HORRIFIC DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN, CONT. EARLIER THIS YEAR, we fearlessly predicted that a new era was dawning in American life (“Horrific Days Are Here Again,” by Andrew Ferguson, January 22, 2001). Since the government was no longer being presided over by a liberal Democrat, we reasoned, Democrats and their allies in the national press corps would suddenly discover that the country was afflicted with any number of intolerable troubles that had flourished in the 1980s but had somehow lain dormant during the Clinton years: homelessness, hunger, the trade deficit, the gap between rich and poor, and so on. And what do you know? The moment George W. Bush removed his hand from the Bible after taking the oath of office, it seemed as though an alarm clock had gone off. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times gave over large sections of their front pages to the plight of the homeless. And last week the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, issued an analysis of new data from the Congressional Budget Office that showed—you guessed it—that the income gap is widening between rich and poor. As it happens, the green eyeshades at CBPP were never all that enamored of the Clinton administration’s economic policies either, believing them to be insufficiently redistributionist. But their timing with this report is impeccable, and it will surely reinforce the press’s incipient enthusiasm for the growing income gap—which now, of course, becomes George W. Bush’s problem. We just wonder why it was never Bill Clinton’s problem. For as the CBPP puts it: “The study shows that income gaps both between rich and poor and between the rich and the middle class widened in the 1980s and 1990s alike and reached their widest point on record in 1997.” Wait: 1997? Wasn’t that right in the middle of the Clinton-era Decade of Greed? FELONS? WHAT FELONS? LAST WEEK’S WASHINGTON POSt ran a front-page story about the thousands upon thousands of Florida voters disenfranchised in last year’s presidential election. The problem? Because of an error-ridden computer database that was supposed to scan for convicted felons, “at least 2,000 felons whose voting rights had been automatically restored in other states were kept off the rolls and, in many cases, denied the right to vote.” The article is chock full of accounts of voters wrongly turned away at the polls. And because Bush won by only 537 votes, and 68 percent of the disenfranchised are registered Democrats, well, you can do the math. You may wonder, on the other hand, did any felons actually get away with voting? In the Post piece, there is one sentence that reads, “At the same time, some felons who should not have been allowed to vote slipped through and cast ballots.” Some? According to a report in the Palm Beach Post, “Thousands of felons voted in the presidential election last year, despite a three-year, $3.3 million campaign by state officials to keep them off the voter rolls.” A computer analysis done by the Palm Beach Post showed “more than 5,600 people who voted on November 7, though they appeared to perfectly match names on a statewide list of suspected felons….Statewide, Broward County had the largest number of felons who voted, with nearly 1,500.” So, on balance, error-free implementation of Florida voting rules, as regards felons, would probably have reduced the total number of votes cast, and would have added to Bush’s victory margin. But really, why let this little detail get in the way of another good story about the illegitimacy of the Bush presidency? BUSINESS AS USUAL AS NOTED ON THIS PAGE a few weeks ago, the Senate Banking Committee had reported to the floor a bill renewing the Export Administration Act, the law that regulates the sale of sensitive technologies abroad. More worried, it seems, about campaign contributions from exporters than the national security implications of what might be sold to countries like China and Iran, the committee drafted a bill giving the Commerce Department the lead in deciding what can be sold and told the Pentagon to take a hike when it comes to blocking sales it considers dangerous. Faced with objections from senators—Shelby, Thompson, Helms, Warner, Kyl, and McCain—with responsibility and expertise in the national security area, the bill’s sponsors argued that those worries were unfounded and that security concerns would be taken care of in any case by an executive order being drafted by the administration. Well, guess what? According to a draft executive order obtained by Amy Svitak of Defense News, the administration is not only uninterested in addressing those concerns but actually has language in the would-be order that would explicitly discourage the Defense Department from making appeals, further reducing whatever small leverage it had left in the interagency review process. It sure is lucky that those Clinton folks are gone—the ones conservatives used to wail about for not safeguarding critical U.S. technologies. THE IDIOCY OF RURAL DIVERSITY A SUDDEN INTEREST IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT has seized the media. Or maybe it’s just another opportunity to add to the travails of a Bush administration nominee—in this case the would-be undersecretary of agriculture for rural development, Tom Dorr. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post last week followed a story from the Des Moines Register, reporting a statement made in 1999 by Dorr at a development conference. The nominee, an Iowa farmer, noted that the three most economically prosperous counties in rural Iowa are “very nondiverse in their ethnic background and their religious background.” In case that’s too circumspect for readers unfamiliar with Iowa demographics, the paper adds, “the population of the counties—Carroll, Lyon and Sioux—is predominantly white and Christian.” The Post provides an edited video clip of the comment on its website. But both the clip and the report of Dorr’s comment are taken out of context, according to Keith Heffernan, assistant director of the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development at Iowa State University. “I’ve had the privilege of seeing the entire tape. Seeing it in context, it’s hard for me to understand the [controversy]….It came as a question and a response in a brainstorming session.” Actually, the controversy is easy to understand: Dorr’s observation had the misfortune of being true, and thus particularly offensive to the “diversity” cult. Incoming Democratic Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, who never supported the nomination of his fellow Iowan, has used the flap—and the predictable if utterly unfounded accusations of racism—as a means to delay Dorr’s confirmation hearing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott was overheard saying, “I worry about what the Democrats are going to try to do with President Bush’s nominees.” THE SHALALA STANDARD WE’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER former secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala for her appearance after that January 1998 cabinet meeting in which Clinton lied to his top officials about Monica Lewinsky. “I believe the allegations are completely untrue,” said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “I’ll second that. Definitely,” said Commerce Secretary William Daley. “Third it,” chimed in the very loyal Shalala. Thus we were amused when Shalala, now president of the University of Miami, was asked by USA Today if she would like to see her Miami Hurricanes basketball team play against Bobby Knight’s Texas Tech: “I think I’ll pass. I’m not a fan [of new Tech coach Knight]. I have a very high standard about the behavior of not only professors and presidents but also coaches.” Just this once, we think Bobby Knight would be perfectly justified in throwing a chair.
