Logistically, Obama may be able to “close Guantanamo pretty quickly” once he finds facilities on the mainland to house the prisoners, said Matthew Waxman, a former Defense Department official who teaches law at Columbia University. “The bigger issue is on what legal basis are you going to hold them?”
So What are they going to do if they can not get the goods? Sounds like we will have some terrorists running around the U.S. doing what they do best. If 9/11 defined the beginning of the Bush administration this may be Obama's moment.
How wonderful!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Guantanamo
Interesting tidbit from Bloomberg on the plan to bring these terrorists to the U.S.:
Monday, December 1, 2008
Bill and Pat Buckley
This is a long one but a great insight to the man of the Right:
Mr. and Mrs. Right
They called each other “Ducky.” And they died within months of each other, in April 2007 and February 2008, as if William F. Buckley Jr., the famously polysyllabic founder of the modern conservative movement (and of its literary flagship, the National Review), could not go on without Patricia, the equally opinionated social lioness he’d married 57 years earlier. Talking to Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the Buckleys’ only child, Christopher, who has been making his own headlines, the author explores the complex connections—political, intellectual, and romantic—behind the ineffably stylish world of Pat and Bill.
by Bob Colacello January 2009
His memorial service was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. Hers was at the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His was a Requiem Mass, with 18 priests, banks of Easter lilies along the altar rail, and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto for a postlude. Hers was a Celebration of the Life, with a brief benediction, a gigantic bouquet of fuchsia rhododendrons behind the lectern, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” on the soundtrack of the opening photomontage. His was open to the public, and a capacity crowd of around 2,200 mourners—a sprinkling of socialites and journalists engulfed by a legion of right-wing eggheads—squeezed into the cathedral’s pews. Hers was by invitation only, and socialites vastly outnumbered eggheads among the approximately 400 select, each of whom was perched on a gilded ballroom chair with a hot-pink cushion.
Henry Kissinger spoke at both.
William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual force behind the modern American conservative movement, and his fashionable wife, Patricia, may have seemed to be a study in contrasts—Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra—but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically. As Kissinger noted at her memorial, “Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.” One of the clearest signs of the depth of their affection was the fact that each called the other by the same nickname: Ducky.
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Pat Buckley died on April 15, 2007, at age 80, of septic poisoning after a vascular operation on her left leg. Her memorial, organized by the Buckleys’ only child, Washington-based writer Christopher Buckley, took place a month later. Kissinger’s eulogy was followed by those of former New York City commissioner of cultural affairs Schuyler Chapin, Vanity Fair contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera, investment banker Frederick Melhado, and costume-jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (who compared Pat to Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt). Christopher’s teenage daughter, Caitlin, recalled her grandmother’s lessons in comportment, such as “Never ever butter your bread in midair—only people who are deeply common do that.” “When I was seven or eight,” Caitlin continued, “she taught me the art of air-kissing. She said this would be essential later in life when I moved to New York.”
Bill Buckley was too shaken up by his wife’s passing to deliver his eulogy, so it was printed in the program. He quoted a condolence letter from an acquaintance: “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not good-bye, but hasta luego.” Buckley commented, “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.” Friends who had not seen him for a while were shocked by his appearance. “I couldn’t believe the state he was in—really like a derelict,” recalls the interior designer Mica Ertegün. “I’m so worried about Bill,” Nancy Reagan told me in a telephone call shortly after Pat’s death. “I don’t know how he can go on without her. She ran his life, really. And he let her. He wanted her to.”
He lasted another 10 months, collapsing at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. He was 82 and suffering from diabetes and emphysema. The New York Times, mimicking his trademark predilection for obscure polysyllabic words, called him the “Sesquipedalian Spark of the Right.” Nearly every major newspaper in the world ran a lengthy obituary, and Newsweek did a cover story, titled “Mr. Right, R.I.P.”
At St. Patrick’s the faithful responded to Kissinger’s emotion-choked eulogy with sustained applause. “Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics,” the former secretary of state intoned. “He founded the National Review that, for over a generation, has shaped American political discussion; he hosted an influential talk show [Firing Line] for 30 years; he wrote an elegant column. Every year, he authored a beautifully written novel; in what passed for his spare time, he produced several nonfiction works and delivered over 50 lectures annually. He was a passionate skier, an accomplished harpsichordist, and a daring sailor. He wrote as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft … this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.”
Though Buckley’s brother the former senator James Buckley and sister the retired National Review managing editor Priscilla Buckley read from the Bible, Christopher Buckley was the only other eulogist. After quoting Hamlet—“I shall not look upon his like again”—and calling his father “the world’s coolest mentor,” Christopher concluded, “This afternoon I’ll make one last trip up there [to Stamford] to bury him.… I shall place in his coffin his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes.”
Dead or alive, the Buckleys continue to command attention. The BBC has a William F. Buckley documentary in production, and two biographies are on the way: an authorized life by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and an oral history by former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove. Bill Buckley’s 55th book, The Reagan I Knew, which he was close to finishing when he died, has just been published by Basic Books. A memoir of his personal and political relationship with President Reagan, it includes 40 years of correspondence between Buckley and both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as well as a foreword by Christopher Buckley, who helped Linda Bridges of the National Review complete it.
But the book that will no doubt create the greatest stir is Christopher’s own memoir of his parents’ last days, Losing Mum and Pup, due out in May. Coming on the heels of his latest novel, Supreme Courtship, a send-up of the nation’s highest judicial institution, it will be his 14th book—literary prolificacy runs in the family. “Writing this book may have been simply a way of spending more time with my parents, before finally letting them go,” Christopher, who is 56, told me. “I honestly had no intention of writing about them. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, it would seem an act of conscious omission not to do something about it. It spilled out of me. I wrote it in 40 days—no biblical association intended. This book is going to land hard in some quarters, although anyone who concludes that it’s anything but an act of love will, I think, be wrong. It’s a book about two very complex people. They were not your typical mom and dad. This is not Ozzie and Harriet. They were William F. and Pat Buckley. The phrase ‘larger than life’ doesn’t twice cover it.”
A Couple of Swells
Nancy Reagan recalls hearing the story of how Bill proposed to Pat: “She was playing bridge and Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. And Pat said, ‘Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?’ Can’t you just hear her?” (In other versions Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.)
The couple had met some months earlier, in the fall of 1948, when Bill was a junior at Yale and Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, where she shared a dormitory suite with Bill’s sister Trish, who had arranged a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived. “I offered to paint her fingernails,” he later wrote. “And she immediately extended her hand.”
They were married on July 6, 1950, in Vancouver, where the home of Pat’s parents, Austin and Kathleen “Babe” Taylor, occupied an entire city block. The Taylors, according to Buckley biographer John B. Judis, “had major holdings in gold, oil, and timber,” making them one of the richest families in Canada. Pat’s father also owned Canada’s leading Thoroughbred stable; two of his horses had nearly beat Seabiscuit in the 1930s. “The Taylors were the big cheeses in Vancouver,” says Virginia Wright, who grew up with Pat. “But Pat was not at all like her parents. She was something else, a rara avis, so glamorous in a town that was so hick and quiet. I think she felt fulfilled when she met Bill. She never looked back. Her maid of honor never heard from her again.”
While Pat agreed to be wed in a church ceremony presided over by the Catholic archbishop of Vancouver, her parents insisted on having the city’s Anglican bishop bless the bride and groom at the reception for 1,000 guests that followed on their lawn. And from then on, whenever the subject of Bill’s well-publicized Catholicism arose, Pat would loudly announce, “I am Church of England.”
Despite the religious differences, Bill got along just fine with his in-laws, whose political views were as right-wing as his and whose great wealth impressed him. As one friend told me, “Bill really believed that it was virtuous to be rich. And anybody who was very, very rich must be a good guy.” In his recently published memoir, An American Family, Bill’s brother Reid Buckley reproduces a “Memorandum to Austin C. Taylor” from their father, William F. Buckley Sr.:
I have tried for many years to interest my children in conventional sports, but I have not been very successful. Billie is easily the worst in this regard, having no interest in tennis, golf, or other activities which satisfy the great majority of the nation. If you expect to entertain him, you will find it necessary to furnish him with 1) a horse, 2) a yacht, or 3) a private airplane. Aloise joins me in affectionate regards to you and Babe.
Bill’s parents, Will and Aloise Buckley, may not have been as rich as the Taylors, but they were hardly paupers. Will, a Texas wildcatter, made his first fortune drilling for oil in Mexico, then lost it when he was expelled, in 1921, for counterrevolutionary activities against that country’s leftist government. By the time Bill was born, in 1925, the family was based on a 47-acre estate called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, but Will’s business interests caused them to spend long stretches in Venezuela, France, England, and Italy. Bill and his nine siblings were privately tutored in everything from Latin to ballroom dancing, and all of them were fluent in Spanish, French, and English by the time they were 13. In 1940, Bill was enrolled at Millbrook, a private Episcopalian boarding school in the Hudson Valley, where, according to one fellow student, there were no Jews and only a handful of Catholics.
Frederick Eberstadt, a New York friend who was a classmate at Millbrook, says, “It sounds funny, but Bill’s biggest interest was kidding around. He was very Catholic, though. He had a little shrine in his room, a Madonna inside this kind of stone box. He asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was kitsch. He said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ He said, ‘It’s the mother of God.’ Even at that age, to his thinking, it could not be kitsch, because it was the mother of God.”
After two miserable years on army bases in Georgia and Texas during World War II, the pampered young heir entered Yale, where he flourished, becoming chairman of the Yale Daily News, a star of the debating team, and a member of Skull and Bones. A month after graduating, he married Pat, who had left Vassar, and they rented a house near New Haven, where in six months Bill wrote the book that would make him famous, God and Man at Yale, a fierce attack on his alma mater for not upholding Christianity and free enterprise against atheism and collectivism.
