The Week - News Briefs

National Review, Jan 24, 2000

--Ted Turner and Jane Fonda are Splitsville. So who gets CNN and who gets the anti-aircraft gun?

--During the holiday season, George W. Bush, Orrin Hatch, and Gary Bauer caused a mini-flap by testifying to the importance of Christ in their lives. How to answer their critics? America is not a Christian nation, but it has long been overwhelmingly a nation of Christians-a sociological, and therefore a political fact. George Washington, who did more than any other Founder to teach freedom of religion by example, said that Americans should imitate the humility and charity of "the Divine Author of our blessed religion" in their public life. Politicians who make such statements insincerely will face a judgment more severe than that of the ACLU.

--After running last year's worst primary campaign, Elizabeth Dole is still angling for a chance to run this year's worst vice-presidential campaign. How ambitious. Her endorsement of George W. Bush renewed talk of her as a veep pick, which at least has the advantage of not being motivated by crass political factors, since it would make no sense: Mrs. Dole has no retail political skills, no issues with which she is identified, no appeal to the GOP's right, no ability to help deliver a state or region, and a temperament utterly unsuited to a national campaign. Bush often says you can judge candidates by the competence of people around them. Here is one association that wouldn't flatter him.

--New York governor George Pataki, too, yearns to be a vice-presidential candidate. But of which party? Certainly Pataki, who ousted Mario Cuomo in 1994, has lately been governing like a Democrat. In 1997, he saved rent controls in New York City; his 1998 budget increased spending by four times the inflation rate; state environmental programs are a porkfest. His latest idea is a cigarette-tax hike, which will certainly hike smuggling, but may not hike much in the way of revenue. Pataki spends and taxes under cover of a Wall Street boom, while the rest of the state's economic infrastructure limps along in Rust Belt mode. While Republican social liberals still sell themselves as economically conservative, Pataki (who is pro-abortion) is as bad on dollars and cents as he is on life.

--The latest figures confirm that the new investor class is growing as fast as--well, as the stock market itself. Since NAFTA and GATT cut taxes internationally, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrials have tripled and the NASDAQ has quintupled. Seventy-nine million Americans now own stock, and half of them entered the markets in the last decade. In 1989, only 9 million Americans owned equities worth more than $50,000. By 1999, more than 39 million individuals owned that much, and 24 million held portfolios worth more than $100,000. In 1989, the median portfolio was worth $10,400. Today, it is $50,000. Stocks now represent 38 percent of household wealth. As a result, Americans by the millions are changing their views on business, on their retirement plans, and on the returns to their "investments" in government programs such as Social Security. Yet no one in the presidential field has shown a hint of understanding how investors think or what they want. If only the political market moved as fast as the financial ones.

--The Clinton administration, however, is willing to posture as the friend of the new investors. Its just-revived proposal for Universal Savings Accounts--in effect, 401(k)s where workers' contributions would be matched by tax credits--is a cynical ploy, never written up as legislation or acted on by congressional Democrats. The administration's goal is to get Republicans to denounce a middle-class tax cut. Republicans, including George W. Bush and John McCain, can propose their own tax cuts on investment income--or they can fall for the administration's bait, in which case they will have only themselves to blame when Al Gore picks off the suburban vote.

--President Clinton has indicated that he will not ask to be reimbursed for his legal expenses, though he thinks he would be entitled to do so-- thus, like a prudent chief executive, establishing a precedent for successors as debauched and shameless as he is, should there ever be any.

--Just when you think Al Sharpton's rallies in New York can get no more vile, he outdoes himself--most recently with a new sidekick, Winnie Mandela. This Mandela is no Nelson Mandela: She is a terrorist, who does not blink at torture and murder. Traveling from Africa, she was detained briefly at Kennedy Airport--but the Clinton State Department saw to it that she was let in. "I don't need anyone's permission to see my children here in Harlem," Mandela later huffed. "No CIA, no FBI or agent will keep me from my family." Mandela does not think much of children or family: She had her thugs kill a 14-year-old boy, Stompie Seipei, who refused to lie in the way Mandela wanted. She encouraged and cooed about the practice of "necklacing," an especially gruesome form of murder. The United States should not have permitted her to enter this country. But in Al Sharpton, it is true, she has found a perfect mate.