Washington Diary
The Truth About Superman
Posted March 15, 2004
By James P. Lucier
insightmag.com
Mild-mannered John Kerry stepped into the Super Tuesday telephone booth and emerged in full red cape and blue spandex, "Lois Lane" Heinz on his arm. The Democratic Superman basked in the pulsating energy that roared from supporters crammed into his campaign headquarters, Washington's Old Main Post Office Building - now a down-at-the-heels, government-restored mall that, like many government projects, went nowhere and was offering scads of space cheap. Was this the gangly Botox kid we had seen working out at the presidential sweepstakes gym for the past 20 years? The same guy who only six weeks before had been declared a washup? Now he had leapt over nine primaries in a single bound and put a kryptonite lock on the nomination.
The 10th primary was won by Howard Dean, the short-lived, Internet phenom who once appeared invincible to the media gaggle that gets paid to talk about such things. Dean won in his home state, Vermont, even though he had dropped out of the running two weeks before, making his win either a consolation prize or a booby prize. A month earlier, John Edwards, the North Carolina Democratic senator, had swept the primary in his birth state, South Carolina, but he was to win no more. His tale of two nations - one rich (like him) and one poor - brought no resonance. Now he seemed like the Joker, a character who had wandered in from a competing comic strip.
To the Electric Kool-Aid crowd hanging from the rafters in the Old Main Post Office on Super Tuesday, Edwards was indeed just a trickster, and Dean the flickering last gasp of a hologram as the current failed and he became so many forgotten photons falling in the air. This was the night for KER-RY! KER-RY! as it was so eloquently put by the dynarchs of change who mobbed the hall. For make no mistake about it, the blood lust for victory was in full cry. These were no average-Joe Democrats gathered here in the very center of official Washington - these were the professional political operatives and fund-raisers, the union bosses whose jobs depend upon having Democrats in power, and the warren of hot-headed Senate and House aides who have been waging an entrenched battle against the legitimacy of the Bush administration since Nov. 23, 2000.
For them, it wasn't just that the election had been stolen by Katherine Harris and five pip-squeaks on the U.S. Supreme Court. It wasn't just that some minor aspects of the New Deal are being dismantled by revanchist die-hards holding their tiny majorities in Congress. Rather, it was a deep feeling that Republicans don't have a right to exist except in minority status grudgingly granted. The Democratic activists are fueled by some inner religion that blocks out the possibility of coexisting with those of another belief in that same space.
But now the Democratic Superman rises above the crowd and attempts to settle the undulating surge of emotion. He fails. It takes a demigod, longtime Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, Kerry's il padrone, to calm the crowd enough so that Superman can speak. He speaks. He accepts the adulation of the crowd. He smiles, his face cracking like plaster. Then he launches into what amounts to an acceptance speech more appropriate to a national convention than to a campaign rally. "Why," said the White Queen to Alice, "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." But Kerry speaks as a believer in many impossible things.
"We reject the politics of fear and distortion," he said, even as he embraced them, noting that "millions live in fear every day that they will lose their job or lose their health care or lose their pensions." He promised to build a strong foundation for growth by repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. In that way he could cut the deficit in half in four years, out-Bushing the Bush promise to do it in five years. He promised "to repeal every tax break and every loophole that rewards any corporation for gaming the tax code to go overseas and avoid their responsibilities in America." Instead, he would provide new incentives for manufacturing that reward good companies for creating and keeping good jobs here at home. And yes, he would increase the minimum wage, and he would create energy independence with new technologies that would create 500,000 jobs, and he would create health care that would be a right and not a privilege, and we would rejoin the community of nations, and we would, we would, ah, we would ... Gee-whiz! It's all right up there on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
But cooler heads might have discerned some impossibilities in the warring halves of the Hegelian dialectic the Superman presented that night. For example, are the tax cuts for the wealthy, or are they tax cuts for taxpayers, since the cuts went to everyone in proportion to what they pay? And are the Bush tax cuts the cause of the economic downturn that began under President Bill Clinton, or are they the stimulus that brought about the restoration of the economy to levels that exceeded those obtained during most of the Clinton administration?
As J. Edward Carter, chairman of Economists for Bush, has pointed out: The record that Clinton ran on for his second term in 1996 showed inflation at 2.6 percent, compared with 1.9 percent under Bush. The Clinton unemployment rate in 1996 was 5.4 percent, compared with 5.6 percent today. Nonfarm productivity growth under Clinton in 1996 was 0.5 percent, compared with 4.1 percent today. The nonfarm real hourly pay-rate change was minus 0.3 percent in 1996, but it is plus 0.8 percent today.
While it is undeniable that some people lose jobs and others get new jobs every day and that this transition results in a painful impact on thousands of people (many of whom vote), the latest data released by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on March 1[see chart] shows that there were 138.3 million persons gainfully employed in the U.S. labor force, compared with 126.7 million when Clinton ran for his second term and 136.9 million at the end. In other words, there are 1.4 million more individuals employed today in the "jobless recovery" than at the end of the Clinton administration. Moreover, the unemployment rate of 5.6 percent is not only typical for the U.S. economy but is precisely what economists consistently have defined as "full employment." If millions of Americans live in fear for their jobs, as Kerry opines, then it is because of the demagoguery of fear instilled by Kerry and his kind.
The fact is, the U.S. economy is giving more people more jobs than ever before. It is numbers racketeering to talk about job losses without putting them in perspective. As the BLS figures demonstrate, the labor force increased as the population increased over the years, and the number of persons employed in that labor force has remained steady at about 62 percent despite the larger number of citizens requiring work. The only period when the unemployment rate itself declined was during the period of irrational exuberance in the Clinton bubble.
So just precisely what loophole in the tax code would Kerry close to prevent the Benedict Arnold companies from outsourcing jobs or moving abroad? Most experts believe that there aren't any such specific incentives in the code. The tax code is a patchwork behemoth that has been jointly perpetrated by both parties for 60 years and that is intended to reflect confusing and contradictory political, not economic, priorities. For decades, politicians versed in the politics of envy and greed have been saying, "Well, we'll fix that!" and they stick on some other prohibition or incentive, such as tilting toward windmills by creating 500,000 new jobs in alternative energy. At the same time, they might thoughtlessly destroy 500,000 old jobs by raising the minimum wage just in time for the election. Ever since Nobel laureate George Stigler showed in 1946 that raising wages above the productivity level of unskilled workers throws people out of work or blocks entry-level opportunities, the virtually unanimous consensus of economists has been that raising the minimum wage is not a good thing, except for vote-sucking politicians, of course.
But even as the primaries were grappling with the whole question of truth, another powerful phenomenon slipped in under the radar of the political elite. That, of course, was the motion picture that could not be made, that should not have been made and that even after it was made, no one would or should go to see. It was not enough for the oh-so-sorry flick flacks to denounce it as an artistic nullity or an example of sordid excess. Even the editorial columns roared in anger that Mel Gibson was irresponsible to drag religious belief into the secular forum, upsetting the consensus that nice people don't do belief. Perhaps it was these editorials alone, demonstrating how isolated the elite are from the real feeling of the country, that drove so many people to go see The Passion of the Christ. The film grossed $231 million through the first two weeks, with predicted grosses of more than $400 million. Or perhaps it was because millions of people were fascinated to see a film about an unprincipled, hand-washing judge and a couple of sleazy liberal politicians - all so typical of any government in any time - make such a big mistake about the meaning of truth. It was a kind of awakening, perhaps a great awakening with an impact yet unknown. |