One night during this period, Bill’s best college friend, Evan Galbraith, dared him to break into the Yale Bowl so that they could run a 100- yard race on the cinder track bordering the football field. Frederick Melhado, who was a class behind them, remembers, “Pat immediately elected herself to manage this daunting project. She conscripted a group of about 20 of us to carry flashlights and lanterns. The locks were broken, the chains were removed, and we filed silently through the tunnel that led into the stadium. Bill won a close race. But you could see here a preview of what became their standard operating procedure. Pat was the leader.”
To avoid further military service, in the Korean War, Bill signed up with the C.I.A. and served in Mexico City under the station chief, Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame). After nine months he quit to take a job in New York as an editor at The American Mercury, the irreverent literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, which over the years had drifted to the right. Pat was pregnant with Christopher, who was born in September 1952. “I am the only only child in the Buckley clan,” says Christopher. “My mom had two ectopic pregnancies, as they were called in those days. So I was continually, and somewhat annoyingly, reminded as I was growing up that I was ‘a miracle child.’”
“If Pat could have had seven or eight children, like all the other Buckleys, she would have been the Great Earth Mother, which was her real character,” says her friend Bootsie Galbraith, Evan’s widow. “There would have been none of the charity stuff, no need to be as social.” Lynn Wyatt, the Houston hostess, puts it another way: “Pat was Mother Superior. She took care of everybody, and she bossed everybody around.”
One could say that Pat’s two closest girlfriends in New York represented the two sides of her personality. Shirley Clurman, an ABC producer for Barbara Walters and the wife of Bill’s good friend Richard Clurman, the Time-Life News Service’s chief of correspondents, was warm, motherly, completely down to earth, and almost dowdy. The famous fashion plate Nan Kempner, on the other hand, was brittle, needy, socially obsessed, and almost as theatrical as Pat. Reinaldo Herrera points out, “Pat could have been a great actress. She didn’t talk, she delivered.”
Birth of a Movement
After producing an heir for Bill, Pat’s next order of business was to find a Great Elm of their own. Every day for weeks she would set out from Manhattan in search of a country house that would satisfy Bill’s three requirements: not too expensive, on the water, and within an hour of Grand Central. She found a 15-room Victorian house on three acres facing Long Island Sound in Stamford and immediately set about sprucing it up to her taste. She added a music room, where Bill could play his harpsichord, and had a pool built right on the Sound, where Bill wanted it. “It was the most wonderfully eccentric house, pink on the outside, red on the inside, filled with paintings of every color, by painters you never heard of,” says Kenneth Lane, a frequent houseguest. “In the spring and summer, there was every kind of flower in every color you could think of.”
John Fairchild, the fashion world’s high priest, says, “I once asked Pat why she painted the house pink. After all, they didn’t live in Bermuda. She said, ‘To attract the sailors.’ She was the brightest light in that New York group, and a great hostess. I remember going for dinner once—I think we were six or eight. I’d never seen so many lamb chops in my life.”
By 1953, Bill had left The American Mercury and begun collaborating with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell on a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies, a defense of the anti-Communist crusade of the controversial Senator Joseph McCarthy. Published in March 1954, a month before the notorious Army-McCarthy hearings, it turned Buckley, according to John Judis, from an enfant terrible to a pariah “among the eastern intelligentsia.” One of those who backed away was the young Harvard instructor Henry Kissinger. “I invited Bill to write an article on McCarthy for a magazine I was editing called Confluence, which brought together Europeans and Americans on agreed-upon subjects, and to my shame I didn’t publish it,” Kissinger tells me. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of an enduring friendship. “You know how it was with Bill—suddenly you found yourself in his orbit,” says Kissinger, who recalls meeting Pat a little later. “I had not had much contact with New York social life in those days, so for me she was a rather overpowering personality. But over the years I grew tremendously fond of her. She had no hesitancy in interrupting me in mid-paragraph, saying, ‘You’re making no sense at all.’”
In 1955, Bill teamed up with Willi Schlamm, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Time-magazine boss Henry Luce, to create the National Review. A Jewish former Communist who had fled Austria after Hitler took over, Schlamm had proposed to Buckley the previous summer the idea of a weekly magazine that would exert pressure from the right on the American political establishment. Buckley’s father enthusiastically threw in the first $100,000, and Buckley and Schlamm raised another $450,000 from conservative Yale alumni, including New York financier Jeremiah Milbank, Houston oilman Lloyd Smith, and South Carolina textile manufacturers Roger and Gerrish Milliken, as well as from Henry Salvatori, the Los Angeles oil tycoon who would later become a power in Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet. The first issue appeared in November, with a statement of purpose vowing to oppose big government, uphold the “organic moral order,” and resist Communism, which it defined as “the century’s most blatant force of satanic Utopianism.” By 1961 circulation had reached 54,000 and Buckley had emerged as the leading voice of conservatism. The following year he launched his nationally syndicated column. He was instrumental in founding Young Americans for Freedom, which became a driving force behind Barry Goldwater’s run for president, in 1964. Buckley himself ran for mayor of New York City as a Conservative in 1965, against Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsay. Although he won only 13.4 percent of the vote, the publicity he gained enabled him to start Firing Line in 1966.
Buckley’s fans saw him as a dazzling verbal genius; his detractors considered him a supercilious put-down artist. Among those not impressed by his stellar rise was Gore Vidal, who could be at least as acerbic and patrician as Buckley. The two authors first clashed in back-to-back appearances on The Jack Paar Show in 1962. After Vidal claimed on-air that Buckley’s political views were identical to those of the John Birch Society and suggested that Buckley had never worked for a living, Buckley sent a telegram to Paar in which he referred to Vidal as “a pink queer.” Matters came to a head when the two traded insults on ABC during the 1968 Democratic convention, with Vidal calling Buckley “a crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatening to “sock” him “in the goddamn face.” In follow-up pieces in Esquire, Buckley focused on homosexual themes in Vidal’s work, and Vidal responded by implying that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite, whereupon Buckley sued and Vidal countersued. After three years of legal wrangling, Vidal’s suit was thrown out, Buckley dropped his, and Esquire settled a modest sum on Buckley. Vidal still bristles at the mention of his old enemy’s name. “He was out to get me from the very beginning,” he says. “He wanted me to write for his little magazine. I spurned him, and he didn’t like that. Bear in mind, this was a very stupid guy, who never read any of those books he referred to, and Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman. I never heard such trash as when he cooled it.” Even Vidal, however, says of Pat, “I liked her, and it was mutual.”
Bill always claimed that Pat opposed each of his new ventures, which, however, “once they were undertaken, she took part in enthusiastically.” Twice a month she hosted National Review editorial dinners at their East 73rd Street duplex maisonette, which was decorated in her favorite colors—red, orange, and purple—except for the dining room, which was painted black. Drinks were taken in the library, where a full-length portrait of the hostess—in a flame-red caftan, with her beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniels at her feet—hung over the fireplace. These dinners brought together the magazine’s writers and editors with such famous Buckley friends as Whittaker Chambers, Clare Boothe Luce, and Lauren Bacall. Kissinger recalls, “Pat’s role was a combination of making sure that everybody was comfortable, that the conversation was on an important level, and that Bill was the featured person. She did that with extraordinary tact, but not as a hostess, as a partner.”
As John O’Sullivan, longtime writer and editor at the National Review, put it in an online tribute to Pat, “Together they were conservatism’s golden couple, giving a contemporary Manhattan gloss to a movement that its enemies would like to have caricatured as provincial, dull, and outdated.”
“I don’t know how Bill could have picked any woman in the world to be his wife other than Pat,” says Aileen Mehle, the society columnist, “because she could match him—even intellectually, and certainly as far as humor was concerned. Most women would have felt challenged by Bill, but she always held her own. She blurted out anything she felt like blurting out. If she loved you, she loved you madly. If she hated you, look out. Don’t forget, she was six feet tall. But she always wore flats so she wouldn’t be taller than Bill.”
Hostess with the Mostest
Pat called herself “a good Arab wife” and would say, “Wherever Bill goes, I pitch the tent.” In addition to the Manhattan and Stamford residences, the Buckleys rented the Château de Rougemont, outside Gstaad, Switzerland, every winter, and Bill owned and occasionally chartered a series of small yachts, on which he sailed around the Caribbean and made three trips across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific. He also made a ritual of moonlit Friday-night sails out of Stamford. “Seeing Pat stock a boat was incredible—the wine, the vegetables, the canned stuff,” says Mehle. “She was the galley master.” Mehle, who traveled often with the couple, remembers them showing up at an airport in the Bahamas with 42 duffel bags. “You know how many times she counted those bags? Not Bill! He never counted bags.” According to Christopher Buckley, “Even when she wasn’t speaking to my dad, which was a lot of the time, she would pack his bags. Deep in her DNA was something that I think she had learned from her mother: you take care of your men.”
Her greatest logistical feat was the annual move to Switzerland, where Bill would write a whole book in two months’ time, nonfiction to begin with, including his first memoir, Cruising Speed (1971), and later spy novels, such as Saving the Queen (1976) and Marco Polo, If You Can (1982), featuring a hero modeled on himself, Blackford Oakes, a blue-eyed, Yale-educated C.I.A. agent. Julian Booth, the English chef who was with the Buckleys for 35 years, describes Pat setting up the château: “It was a three-day preparation at least. We’d have everything stored upstairs in the eaves. She had her own sheets and linens, and of course the cutlery and crockery were all hers. So we would unpack that. And we would transform what we called the nursery into his office and studio. Basically, there was a billiard table, and we would put a Ping-Pong table over the top, and that was his table for painting. When he was in the château, he loved to paint. He and his research fellow—usually a different one each year—would work in the mornings, then lunch, ski, and be back usually by 3:30 in the afternoon. And then work until the cocktail hour. And then join the guests for dinner. And then play the harpsichord or paint.”
