The Week - political events

National Review, August 9, 1999

* Okay, they've bought our presidency, stolen our nuclear secrets, and menaced Taiwan-but they can't beat our women's soccer team. Rah.

* Is George W. Bush starting to take conservative support for granted? Three recent signs point that way. First his spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, waffled on the minimum wage. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Bush would cut taxes only after funding Social Security, Medicare, and the military. "If there is any money left over, it ought to be returned to the people," said Bush, in a formulation indistinguishable from President Clinton's. And in Iowa, Bush called for "disaster relief" for farmers, the disaster being low prices. (To be fair, he also sensibly urged free trade in agriculture as a longer-term solution for farmers' difficulties.) We do hope W. isn't going to start standing for "wobbly."

* Bill Archer and William Roth, the chairmen of the House and Senate tax-writing committees, have introduced important tax-cut bills. Archer's plan is bolder in cutting income taxes and capital-gains taxes. Both bills, however, tackle the marriage penalty and the estate tax. And Roth's bill is the bolder when it comes to tax cuts for savings and investment. Either bill would reduce federal revenue by an estimated $800 billion over ten years. President Clinton says this is reckless. A liberal think tank warns that Archer's bill would reduce revenues by $3 trillion in the second decade after passage and warns us to think of the long run. But as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett points out, this is silly: Projections that far ahead are meaningless, and Congress could always raise taxes later if it had to. Besides, the same projections show that GDP over that second decade will be $173 trillion. Republicans should combine the best features of both bills. Send the tax cuts to President Clinton, and the money out of Washington.

* Rep. Michael Forbes, of eastern Long Island, left the GOP for the Democratic party. His walk was hardly a matter of principle. Forbes first won his seat as an opponent of abortion and gun control and a supporter of the Contract with America. He was shunned by the leadership after voting in 1997 to oust Newt Gingrich as Speaker on ethics charges. Bob Livingston, who successfully campaigned to succeed Newt, promised to give Forbes power and clout, but when Livingston resigned from Congress after a sex scandal, Forbes was alone again. Forbes, who voted to impeach Bill Clinton and has endorsed George W. Bush, will make an odd Democrat. But we should not dismiss his switch lightly. The GOP has successfully wooed Democratic congressmen since the Eighties, especially after 1994. Forbes is the first congressman to move the other way in decades. Even a weak reed can be a straw in the wind.

* Hillary Clinton is settling in nicely to the political culture of her new state, thank you. Since announcing she is a Yankees fan, she has described Jerusalem (formulaically) as the "eternal and indivisible capital of Israel" (this, after calling for Palestinian statehood last year); and said Congress should let New York join a milk cartel that protects dairy farmers in the states that belong to it, at the cost of boosting the price of their milk by 50 cents a gallon. A few appearances with IRA plastique suppliers, and a robust defense of rent control in New York City, and she will be indistinguishable from any homegrown pol.

* The abortion drug RU-486 appears ready to become widely available in America later this year. Margaret Talbot, writing in The New York Times Magazine, hails this development and its potential to "reconfigure the politics and perception of abortion," perhaps even offering a "peace treaty" in the abortion wars. The pill, which chemically triggers an often painful miscarriage, could indeed encourage more first-trimester abortions and eliminate the stigma on abortionists. Under these circumstances, no doubt many Americans would be attracted to the policy prevalent in Europe: approval and even public funding of first- trimester abortions, but restrictions on those occurring later in pregnancy. Most Americans believe that earlier abortions are better than later ones. But moral intuition must yield to moral reasoning, which tells us that the embryo is a genetically distinct individual life from the moment of conception-and not just when it starts to look like an infant on an ultrasound screen. Killing is killing, whether early or late, at home or in an office. And abortion is a moral wrong that no technology can right.

* Bill Bradley came out for an array of gun controls, including mandatory registration of all handguns, and Al Gore responded with a weaker licensing proposal. Neither man is on the right track. Background checks have not yielded much benefit to date, and criminals would surely find ways to evade a more extensive system. Both candidates favor a ban on cheap guns-the main effect of which would be to make self-defense harder for the law-abiding poor in high-crime areas. These proposals suggest that the competition for primary votes is leading Democrats to overplay their hand. Yes, many of the ideas appeal to the public, but the people who vote on gun issues are heavily opposed. On some issues, moreover, Gore has staked out a position that lacks even superficial appeal: A large majority of the public opposes the lawsuits against gun manufacturers that he is defending. Republicans will lose on this issue only if they take the media bait and abandon their natural allies-which, sorry to say, is always a possibility.