THE FANTASIES OF MR. BROOKS
David Brooks pinched off a fragrant pile in
Salon entitled
George W. Bush Should Be President. It gets an B for effort
but an F for its connection to reality.
Brooks is a long-time "American Spectator" hack scribe whom Emmett
Tyrell elevated to chief bootlick status when David Brock proved himself
unqualified for the role by being unwilling to
accuse Hillary Clinton of infanticide and of having lesbian sex
orgies in the White House in his book about her, i.e.
he was fired and placed on the persona non
grata list for failing to maintain political correctness thereabouts.
Brooks has no such ethical problems.
Early on in his hagiography, he assures us that:
George W. Bush
is not a ruthless hard-ass. He's not even an arrogant frat boy,
capable of cruelty. He is, deep down, a very nice guy who likes
people.
That's rich, especially seeing how Brooks later tells us what a marvelous
contrast Bush makes to Gore, who is "a deeply un-nice man."
This from one of the official hack scribes of the party that prides
itself on realpolitik and on being hard-nosed realists who have made
careers out of sneering at the unrealistic touchy-feely bullshit always
being spouted by liberals.
He goes on to favorably compare Shrub to other Presidents (with the act of
contrasting alone lending him a presidential air, of course). Other
presidents don't have close friends ...
... either they are aloof from anybody who could possibly address
them as an equal (like Nixon) or they have personally useful
contacts in place of friendship (like Clinton), and they discard those people when they are no
longer useful.
Note the description of the ubiquitously foul-mouthed and anti-semitic misanthrope of the White
House tapes (that is, the ones that have thus far been successfully
pried from his dead fingers) as merely "aloof" (as opposed, of course, to
the Nazi-like Hillary who is alleged to have said one such thing 25 years ago).
Note also the "personally useful contacts in place of friendship" line
hung on Hillary's husband, wherein Brooks' godlike capabilities of discerning
the inner states of others takes center stage.
And, to be very blunt, unfavorably comparing someone to Shrub because of
their "personally useful contacts" is like unfavorably comparing someone to
Hugh Hefner because of their decadent, self-indulgent lifestyle. "Dad?
Can you ring up Skippy and Bozzie and Beebs and the rest for another
coupla million for the campaign? Thanks."
And note especially the non-mention of Jimmy Carter who was and still
is routinely excoriated as the poster boy for "nice guys finish last."
Brooks not only churns out the worst sort of vapid rhetoric on
intangible topics, but also can't even get his basic facts right.
After coining the phrase "an instinct for the bold move" to describe Shrub,
Brooks offers as an example:
His [Texas]
administration suggested a bold tax reform package, which moved the state's revenue base
from income to property taxes. It infuriated members of the business community, who were
scarcely paying taxes under the income tax regime, and in the end he had to compromise away
key elements of the plan (it was the state Republicans who opposed it). But in that episode he
demonstrated a surprising penchant for innovation.
He's attempting to describe Shrub's beginning of the 1997 Texas
Legislature session with a proposal to cut property taxes by
$1 billion. To begin with, there is no personal income tax in Texas, a
revenue shortfall that's somewhat compensated for by one of the highest
sales taxes in the nation. Bush's original proposal would have made up
for the $1 billion property tax shortfall by further increasing the sales tax
and by decreasing funding for education.
The Texas House, led by Education chairman Paul Sadler, spent the
next 100 days hearing 300 witnesses and totally rewriting Shrub's "bold"
package. They cut out a lot of loopholes under which such things as
limited partnerships (i.e. law firms and doctors) weren't previously taxed,
and also extended the sales tax to service businesses. They found a way
to broaden the sales tax such that those who hadn't previously paid any
would start doing so and those who already paid it wouldn't have it
increased.
As you might have guessed right after reading the words "law firm,"
the opposition was fierce. Every private jet in the state converged on
Austin and money talked. The rewritten proposal failed, although to
give Shrub some credit he supported the completely rewritten proposal
up until the vote that killed it was cast. That is, he wasn't particularly
bold or innovative (after all, how innovative is it for a Republican to
suggest a tax cut?), but he did the right thing for once.
Next Brooks suggests another bold triumph:
He was more successful with his education reform package, which was also unconventional,
and which passed. The Rand Corporation recently ranked Texas as the state whose school
system has made the most progress in the last few years.
The best that can be said about Shrub's education record is that he
hasn't tried too hard to screw up a series of long, long overdue steps
that were begun in the early 1980s to raise the worst education system
in the nation from moribund to the intensive care unit.
Former Gov. Mark White (1982-1986) was in office when the changes
really started, although he was the beneficiary of a lot of hard and failed
battles many others had been fighting for several decades.
White's most interesting action was appointing a commission headed
by none other than H. Ross Perot to study the problem and suggest
solutions. The then-sane Perot worked with state comptroller
Bob Bullock (a far more interesting and better Texas politician than anyone
named Bush could every hope to be) to figure out a way to get the state
started towards equitable funding of schools, i.e. the rich schools mostly
turned out students who did well and the poor schools didn't.
Perot also did something else that pissed off a lot of people and lost
many legislators their jobs: he suggested a "no pass, no play" rule for
high school football (second only the Jesus H. Christ hisself in Texas on
the religious scene).
The legislation that finally got passed in 1984 was called HB 72 and called
for smaller class sizes, early childhood education programs (Texas is
still the only state without kindergarten statewide), and school funding
equalization.
HB 72 had to go through an oil bust and some other growing pains, but
it led to noticeable increases in school test scores - especially among
minority students - well before Bush first entered the governor's
office in 1995. The scores have continued to increase at about the
same rate since he's been in office, so while he should in no way get
full and even overly much partial credit he should at least be commended for not letting the nutbars talk him into reversing 30 years of
progress.
I've already detailed elsewhere his "bold" environmental
legislation, which could only be termed such if one thinks that letting
the worst polluters (who've been grandfathered out of even mild
pollution cleanup since 1970) voluntarily comply with their own cleanup
plans is a pro-environmental act.
Once you strip away the counterfactuals from Brooks' argument, all
you're left with is his opinion that Bush is "nice" and Gore is "un-nice,"
which would sound pathetic coming from a bleeding heart liberal much
less from a supposed realpolitiking member of the GOP.
posted by Steven Baum
8/3/2000 11:24:23 PM |
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