“David Niven was there every night. He was Bill’s closest friend,” recalls Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek shipping heir, who began his journalistic career in 1967 as a photographer for the National Review. “Roger Moore was there. Kenneth Galbraith was there. In those days the Buckleys stayed up very late, whooping it up. Pat always played the outraged duchess: ‘No, I’m not going to let Taki take you deep-mountain skiing, Bill.’ And Bill would sort of smile wryly.”
As Gstaad became more and more social, in the 70s, so did the scene at the Buckleys’. Nan Kempner would show up every February and take two rooms, one for her and one for her couture gowns. Other regulars included Lynn Wyatt, Brazilian socialite Elizinha Moreira-Salles, and Spanish extra man Pano de Hoyos. As editor of Interview, I was invited to stay in 1978, and I arrived in time for a standard lunch of fettuccine with gobs of pâté de foie gras, stuffed roast pheasant, and chocolate mousse. I had barely taken a sip of the Château Margaux when Pat bellowed, “I cannot understand how a nice Catholic boy like you could work for that creep Andy Warhol!” Julian Booth recalls of those days, “We would have the Greek night, with King Constantine, the Goulandrises, and Taki. Then we’d have a German night, with Count and Countess von Oeynhausen. And then the Danish night, when Princess Benedikt would come. And the Monegasque night—the Grimaldis and David Niven.”
Jamie Niven, David’s son, says, “My father saw them all the time in the winter. They were really, really close. We called them the Buckles. In the summer they would come and stay at my father’s house at Cap-Ferrat. One year, Château de Rougemont burned, and it was terribly damaged. So they moved down the road five kilometers and spent that winter with my father. The harpsichord was saved. It went downstairs in the little wine cave my father had. Bill took that over and worked in there.” Jamie, who didn’t get along with his stepmother, grew very close to Pat over the years. “I remember I was talking to her on the phone, and she was telling me I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that. I said, ‘You know, you’re not my mother. You can’t talk to me like that.’ She said, ‘I have been your mother, Sonny, and I shall remain your mother until I die.’ So I became Sonny to her, and I would call her up and say, ‘Mother, how are you today?’”
When David Niven died, in 1983, Jamie was on a fishing trip in Idaho. True to form, Pat called the governor of Idaho, who sent a plane to pluck him out of the woods, making it possible for him to get to Switzerland in time for the funeral. Jamie says, “About two years later, the Museum of Modern Art decided to have a fund-raising evening for the film department in memory of my father. My first call was to Pat. She became chairman of the evening, and we made more money than MoMA had ever made in one night.” Pat and Jamie subsequently organized events at the museum honoring Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and Clint Eastwood.
“I am, to put it in really vulgar language, a money raiser,” Pat Buckley once told a reporter, “a money raiser for things I believe in.” Her two principal charities were New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. Starting in the 1960s, she and Nan Kempner co-chaired annual galas for the hospital, raising some $75 million over 30 years’ time. From 1978 to 1995, Pat chaired the Costume Institute’s yearly benefit, which was so exclusive—and lucrative—that it became known as the Party of the Year. For the opening of Diana Vreeland’s 1981 exhibition, “The Eighteenth-Century Woman,” for example, nearly every major European designer flew over, and the 720 dinner guests ranged from Doris Duke and Diana Ross to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bill Paley. After dinner, 1,000 kids paid $100 each to dance in the Temple of Dendur. “Pat ran those parties with an iron fist,” says Blaine Trump, who helped Pat with her charities. “She would figure out what the tables were going to look like, and who could buy the tables. She was also very aware of the fact that you don’t spend a lot of money on the fluff—you make sure that the charity gets the money. Once Pat sat down with you, you were done—get your checkbook out. And when you did something for her, there was no one more appreciative. You always got a beautiful note and some wonderful pâté or something that Julian had whipped up.” Sean Driscoll, whose Glorious Food catered the parties, adds, “Pat was totally hands-on. If we were running out of time and there were still flowers to be hung from the chandeliers, she would just get up on a ladder and do it herself.”
‘Pat was the Queen of New York when Reagan was president,” says Louise Grunwald, the Park Avenue hostess and widow of Time bigwig Henry Grunwald, who served as ambassador to Austria under Ronald Reagan. “That was Pat’s high point. The best invitation in town was to go to the Buckleys’. It was the best fun: it was journalists, it was celebrities, it was Tom Wolfe, it was fabulous. Who gives parties like that today?”
The Buckleys’ friendship with the Reagans went back to 1961, when Bill was giving a speech in Beverly Hills to an organization called Citizens for Better Education and Ronald Reagan was asked to introduce him. Over the years Bill would sometimes stay at the Reagans’ house when he was in California. Nancy recalls, “After he left, the kids would always say, ‘Why can’t we have peanut butter on our toast like Bill Buckley?’” Nancy’s good friend Betsy Bloomingdale remembers how attractive Bill was back then, especially whenever he made a toast at one of the Reagans’ dinners. “He’d get up at the head of the table, put his thumbs in his pockets, and he had a way of rocking as he spoke. And we would sit there mesmerized. Nancy and I thought he was the most divine thing we ever saw.” The Bloomingdales’ boys went to the same Catholic boarding school as Christopher, Portsmouth Abbey, in Rhode Island, and the two mothers found the nearby hotels so depressing that they rented and decorated an apartment for their visits.
While Reagan relied on Bill for ideological guidance, he was also amenable to taking his recommendations for appointments. In Bill’s posthumous memoir, he prints a letter in which he suggests that Reagan “enroll the help” of Evan Galbraith, whom the president shortly thereafter made ambassador to France. The book makes clear as well how close Bill was to Nancy. In a January 22, 1985, letter to her he writes:
This is a love letter.
When El Presidente was sworn in, and after he spoke, I was standing five feet behind him—and you. And I saw your fingers caressing his. You thought the gesture entirely private, but I have Eyes That See All, and I was not, in living memory, so moved by so tender a liaison between a great leader and his incomparable wife.
The Buckleys were at the first private dinner the Reagans gave at the White House, in honor of Prince Charles, and at their last private dinner, when Nancy’s official portrait was unveiled. In between, they attended a state dinner for Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, a private dinner for Laurence Olivier, and the famous party where Princess Diana danced with John Travolta. They were invited to stay overnight at the White House and to fly on Air Force One—honors granted not even to Nancy’s closest confidant, Jerry Zipkin, the Park Avenue real-estate heir and social arbiter.
Feuds and Milestones
All through the 1980s, Pat and Jerry, who were the best of friends, ran Nancy Reagan’s social calendar when she visited New York. They were quite a duo, one as funny as the other, and both highly opinionated, judgmental, and cutting. They also shared a passion for gin rummy. “When you spent the weekend in Stamford, every afternoon you played gin rummy,” says Aileen Mehle. “And everybody wanted to hurry up and finish lunch so we could play. Not Bill. He never did play gin—ever. Those gin-rummy games should have been taped. Oh, my God, the things people said to each other. Naughty, naughty.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that two personalities as strong as Pat and Jerry would have a falling-out. Christopher Buckley thinks his mother’s relationship with “old Zip” may have come to an end over the card table at East 73rd Street. “Apparently, at one of those card games, Jerry said something snappish to one of the other men in my mother’s regular group—all confirmed bachelors—and Mum demanded that he apologize. I’m sure drink had been taken. Jerry refused, and it went from there.” Other people said Zipkin had gone around town saying Pat had a drinking problem, and it got back to her. I recall Zipkin vowing over lunch at Mortimer’s that he would never speak to Mrs. Buckley again, after she had seated his date, the Duchess de Cadaval, at Bill’s table at a Costume Institute ball, and put him in Outer Mongolia. “I think their fight was about Nancy,” says Kenneth Lane. “There was a little bit of competition. I thought it was very stupid, so I had them both to lunch, without telling them that the other one was coming. It did not work.” Blaine Trump adds, “We tried to have a peacemaking summit at Le Cirque. Jerry asked for his fish grilled dry, and it came with a sauce, and he did his usual thing with the waiter. Pat said, ‘You just can’t treat people that way.’ And that was the end of the summit.”
Sadly, Pat would also break with another of her closest pals, the fashion designer Bill Blass. “There was an incident with Blass,” says a friend of theirs, “when she had too much to drink, and he said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Zipkin died in 1995, Blass in 2002. Pat attended Zipkin’s funeral; Blass didn’t want one.
In July 2000, the Buckleys celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with a dinner for 50 friends and relatives on the terrace of the house in Stamford. They chartered a bus to bring some of the invited from Manhattan. As Bill was greeting people arriving in their own cars—Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Frederick and Virginia Melhado, C. Z. Guest, Aileen Mehle—Pat stuck her head out their upstairs bedroom window and hollered to him, “Ducky, you’re not going to believe this, but the bus is broken down, and our guests are sitting on the side of I-95.” Their chauffeur and another driver were dispatched to rescue the stranded guests, Evan and Bootsie Galbraith among them.
After a buffet of barbecued pork and whole lobsters, Christopher showed a video he had made for his parents’ 40th anniversary. This was followed by a speech from Bill, which he ended with “To spend 50 years with Pat, you have to love her.” Pat then stood up and explained why she had changed clothes during the dinner. She said that the red-and-white-striped dress she was now wearing had been made by the Paris couturier Jacques Fath, and that she had been wearing it the night Bill proposed to her. “And it still fits!” she added proudly.
