2000 she had sprung for Ralph Nader, and in the current contest she finds Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun closest to her Weltanschauung. But realism breaking in and rising above principle, she has decided to go with a winner -- and thus hosted a reception for Howard Dean.