But if the ghost of Dick Darman wafts through the White House and convinces the administration to focus on the deficit, then tax cuts are a problem, not half the solution, and Democrats have an equally valid solution: raise taxes. A fixation on the federal deficit--rather than spending as a percentage of the economy--destroyed the presidency of the first Bush. I fear it could happen again.
Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.
I Hope...We'll Hear More About Ownership
Charles Murray
Even though George Bush has no commitment to limited government,
the right rhetoric can have a power of its own. The task is to come
up with a proposition that a large proportion of the electorate
will hear and instinctively say, "Damn right." For years,
libertarians haven't had one. We have tried to reinfuse words like
freedom and rights with the power they once had, but they have
become too degraded by overuse. Ownership may still have that
power. To say that the money we spend on Social Security is for our
own retirement and that we ought to have ownership over it sounds
to me like the Damn Right proposition that could catalyze a
political majority.
Charles Murray is W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of Human Accomplishment
(HarperCollins).
I Fear...We'll Hear More About God
Heather MacDonald
"Talk about your faith!" That is the punditocracy's resounding consensus following the Kerry defeat. It will usher in a new level of political hypocrisy.
Even before the election, Kerry was trying desperately to retool himself according to the emerging wisdom. It was a losing battle. He could never match Bush's easy recitals of faith. "My faith plays a big part in my life," Bush said in the third debate. "I pray a lot. And I do. And my faith is a very, it's very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm's way. I pray for my family. I pray for my little girls."
Remember those words; they are the future.
But I am puzzled by what exactly we learn from such recitals. Several hypotheses present themselves:
1. When a candidate parades his faith, he reassures voters that he is a good, moral person who will not do bad things. This, however, is a dubious assumption in light of history and experience.
2. It guarantees that the candidate will always make the right choices because God will direct him. But what if both candidates are praying for guidance? Who will trump whom?
Unlike a policy proposal, a profession of faith is a conversation stopper. It can't be challenged. And nothing follows from it. Moliere might have believed that the public display of piety is ground for a sound thrashing, but such cynicism is not in America's blood, at least not now. We are bound to assume that the self-confessed believer is utterly sincere.
My only hope for ending the upcoming rush to religious declaration is a candidate who announces that his is the one true faith, to which unbelievers must convert or face damnation--a venerable faith position with a much longer pedigree than our current bland tolerance. It will be a nice test of the country's appetite for religious fervor.
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