On Christmas Eve 2002, the Buckley family was shaken by an item in the New York Daily News revealing that Christopher was “embroiled in a paternity action” with former Random House publicist Irina Woelfle, “over her 2-year-old son, Jonathan,” and that he had voluntarily taken a DNA test, which had established him as the boy’s father. After Christopher agreed to pay $3,000 a month in child support, the press dropped the subject. Although Christopher and his wife, Lucy Gregg Buckley—the daughter of a former C.I.A. officer, with whom he had two children, Caitlin and William Conor—seemed happily married, even close family friends refrained from asking Pat and Bill about the situation. As Blaine Trump says, “Pat usually talked about everything, but this became the unspeakable. And for Bill, who was so Catholic, it was something he couldn’t abide.”
Christopher was not always the perfect son he appeared to be. He has admitted that he was high on LSD during an interview with Mike Wallace for a segment 60 Minutes did on his father in 1970. Christopher was quite open with me about his relationship with his parents. “It was tough, but I wouldn’t trade it,” he says, adding that he and his father had exchanged at least 7,000 letters and e-mails over the years, and “it’s quite possible that over half of them involved contentions.” Some of their biggest arguments were about religion. Bill, who had a private Mass said every Sunday for him, the two Hispanic maids, and any houseguests who were Catholic, was understandably upset when his son “demurred”—Christopher’s word—from the faith. “My father had a great sense of humor, but it absolutely stopped at the threshold of the Church. And that became a source of great disappointment to him. The funny thing is, my mother got it. She and I probably, over the course of the last 20 years, spent about a third of the time not speaking, but I could go to her more than I could go to him.”
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Unfortunately for Christopher, last October he found himself in the tabloids again, when Irina Woelfle filed a lawsuit seeking additional child support for their son. What shocked people most was a line from Bill Buckley’s will that seemed exceptionally cruel: “I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes … shall be deemed to have predeceased me.” The Hartford Courant, which broke the story, estimated the value of Bill Buckley’s estate at more than $30 million, though presumably $24.5 million of that was the asking price for the Buckleys’ co-op apartment on East 73rd Street. The New York Post followed up with Woelfle’s neighbor’s claim that Christopher had “never laid eyes” on his “love child,” who “wistfully watched his friends play with their fathers and asked his mom about his own dad” at the local community pool in Coral Gables, Florida, where Woelfle now lives. Restricted from responding by his lawyer, but aware that he was not coming across as a paragon of parenthood, Christopher told The New York Times that he looks “forward to the day when I can have a relationship with Jonathan.”
No sooner had that brouhaha died down than Christopher found himself in more hot water when he endorsed Barack Obama in an online article, setting off an avalanche of hate e-mails from furious Republicans and leading him to resign from the National Review. (The writer David Frum, a Sarah Palin critic, decided to exit not long after.) Christopher still, however, sits on the board and owns one-seventh of the shares. Indeed, some friends are not so sure that Bill would have disapproved of his son’s temporary defection from the G.O.P., given that he himself, like many old-school conservatives, had broken with George W. Bush on the Iraq war. Pat, whose views were often to the right of her husband’s—she maintained that we should have “turned Iraq into a parking lot” during the first Gulf War—might have been more upset.
The year before the anniversary party, Bill had given up Firing Line, after hosting 1,504 programs over 33 years. He had already stepped down from the editorship of the National Review, and in 2004 he would divest himself of his controlling interest by giving his shares of voting stock to a corporation whose original trustees included Christopher and Evan Galbraith. In 2005, for the 50th anniversary of the magazine, President George W. Bush hosted a lunch in Washington to honor Bill. He continued writing his syndicated column and saw the publication of five more books, including Last Call for Blackford Oakes, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription (collected letters to and from the editor of the National Review), and Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater.
Pat, who over the years had had a long history of accidents and falls and had had four hip replacements, was also slowing down. The Buckleys stopped going to Gstaad in 2004 and Pat spent much of the winter in Nassau. “Something happened with her,” Jamie Niven says. “She became almost reclusive as time went on. She wasn’t in town as much. She spent more time in Stamford. I used to take her to lunch at the Carlyle hotel, because it was quiet and you could hear. She told me that she was really tired of a lot of things that she had done in New York. Things had just taken a change, and they weren’t what they used to be for her.” She could still throw a punch, however. At a lunch that Deeda and William McCormick Blair Jr. gave in 2006, the host, who had served as an ambassador under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had the temerity to say that he admired Al Gore. Pat reared up and snorted, “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
Friends kept dying on her. Her favorite escort, Johnny Galliher, who had replaced Zipkin at her card table and in her heart, went in 2003. Nan Kempner died of emphysema in 2005. In the last interview Pat ever gave, she told George Gurley of The New York Observer, “I was with her the day before she died. I was going to Europe the next day, and I said, ‘Nan, I’m not going to go to Europe,’ and she looked at me with those watery eyes. She said, ‘Go.’ She knew.… It was very hard for me.”
“I don’t think Pat was particularly anxious to hang around,” says Frederick Melhado. “I kept getting that feeling, and I kept saying to her, ‘You cannot feel that way.’ Because the thought of her not being around was just unbelievably sad to me.” In his eulogy at her memorial, he recalled telling her a few weeks before she died, “I wish I had a magic wand.” Pat had responded, “I know, Freddy, but we run out of magic wands eventually.”
“I was there the day she died, having lunch with Bill,” says Taki. “He had asked Reinaldo Herrera and me to go up. I’ve never seen a man cry so much.”
Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
Mr. and Mrs. Right
They called each other “Ducky.” And they died within months of each other, in April 2007 and February 2008, as if William F. Buckley Jr., the famously polysyllabic founder of the modern conservative movement (and of its literary flagship, the National Review), could not go on without Patricia, the equally opinionated social lioness he’d married 57 years earlier. Talking to Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the Buckleys’ only child, Christopher, who has been making his own headlines, the author explores the complex connections—political, intellectual, and romantic—behind the ineffably stylish world of Pat and Bill.
by Bob Colacello January 2009
His memorial service was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. Hers was at the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His was a Requiem Mass, with 18 priests, banks of Easter lilies along the altar rail, and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto for a postlude. Hers was a Celebration of the Life, with a brief benediction, a gigantic bouquet of fuchsia rhododendrons behind the lectern, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” on the soundtrack of the opening photomontage. His was open to the public, and a capacity crowd of around 2,200 mourners—a sprinkling of socialites and journalists engulfed by a legion of right-wing eggheads—squeezed into the cathedral’s pews. Hers was by invitation only, and socialites vastly outnumbered eggheads among the approximately 400 select, each of whom was perched on a gilded ballroom chair with a hot-pink cushion.
Henry Kissinger spoke at both.
William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual force behind the modern American conservative movement, and his fashionable wife, Patricia, may have seemed to be a study in contrasts—Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra—but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically. As Kissinger noted at her memorial, “Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.” One of the clearest signs of the depth of their affection was the fact that each called the other by the same nickname: Ducky.
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Pat Buckley died on April 15, 2007, at age 80, of septic poisoning after a vascular operation on her left leg. Her memorial, organized by the Buckleys’ only child, Washington-based writer Christopher Buckley, took place a month later. Kissinger’s eulogy was followed by those of former New York City commissioner of cultural affairs Schuyler Chapin, Vanity Fair contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera, investment banker Frederick Melhado, and costume-jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (who compared Pat to Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt). Christopher’s teenage daughter, Caitlin, recalled her grandmother’s lessons in comportment, such as “Never ever butter your bread in midair—only people who are deeply common do that.” “When I was seven or eight,” Caitlin continued, “she taught me the art of air-kissing. She said this would be essential later in life when I moved to New York.”
Bill Buckley was too shaken up by his wife’s passing to deliver his eulogy, so it was printed in the program. He quoted a condolence letter from an acquaintance: “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not good-bye, but hasta luego.” Buckley commented, “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.” Friends who had not seen him for a while were shocked by his appearance. “I couldn’t believe the state he was in—really like a derelict,” recalls the interior designer Mica Ertegün. “I’m so worried about Bill,” Nancy Reagan told me in a telephone call shortly after Pat’s death. “I don’t know how he can go on without her. She ran his life, really. And he let her. He wanted her to.”
He lasted another 10 months, collapsing at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. He was 82 and suffering from diabetes and emphysema. The New York Times, mimicking his trademark predilection for obscure polysyllabic words, called him the “Sesquipedalian Spark of the Right.” Nearly every major newspaper in the world ran a lengthy obituary, and Newsweek did a cover story, titled “Mr. Right, R.I.P.”
At St. Patrick’s the faithful responded to Kissinger’s emotion-choked eulogy with sustained applause. “Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics,” the former secretary of state intoned. “He founded the National Review that, for over a generation, has shaped American political discussion; he hosted an influential talk show [Firing Line] for 30 years; he wrote an elegant column. Every year, he authored a beautifully written novel; in what passed for his spare time, he produced several nonfiction works and delivered over 50 lectures annually. He was a passionate skier, an accomplished harpsichordist, and a daring sailor. He wrote as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft … this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.”
Though Buckley’s brother the former senator James Buckley and sister the retired National Review managing editor Priscilla Buckley read from the Bible, Christopher Buckley was the only other eulogist. After quoting Hamlet—“I shall not look upon his like again”—and calling his father “the world’s coolest mentor,” Christopher concluded, “This afternoon I’ll make one last trip up there [to Stamford] to bury him.… I shall place in his coffin his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes.”
Dead or alive, the Buckleys continue to command attention. The BBC has a William F. Buckley documentary in production, and two biographies are on the way: an authorized life by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and an oral history by former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove. Bill Buckley’s 55th book, The Reagan I Knew, which he was close to finishing when he died, has just been published by Basic Books. A memoir of his personal and political relationship with President Reagan, it includes 40 years of correspondence between Buckley and both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as well as a foreword by Christopher Buckley, who helped Linda Bridges of the National Review complete it.
