When I first lived in Manhattan in 1987, I walked along 50th Street to work. Newcomers in New York City stare at the towering architecture, and I always noticed the Helmsley Building, 36 blocks south as I crossed Park Avenue.
Its eponymous dominatrix, Leona Helmsley, was prosecuted two years later for tax evasion. The most memorable evidence against her came from a housekeeper who recalled the “Queen of Mean” jeering, “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”
After hearing this odious insouciance, the judge sentenced Helmsley to 16 years in prison — it was later reduced to a more reasonable 19 months — and the city rubbed its hands in satisfaction. Ordinary people dislike being treated as plebs. Nothing gets under their skin like one rule for thee and another for me.
Democrats are learning this once again. Just as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed travel restrictions during the first coronavirus surge but went to his gym in Brooklyn, so, now, Gov. Gavin Newsom violates guidelines he decrees for hoi polloi in California and joins a no-masks birthday dinner at a fancy restaurant in Napa Valley, $450 a head. Deservedly, his presidential ambitions may now be Californicated. Then, there’s D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who traveled to Joe Biden’s victory party in Delaware, a “high-risk state for coronavirus exposure,” according to her officials, but excused herself by saying it was “essential travel.” Uh-huh.
The Democratic Party, the vehicle of an unelected governing class, is a political corporation constructed to keep people in their places — the rich at the top, buoyed by state and local tax deductions, for example, and the poor at the bottom, repressed by social programs that perpetuate dysfunction while costing sums so huge that they suggest urgent social concern.
Republicans, whose messaging has been culpably incompetent since President Ronald Reagan left office, are finally helping voters see that the blue party isn’t on their side, or even much like them. Newsom, de Blasio, Bowser, and the ice cream queen, Nancy Pelosi, help this messaging.
The GOP, meanwhile, is making itself look more like the public. I have nothing against middle-aged white men in suits — I am one — but the arrival of 17 (and counting) new Republican women in Congress makes the GOP freshly appealing. It’s a tribute to recruitment efforts by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik.
Byron York talks with McCarthy about election strategy. Our cover story, by Nicole Russell, focuses on the new Republican women, a diverse mix. James Antle profiles the indefatigable Sen. Susan Collins, who, after her thumping election win, must surely be regarded as the queen of Capitol Hill, if not of ice cream (see above).
In the Life & Arts section, Garrison Keillor returns as a young man and a grateful oldster, Eric Felten mixes drinks for Thanksgiving, and Rob Long is enriched by his credit card company’s fraud detection unit.