But the book that will no doubt create the greatest stir is Christopher’s own memoir of his parents’ last days, Losing Mum and Pup, due out in May. Coming on the heels of his latest novel, Supreme Courtship, a send-up of the nation’s highest judicial institution, it will be his 14th book—literary prolificacy runs in the family. “Writing this book may have been simply a way of spending more time with my parents, before finally letting them go,” Christopher, who is 56, told me. “I honestly had no intention of writing about them. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, it would seem an act of conscious omission not to do something about it. It spilled out of me. I wrote it in 40 days—no biblical association intended. This book is going to land hard in some quarters, although anyone who concludes that it’s anything but an act of love will, I think, be wrong. It’s a book about two very complex people. They were not your typical mom and dad. This is not Ozzie and Harriet. They were William F. and Pat Buckley. The phrase ‘larger than life’ doesn’t twice cover it.”
A Couple of Swells
Nancy Reagan recalls hearing the story of how Bill proposed to Pat: “She was playing bridge and Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. And Pat said, ‘Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?’ Can’t you just hear her?” (In other versions Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.)
The couple had met some months earlier, in the fall of 1948, when Bill was a junior at Yale and Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, where she shared a dormitory suite with Bill’s sister Trish, who had arranged a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived. “I offered to paint her fingernails,” he later wrote. “And she immediately extended her hand.”
They were married on July 6, 1950, in Vancouver, where the home of Pat’s parents, Austin and Kathleen “Babe” Taylor, occupied an entire city block. The Taylors, according to Buckley biographer John B. Judis, “had major holdings in gold, oil, and timber,” making them one of the richest families in Canada. Pat’s father also owned Canada’s leading Thoroughbred stable; two of his horses had nearly beat Seabiscuit in the 1930s. “The Taylors were the big cheeses in Vancouver,” says Virginia Wright, who grew up with Pat. “But Pat was not at all like her parents. She was something else, a rara avis, so glamorous in a town that was so hick and quiet. I think she felt fulfilled when she met Bill. She never looked back. Her maid of honor never heard from her again.”
While Pat agreed to be wed in a church ceremony presided over by the Catholic archbishop of Vancouver, her parents insisted on having the city’s Anglican bishop bless the bride and groom at the reception for 1,000 guests that followed on their lawn. And from then on, whenever the subject of Bill’s well-publicized Catholicism arose, Pat would loudly announce, “I am Church of England.”
Despite the religious differences, Bill got along just fine with his in-laws, whose political views were as right-wing as his and whose great wealth impressed him. As one friend told me, “Bill really believed that it was virtuous to be rich. And anybody who was very, very rich must be a good guy.” In his recently published memoir, An American Family, Bill’s brother Reid Buckley reproduces a “Memorandum to Austin C. Taylor” from their father, William F. Buckley Sr.:
I have tried for many years to interest my children in conventional sports, but I have not been very successful. Billie is easily the worst in this regard, having no interest in tennis, golf, or other activities which satisfy the great majority of the nation. If you expect to entertain him, you will find it necessary to furnish him with 1) a horse, 2) a yacht, or 3) a private airplane. Aloise joins me in affectionate regards to you and Babe.
Bill’s parents, Will and Aloise Buckley, may not have been as rich as the Taylors, but they were hardly paupers. Will, a Texas wildcatter, made his first fortune drilling for oil in Mexico, then lost it when he was expelled, in 1921, for counterrevolutionary activities against that country’s leftist government. By the time Bill was born, in 1925, the family was based on a 47-acre estate called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, but Will’s business interests caused them to spend long stretches in Venezuela, France, England, and Italy. Bill and his nine siblings were privately tutored in everything from Latin to ballroom dancing, and all of them were fluent in Spanish, French, and English by the time they were 13. In 1940, Bill was enrolled at Millbrook, a private Episcopalian boarding school in the Hudson Valley, where, according to one fellow student, there were no Jews and only a handful of Catholics.
Frederick Eberstadt, a New York friend who was a classmate at Millbrook, says, “It sounds funny, but Bill’s biggest interest was kidding around. He was very Catholic, though. He had a little shrine in his room, a Madonna inside this kind of stone box. He asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was kitsch. He said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ He said, ‘It’s the mother of God.’ Even at that age, to his thinking, it could not be kitsch, because it was the mother of God.”
After two miserable years on army bases in Georgia and Texas during World War II, the pampered young heir entered Yale, where he flourished, becoming chairman of the Yale Daily News, a star of the debating team, and a member of Skull and Bones. A month after graduating, he married Pat, who had left Vassar, and they rented a house near New Haven, where in six months Bill wrote the book that would make him famous, God and Man at Yale, a fierce attack on his alma mater for not upholding Christianity and free enterprise against atheism and collectivism.
One night during this period, Bill’s best college friend, Evan Galbraith, dared him to break into the Yale Bowl so that they could run a 100- yard race on the cinder track bordering the football field. Frederick Melhado, who was a class behind them, remembers, “Pat immediately elected herself to manage this daunting project. She conscripted a group of about 20 of us to carry flashlights and lanterns. The locks were broken, the chains were removed, and we filed silently through the tunnel that led into the stadium. Bill won a close race. But you could see here a preview of what became their standard operating procedure. Pat was the leader.”
To avoid further military service, in the Korean War, Bill signed up with the C.I.A. and served in Mexico City under the station chief, Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame). After nine months he quit to take a job in New York as an editor at The American Mercury, the irreverent literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, which over the years had drifted to the right. Pat was pregnant with Christopher, who was born in September 1952. “I am the only only child in the Buckley clan,” says Christopher. “My mom had two ectopic pregnancies, as they were called in those days. So I was continually, and somewhat annoyingly, reminded as I was growing up that I was ‘a miracle child.’”
“If Pat could have had seven or eight children, like all the other Buckleys, she would have been the Great Earth Mother, which was her real character,” says her friend Bootsie Galbraith, Evan’s widow. “There would have been none of the charity stuff, no need to be as social.” Lynn Wyatt, the Houston hostess, puts it another way: “Pat was Mother Superior. She took care of everybody, and she bossed everybody around.”
One could say that Pat’s two closest girlfriends in New York represented the two sides of her personality. Shirley Clurman, an ABC producer for Barbara Walters and the wife of Bill’s good friend Richard Clurman, the Time-Life News Service’s chief of correspondents, was warm, motherly, completely down to earth, and almost dowdy. The famous fashion plate Nan Kempner, on the other hand, was brittle, needy, socially obsessed, and almost as theatrical as Pat. Reinaldo Herrera points out, “Pat could have been a great actress. She didn’t talk, she delivered.”
Birth of a Movement
After producing an heir for Bill, Pat’s next order of business was to find a Great Elm of their own. Every day for weeks she would set out from Manhattan in search of a country house that would satisfy Bill’s three requirements: not too expensive, on the water, and within an hour of Grand Central. She found a 15-room Victorian house on three acres facing Long Island Sound in Stamford and immediately set about sprucing it up to her taste. She added a music room, where Bill could play his harpsichord, and had a pool built right on the Sound, where Bill wanted it. “It was the most wonderfully eccentric house, pink on the outside, red on the inside, filled with paintings of every color, by painters you never heard of,” says Kenneth Lane, a frequent houseguest. “In the spring and summer, there was every kind of flower in every color you could think of.”
John Fairchild, the fashion world’s high priest, says, “I once asked Pat why she painted the house pink. After all, they didn’t live in Bermuda. She said, ‘To attract the sailors.’ She was the brightest light in that New York group, and a great hostess. I remember going for dinner once—I think we were six or eight. I’d never seen so many lamb chops in my life.”
By 1953, Bill had left The American Mercury and begun collaborating with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell on a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies, a defense of the anti-Communist crusade of the controversial Senator Joseph McCarthy. Published in March 1954, a month before the notorious Army-McCarthy hearings, it turned Buckley, according to John Judis, from an enfant terrible to a pariah “among the eastern intelligentsia.” One of those who backed away was the young Harvard instructor Henry Kissinger. “I invited Bill to write an article on McCarthy for a magazine I was editing called Confluence, which brought together Europeans and Americans on agreed-upon subjects, and to my shame I didn’t publish it,” Kissinger tells me. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of an enduring friendship. “You know how it was with Bill—suddenly you found yourself in his orbit,” says Kissinger, who recalls meeting Pat a little later. “I had not had much contact with New York social life in those days, so for me she was a rather overpowering personality. But over the years I grew tremendously fond of her. She had no hesitancy in interrupting me in mid-paragraph, saying, ‘You’re making no sense at all.’”
In 1955, Bill teamed up with Willi Schlamm, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Time-magazine boss Henry Luce, to create the National Review. A Jewish former Communist who had fled Austria after Hitler took over, Schlamm had proposed to Buckley the previous summer the idea of a weekly magazine that would exert pressure from the right on the American political establishment. Buckley’s father enthusiastically threw in the first $100,000, and Buckley and Schlamm raised another $450,000 from conservative Yale alumni, including New York financier Jeremiah Milbank, Houston oilman Lloyd Smith, and South Carolina textile manufacturers Roger and Gerrish Milliken, as well as from Henry Salvatori, the Los Angeles oil tycoon who would later become a power in Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet. The first issue appeared in November, with a statement of purpose vowing to oppose big government, uphold the “organic moral order,” and resist Communism, which it defined as “the century’s most blatant force of satanic Utopianism.” By 1961 circulation had reached 54,000 and Buckley had emerged as the leading voice of conservatism. The following year he launched his nationally syndicated column. He was instrumental in founding Young Americans for Freedom, which became a driving force behind Barry Goldwater’s run for president, in 1964. Buckley himself ran for mayor of New York City as a Conservative in 1965, against Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsay. Although he won only 13.4 percent of the vote, the publicity he gained enabled him to start Firing Line in 1966.
Buckley’s fans saw him as a dazzling verbal genius; his detractors considered him a supercilious put-down artist. Among those not impressed by his stellar rise was Gore Vidal, who could be at least as acerbic and patrician as Buckley. The two authors first clashed in back-to-back appearances on The Jack Paar Show in 1962. After Vidal claimed on-air that Buckley’s political views were identical to those of the John Birch Society and suggested that Buckley had never worked for a living, Buckley sent a telegram to Paar in which he referred to Vidal as “a pink queer.” Matters came to a head when the two traded insults on ABC during the 1968 Democratic convention, with Vidal calling Buckley “a crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatening to “sock” him “in the goddamn face.” In follow-up pieces in Esquire, Buckley focused on homosexual themes in Vidal’s work, and Vidal responded by implying that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite, whereupon Buckley sued and Vidal countersued. After three years of legal wrangling, Vidal’s suit was thrown out, Buckley dropped his, and Esquire settled a modest sum on Buckley. Vidal still bristles at the mention of his old enemy’s name. “He was out to get me from the very beginning,” he says. “He wanted me to write for his little magazine. I spurned him, and he didn’t like that. Bear in mind, this was a very stupid guy, who never read any of those books he referred to, and Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman. I never heard such trash as when he cooled it.” Even Vidal, however, says of Pat, “I liked her, and it was mutual.”
Bill always claimed that Pat opposed each of his new ventures, which, however, “once they were undertaken, she took part in enthusiastically.” Twice a month she hosted National Review editorial dinners at their East 73rd Street duplex maisonette, which was decorated in her favorite colors—red, orange, and purple—except for the dining room, which was painted black. Drinks were taken in the library, where a full-length portrait of the hostess—in a flame-red caftan, with her beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniels at her feet—hung over the fireplace. These dinners brought together the magazine’s writers and editors with such famous Buckley friends as Whittaker Chambers, Clare Boothe Luce, and Lauren Bacall. Kissinger recalls, “Pat’s role was a combination of making sure that everybody was comfortable, that the conversation was on an important level, and that Bill was the featured person. She did that with extraordinary tact, but not as a hostess, as a partner.”
As John O’Sullivan, longtime writer and editor at the National Review, put it in an online tribute to Pat, “Together they were conservatism’s golden couple, giving a contemporary Manhattan gloss to a movement that its enemies would like to have caricatured as provincial, dull, and outdated.”
“I don’t know how Bill could have picked any woman in the world to be his wife other than Pat,” says Aileen Mehle, the society columnist, “because she could match him—even intellectually, and certainly as far as humor was concerned. Most women would have felt challenged by Bill, but she always held her own. She blurted out anything she felt like blurting out. If she loved you, she loved you madly. If she hated you, look out. Don’t forget, she was six feet tall. But she always wore flats so she wouldn’t be taller than Bill.”
Hostess with the Mostest
Pat called herself “a good Arab wife” and would say, “Wherever Bill goes, I pitch the tent.” In addition to the Manhattan and Stamford residences, the Buckleys rented the Château de Rougemont, outside Gstaad, Switzerland, every winter, and Bill owned and occasionally chartered a series of small yachts, on which he sailed around the Caribbean and made three trips across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific. He also made a ritual of moonlit Friday-night sails out of Stamford. “Seeing Pat stock a boat was incredible—the wine, the vegetables, the canned stuff,” says Mehle. “She was the galley master.” Mehle, who traveled often with the couple, remembers them showing up at an airport in the Bahamas with 42 duffel bags. “You know how many times she counted those bags? Not Bill! He never counted bags.” According to Christopher Buckley, “Even when she wasn’t speaking to my dad, which was a lot of the time, she would pack his bags. Deep in her DNA was something that I think she had learned from her mother: you take care of your men.”
Her greatest logistical feat was the annual move to Switzerland, where Bill would write a whole book in two months’ time, nonfiction to begin with, including his first memoir, Cruising Speed (1971), and later spy novels, such as Saving the Queen (1976) and Marco Polo, If You Can (1982), featuring a hero modeled on himself, Blackford Oakes, a blue-eyed, Yale-educated C.I.A. agent. Julian Booth, the English chef who was with the Buckleys for 35 years, describes Pat setting up the château: “It was a three-day preparation at least. We’d have everything stored upstairs in the eaves. She had her own sheets and linens, and of course the cutlery and crockery were all hers. So we would unpack that. And we would transform what we called the nursery into his office and studio. Basically, there was a billiard table, and we would put a Ping-Pong table over the top, and that was his table for painting. When he was in the château, he loved to paint. He and his research fellow—usually a different one each year—would work in the mornings, then lunch, ski, and be back usually by 3:30 in the afternoon. And then work until the cocktail hour. And then join the guests for dinner. And then play the harpsichord or paint.”
“David Niven was there every night. He was Bill’s closest friend,” recalls Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek shipping heir, who began his journalistic career in 1967 as a photographer for the National Review. “Roger Moore was there. Kenneth Galbraith was there. In those days the Buckleys stayed up very late, whooping it up. Pat always played the outraged duchess: ‘No, I’m not going to let Taki take you deep-mountain skiing, Bill.’ And Bill would sort of smile wryly.”
As Gstaad became more and more social, in the 70s, so did the scene at the Buckleys’. Nan Kempner would show up every February and take two rooms, one for her and one for her couture gowns. Other regulars included Lynn Wyatt, Brazilian socialite Elizinha Moreira-Salles, and Spanish extra man Pano de Hoyos. As editor of Interview, I was invited to stay in 1978, and I arrived in time for a standard lunch of fettuccine with gobs of pâté de foie gras, stuffed roast pheasant, and chocolate mousse. I had barely taken a sip of the Château Margaux when Pat bellowed, “I cannot understand how a nice Catholic boy like you could work for that creep Andy Warhol!” Julian Booth recalls of those days, “We would have the Greek night, with King Constantine, the Goulandrises, and Taki. Then we’d have a German night, with Count and Countess von Oeynhausen. And then the Danish night, when Princess Benedikt would come. And the Monegasque night—the Grimaldis and David Niven.”
Jamie Niven, David’s son, says, “My father saw them all the time in the winter. They were really, really close. We called them the Buckles. In the summer they would come and stay at my father’s house at Cap-Ferrat. One year, Château de Rougemont burned, and it was terribly damaged. So they moved down the road five kilometers and spent that winter with my father. The harpsichord was saved. It went downstairs in the little wine cave my father had. Bill took that over and worked in there.” Jamie, who didn’t get along with his stepmother, grew very close to Pat over the years. “I remember I was talking to her on the phone, and she was telling me I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that. I said, ‘You know, you’re not my mother. You can’t talk to me like that.’ She said, ‘I have been your mother, Sonny, and I shall remain your mother until I die.’ So I became Sonny to her, and I would call her up and say, ‘Mother, how are you today?’”
When David Niven died, in 1983, Jamie was on a fishing trip in Idaho. True to form, Pat called the governor of Idaho, who sent a plane to pluck him out of the woods, making it possible for him to get to Switzerland in time for the funeral. Jamie says, “About two years later, the Museum of Modern Art decided to have a fund-raising evening for the film department in memory of my father. My first call was to Pat. She became chairman of the evening, and we made more money than MoMA had ever made in one night.” Pat and Jamie subsequently organized events at the museum honoring Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and Clint Eastwood.
“I am, to put it in really vulgar language, a money raiser,” Pat Buckley once told a reporter, “a money raiser for things I believe in.” Her two principal charities were New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. Starting in the 1960s, she and Nan Kempner co-chaired annual galas for the hospital, raising some $75 million over 30 years’ time. From 1978 to 1995, Pat chaired the Costume Institute’s yearly benefit, which was so exclusive—and lucrative—that it became known as the Party of the Year. For the opening of Diana Vreeland’s 1981 exhibition, “The Eighteenth-Century Woman,” for example, nearly every major European designer flew over, and the 720 dinner guests ranged from Doris Duke and Diana Ross to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bill Paley. After dinner, 1,000 kids paid $100 each to dance in the Temple of Dendur. “Pat ran those parties with an iron fist,” says Blaine Trump, who helped Pat with her charities. “She would figure out what the tables were going to look like, and who could buy the tables. She was also very aware of the fact that you don’t spend a lot of money on the fluff—you make sure that the charity gets the money. Once Pat sat down with you, you were done—get your checkbook out. And when you did something for her, there was no one more appreciative. You always got a beautiful note and some wonderful pâté or something that Julian had whipped up.” Sean Driscoll, whose Glorious Food catered the parties, adds, “Pat was totally hands-on. If we were running out of time and there were still flowers to be hung from the chandeliers, she would just get up on a ladder and do it herself.”
‘Pat was the Queen of New York when Reagan was president,” says Louise Grunwald, the Park Avenue hostess and widow of Time bigwig Henry Grunwald, who served as ambassador to Austria under Ronald Reagan. “That was Pat’s high point. The best invitation in town was to go to the Buckleys’. It was the best fun: it was journalists, it was celebrities, it was Tom Wolfe, it was fabulous. Who gives parties like that today?”
The Buckleys’ friendship with the Reagans went back to 1961, when Bill was giving a speech in Beverly Hills to an organization called Citizens for Better Education and Ronald Reagan was asked to introduce him. Over the years Bill would sometimes stay at the Reagans’ house when he was in California. Nancy recalls, “After he left, the kids would always say, ‘Why can’t we have peanut butter on our toast like Bill Buckley?’” Nancy’s good friend Betsy Bloomingdale remembers how attractive Bill was back then, especially whenever he made a toast at one of the Reagans’ dinners. “He’d get up at the head of the table, put his thumbs in his pockets, and he had a way of rocking as he spoke. And we would sit there mesmerized. Nancy and I thought he was the most divine thing we ever saw.” The Bloomingdales’ boys went to the same Catholic boarding school as Christopher, Portsmouth Abbey, in Rhode Island, and the two mothers found the nearby hotels so depressing that they rented and decorated an apartment for their visits.
While Reagan relied on Bill for ideological guidance, he was also amenable to taking his recommendations for appointments. In Bill’s posthumous memoir, he prints a letter in which he suggests that Reagan “enroll the help” of Evan Galbraith, whom the president shortly thereafter made ambassador to France. The book makes clear as well how close Bill was to Nancy. In a January 22, 1985, letter to her he writes:
This is a love letter.
When El Presidente was sworn in, and after he spoke, I was standing five feet behind him—and you. And I saw your fingers caressing his. You thought the gesture entirely private, but I have Eyes That See All, and I was not, in living memory, so moved by so tender a liaison between a great leader and his incomparable wife.
The Buckleys were at the first private dinner the Reagans gave at the White House, in honor of Prince Charles, and at their last private dinner, when Nancy’s official portrait was unveiled. In between, they attended a state dinner for Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, a private dinner for Laurence Olivier, and the famous party where Princess Diana danced with John Travolta. They were invited to stay overnight at the White House and to fly on Air Force One—honors granted not even to Nancy’s closest confidant, Jerry Zipkin, the Park Avenue real-estate heir and social arbiter.
Feuds and Milestones
All through the 1980s, Pat and Jerry, who were the best of friends, ran Nancy Reagan’s social calendar when she visited New York. They were quite a duo, one as funny as the other, and both highly opinionated, judgmental, and cutting. They also shared a passion for gin rummy. “When you spent the weekend in Stamford, every afternoon you played gin rummy,” says Aileen Mehle. “And everybody wanted to hurry up and finish lunch so we could play. Not Bill. He never did play gin—ever. Those gin-rummy games should have been taped. Oh, my God, the things people said to each other. Naughty, naughty.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that two personalities as strong as Pat and Jerry would have a falling-out. Christopher Buckley thinks his mother’s relationship with “old Zip” may have come to an end over the card table at East 73rd Street. “Apparently, at one of those card games, Jerry said something snappish to one of the other men in my mother’s regular group—all confirmed bachelors—and Mum demanded that he apologize. I’m sure drink had been taken. Jerry refused, and it went from there.” Other people said Zipkin had gone around town saying Pat had a drinking problem, and it got back to her. I recall Zipkin vowing over lunch at Mortimer’s that he would never speak to Mrs. Buckley again, after she had seated his date, the Duchess de Cadaval, at Bill’s table at a Costume Institute ball, and put him in Outer Mongolia. “I think their fight was about Nancy,” says Kenneth Lane. “There was a little bit of competition. I thought it was very stupid, so I had them both to lunch, without telling them that the other one was coming. It did not work.” Blaine Trump adds, “We tried to have a peacemaking summit at Le Cirque. Jerry asked for his fish grilled dry, and it came with a sauce, and he did his usual thing with the waiter. Pat said, ‘You just can’t treat people that way.’ And that was the end of the summit.”
Sadly, Pat would also break with another of her closest pals, the fashion designer Bill Blass. “There was an incident with Blass,” says a friend of theirs, “when she had too much to drink, and he said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Zipkin died in 1995, Blass in 2002. Pat attended Zipkin’s funeral; Blass didn’t want one.
In July 2000, the Buckleys celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with a dinner for 50 friends and relatives on the terrace of the house in Stamford. They chartered a bus to bring some of the invited from Manhattan. As Bill was greeting people arriving in their own cars—Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Frederick and Virginia Melhado, C. Z. Guest, Aileen Mehle—Pat stuck her head out their upstairs bedroom window and hollered to him, “Ducky, you’re not going to believe this, but the bus is broken down, and our guests are sitting on the side of I-95.” Their chauffeur and another driver were dispatched to rescue the stranded guests, Evan and Bootsie Galbraith among them.
After a buffet of barbecued pork and whole lobsters, Christopher showed a video he had made for his parents’ 40th anniversary. This was followed by a speech from Bill, which he ended with “To spend 50 years with Pat, you have to love her.” Pat then stood up and explained why she had changed clothes during the dinner. She said that the red-and-white-striped dress she was now wearing had been made by the Paris couturier Jacques Fath, and that she had been wearing it the night Bill proposed to her. “And it still fits!” she added proudly.
On Christmas Eve 2002, the Buckley family was shaken by an item in the New York Daily News revealing that Christopher was “embroiled in a paternity action” with former Random House publicist Irina Woelfle, “over her 2-year-old son, Jonathan,” and that he had voluntarily taken a DNA test, which had established him as the boy’s father. After Christopher agreed to pay $3,000 a month in child support, the press dropped the subject. Although Christopher and his wife, Lucy Gregg Buckley—the daughter of a former C.I.A. officer, with whom he had two children, Caitlin and William Conor—seemed happily married, even close family friends refrained from asking Pat and Bill about the situation. As Blaine Trump says, “Pat usually talked about everything, but this became the unspeakable. And for Bill, who was so Catholic, it was something he couldn’t abide.”
Christopher was not always the perfect son he appeared to be. He has admitted that he was high on LSD during an interview with Mike Wallace for a segment 60 Minutes did on his father in 1970. Christopher was quite open with me about his relationship with his parents. “It was tough, but I wouldn’t trade it,” he says, adding that he and his father had exchanged at least 7,000 letters and e-mails over the years, and “it’s quite possible that over half of them involved contentions.” Some of their biggest arguments were about religion. Bill, who had a private Mass said every Sunday for him, the two Hispanic maids, and any houseguests who were Catholic, was understandably upset when his son “demurred”—Christopher’s word—from the faith. “My father had a great sense of humor, but it absolutely stopped at the threshold of the Church. And that became a source of great disappointment to him. The funny thing is, my mother got it. She and I probably, over the course of the last 20 years, spent about a third of the time not speaking, but I could go to her more than I could go to him.”
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Unfortunately for Christopher, last October he found himself in the tabloids again, when Irina Woelfle filed a lawsuit seeking additional child support for their son. What shocked people most was a line from Bill Buckley’s will that seemed exceptionally cruel: “I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes … shall be deemed to have predeceased me.” The Hartford Courant, which broke the story, estimated the value of Bill Buckley’s estate at more than $30 million, though presumably $24.5 million of that was the asking price for the Buckleys’ co-op apartment on East 73rd Street. The New York Post followed up with Woelfle’s neighbor’s claim that Christopher had “never laid eyes” on his “love child,” who “wistfully watched his friends play with their fathers and asked his mom about his own dad” at the local community pool in Coral Gables, Florida, where Woelfle now lives. Restricted from responding by his lawyer, but aware that he was not coming across as a paragon of parenthood, Christopher told The New York Times that he looks “forward to the day when I can have a relationship with Jonathan.”
No sooner had that brouhaha died down than Christopher found himself in more hot water when he endorsed Barack Obama in an online article, setting off an avalanche of hate e-mails from furious Republicans and leading him to resign from the National Review. (The writer David Frum, a Sarah Palin critic, decided to exit not long after.) Christopher still, however, sits on the board and owns one-seventh of the shares. Indeed, some friends are not so sure that Bill would have disapproved of his son’s temporary defection from the G.O.P., given that he himself, like many old-school conservatives, had broken with George W. Bush on the Iraq war. Pat, whose views were often to the right of her husband’s—she maintained that we should have “turned Iraq into a parking lot” during the first Gulf War—might have been more upset.
The year before the anniversary party, Bill had given up Firing Line, after hosting 1,504 programs over 33 years. He had already stepped down from the editorship of the National Review, and in 2004 he would divest himself of his controlling interest by giving his shares of voting stock to a corporation whose original trustees included Christopher and Evan Galbraith. In 2005, for the 50th anniversary of the magazine, President George W. Bush hosted a lunch in Washington to honor Bill. He continued writing his syndicated column and saw the publication of five more books, including Last Call for Blackford Oakes, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription (collected letters to and from the editor of the National Review), and Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater.
Pat, who over the years had had a long history of accidents and falls and had had four hip replacements, was also slowing down. The Buckleys stopped going to Gstaad in 2004 and Pat spent much of the winter in Nassau. “Something happened with her,” Jamie Niven says. “She became almost reclusive as time went on. She wasn’t in town as much. She spent more time in Stamford. I used to take her to lunch at the Carlyle hotel, because it was quiet and you could hear. She told me that she was really tired of a lot of things that she had done in New York. Things had just taken a change, and they weren’t what they used to be for her.” She could still throw a punch, however. At a lunch that Deeda and William McCormick Blair Jr. gave in 2006, the host, who had served as an ambassador under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had the temerity to say that he admired Al Gore. Pat reared up and snorted, “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
Friends kept dying on her. Her favorite escort, Johnny Galliher, who had replaced Zipkin at her card table and in her heart, went in 2003. Nan Kempner died of emphysema in 2005. In the last interview Pat ever gave, she told George Gurley of The New York Observer, “I was with her the day before she died. I was going to Europe the next day, and I said, ‘Nan, I’m not going to go to Europe,’ and she looked at me with those watery eyes. She said, ‘Go.’ She knew.… It was very hard for me.”
“I don’t think Pat was particularly anxious to hang around,” says Frederick Melhado. “I kept getting that feeling, and I kept saying to her, ‘You cannot feel that way.’ Because the thought of her not being around was just unbelievably sad to me.” In his eulogy at her memorial, he recalled telling her a few weeks before she died, “I wish I had a magic wand.” Pat had responded, “I know, Freddy, but we run out of magic wands eventually.”
“I was there the day she died, having lunch with Bill,” says Taki. “He had asked Reinaldo Herrera and me to go up. I’ve never seen a man cry so much.”
Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
The New Deal That Wasn't
WASHINGTON -- Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over. George Will's e-mail address is georgewill(at)washpost.com. (c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over. George Will's e-mail address is georgewill(at)washpost.com. (c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Go Marines
Marine Makes Insurgents Pay the Price
November 18, 2008Marine Corps Newsby Cpl. James M. Mercure
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FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.
Shewan has historically been a safe haven for insurgents, who used to plan and stage attacks against Coalition Forces in the Bala Baluk district.
The city is home to several major insurgent leaders. Reports indicate that more than 250 full time fighters reside in the city and in the surrounding villages.
Shewan had been a thorn in the side of Task Force 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Afghanistan throughout the Marines’ deployment here in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, because it controls an important supply route into the Bala Baluk district. Opening the route was key to continuing combat operations in the area.
“The day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat,” said a designated marksman who requested to remain unidentified. “Our vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and machine gun fire. One of our ‘humvees’ was disabled from RPG fire, and the Marines inside dismounted and laid down suppression fire so they could evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast.”
The vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the Marines pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense eight-hour battle as the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades. After recovering the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site.
“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper said. “A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”
During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.”
After calling for close-air support, the small group of Marines pushed forward and broke the enemies’ spirit as many of them dropped their weapons and fled the battlefield. At the end of the battle, the Marines had reduced an enemy stronghold, killed more than 50 insurgents and wounded several more.
“I didn’t realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken through the enemies’ lines and forced them to retreat. It was roughly 250 insurgents against 30 of us,” the corporal said. “It was a good day for the Marine Corps. We killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our guys were seriously injured.”
November 18, 2008Marine Corps Newsby Cpl. James M. Mercure
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FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.
Shewan has historically been a safe haven for insurgents, who used to plan and stage attacks against Coalition Forces in the Bala Baluk district.
The city is home to several major insurgent leaders. Reports indicate that more than 250 full time fighters reside in the city and in the surrounding villages.
Shewan had been a thorn in the side of Task Force 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Afghanistan throughout the Marines’ deployment here in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, because it controls an important supply route into the Bala Baluk district. Opening the route was key to continuing combat operations in the area.
“The day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat,” said a designated marksman who requested to remain unidentified. “Our vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and machine gun fire. One of our ‘humvees’ was disabled from RPG fire, and the Marines inside dismounted and laid down suppression fire so they could evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast.”
The vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the Marines pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense eight-hour battle as the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades. After recovering the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site.
“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper said. “A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”
During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.”
After calling for close-air support, the small group of Marines pushed forward and broke the enemies’ spirit as many of them dropped their weapons and fled the battlefield. At the end of the battle, the Marines had reduced an enemy stronghold, killed more than 50 insurgents and wounded several more.
“I didn’t realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken through the enemies’ lines and forced them to retreat. It was roughly 250 insurgents against 30 of us,” the corporal said. “It was a good day for the Marine Corps. We killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our guys were seriously injured.”
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Poor Barack
Former President Bill Clinton has agreed to several restrictions on his future business and philanthropic activities around the world to pave the way for his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to serve as secretary of state, Democrats close to the situation said Wednesday.
Poor Barack, he just does not get it. Bill Clinton will tell him whatever he wants to hear because BILL CLINTON IS A DOCUMENTED LIAR!
Poor Barack, he just does not get it. Bill Clinton will tell him whatever he wants to hear because BILL CLINTON IS A DOCUMENTED LIAR!
Monday, November 17, 2008
Methodist's Getting it Right
Wesley's Pro-Lifers
By John Lomperis on 11.17.08 @ 6:06AM
With the strengthening of Democratic congressional majorities, the election of Barack Obama, and liberal victories on state ballot initiatives concerning abortion, bioethics, and assisted suicide, the last two weeks have given little for pro-lifers to celebrate. Yet pro-lifers have also seen the emergence of more encouraging trends in unlikely places.
One is the United Methodist Church, our country's second-largest Protestant denomination. Like other mainline American Protestant denominations, United Methodism has for decades been dominated by a theologically liberal and radical hierarchy that is out-of-step with the generally much more conservative grassroots membership. One of the many reflections of this was the official abortion-friendly positions adopted by such denominations a generation ago.
At its 1972 General Conference (as the denomination's quadrennial policymaking body is called) the United Methodist Church adopted a lengthy statement of "Social Principles" on various controversial issues, including a moral defense of abortion and a call for the practice's legalization. Ever since, pro-life United Methodists have been trying to take their church back. In the last three General Conferences, "death with dignity" rhetoric of "right-to-die" advocates was officially abandoned in order to clearly state that the denomination "opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia" along with "any pressure upon the dying to end their lives." At the 1988 General Conference, the Social Principles statement was amended to oppose abortion "as a means of gender selection" or as a "means of birth control" -- which, the data shows, applies to most U.S. abortions.
In 1992 and 1996, the denomination passed amendments calling the church "to provide nurturing ministries" to "those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy," including both "those who terminate a pregnancy" and "those who give birth." At the 2000 General Conference, statement was added "oppos[ing] the use of" partial-birth abortion and "call[ing] for the end of this practice" in most instances. In 2004, the statement on abortion was qualified with strong support for adoption. The denomination's position was further modified that year to recognize post-abortion stress and promote counseling for its victims.
When United Methodists convened this spring, they took quite a number of pro-life steps. Delegates adopted a supplemental statement that lengthily denounced the global problem of gender-selective abortion while describing abortion as "violent" and something to oppose when chosen for "trivial reasons." Opposition to abortion as a means of birth control was strengthened, and language opposing parental notification requirements was neutralized while adult "notification and consent" and family consultation were endorsed for minors' abortions. The Social Principles now indicate a clear preference for life with a sentence to "affirm and encourage the Church to assist the ministry of crisis pregnancy centers … that compassionately help women find feasible alternatives to abortion."
More significantly, this last General Conference removed much of the pro-abortion language that had remained in place for 36 years. 1972 rhetoric about circumstances that "warrant" abortion, "unacceptable pregnancy," and support for abortion being somehow "[i]n continuity with past Christian teaching" were stricken from the Social Principles, which now declare that "we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child." Now the abortion problem with the United Methodist Social Principles has been reduced to a single sentence, which "supports[s] the legal option of abortion" during unspecified "tragic conflicts of life with life."
It is true that the pace of pro-life progress has been frustratingly slow, and the vagueness of that single sentence has enabled liberal denominational officials to continue claiming a mandate for promoting pro-abortion policies in the church's name. Yet the encouraging fact remains that for the last 20 years, every abortion-related change to the denomination's Social Principles has been life-affirming. There are now also positive signs of change in the denominational hierarchy, with at least three bishops in as many years taking the groundbreaking step of speaking out against abortion.
The biggest disappointment for the pro-life Methodist cause came when a margin of just 32 General Conference delegates (out of 800 voting) sustained the denomination's continued affiliation with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which stridently opposes any legal restriction or moral disapproval of abortion. The vote was suspiciously scheduled at a time when more than 100 of the increasingly international denomination's pro-life-leaning African delegates were absent. The vote was also influenced by a massive and apparently unprecedented effort by RCRC staff and volunteers before and during the General Conference to lobby delegates, at several points with blatant dishonesty about the extent of their uncompromising extremism. Yet the fact remains that the United Methodist vote on RCRC affiliation was nevertheless the closest it has ever been.
It is also worth remembering that there is recent precedent for an abortion-affirming denomination to reverse course. Two other mainline Protestant denominations, the American Baptist and the Northern Moravians, have chosen to sever their past ties with RCRC. America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, adopted a resolution in 1971 that anticipated the Supreme Court's reasoning two years later, demanding legal abortion for reasons as vague as the threat of consequences for the mother's emotional health, effectively making any abortion impossible to prohibit.
In 1974, they adopted a mealy-mouthed resolution calling for "a middle ground" on abortion without any supporting any concrete limitation. Among RCRC's early supporters were several Southern Baptist seminary professors and Foy Valentine, who remained that denomination's chief public spokesman on social issues until 1986. Yet through a struggle of many years, the Southern Baptist Convention has renounced its support for abortion, adopted a position in line with historic Christian teaching, and become a critical institutional bulwark of the pro-life movement.
Many pro-life United Methodists are cautiously optimistic that a similar change may be underway in their own denomination.
By John Lomperis on 11.17.08 @ 6:06AM
With the strengthening of Democratic congressional majorities, the election of Barack Obama, and liberal victories on state ballot initiatives concerning abortion, bioethics, and assisted suicide, the last two weeks have given little for pro-lifers to celebrate. Yet pro-lifers have also seen the emergence of more encouraging trends in unlikely places.
One is the United Methodist Church, our country's second-largest Protestant denomination. Like other mainline American Protestant denominations, United Methodism has for decades been dominated by a theologically liberal and radical hierarchy that is out-of-step with the generally much more conservative grassroots membership. One of the many reflections of this was the official abortion-friendly positions adopted by such denominations a generation ago.
At its 1972 General Conference (as the denomination's quadrennial policymaking body is called) the United Methodist Church adopted a lengthy statement of "Social Principles" on various controversial issues, including a moral defense of abortion and a call for the practice's legalization. Ever since, pro-life United Methodists have been trying to take their church back. In the last three General Conferences, "death with dignity" rhetoric of "right-to-die" advocates was officially abandoned in order to clearly state that the denomination "opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia" along with "any pressure upon the dying to end their lives." At the 1988 General Conference, the Social Principles statement was amended to oppose abortion "as a means of gender selection" or as a "means of birth control" -- which, the data shows, applies to most U.S. abortions.
In 1992 and 1996, the denomination passed amendments calling the church "to provide nurturing ministries" to "those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy," including both "those who terminate a pregnancy" and "those who give birth." At the 2000 General Conference, statement was added "oppos[ing] the use of" partial-birth abortion and "call[ing] for the end of this practice" in most instances. In 2004, the statement on abortion was qualified with strong support for adoption. The denomination's position was further modified that year to recognize post-abortion stress and promote counseling for its victims.
When United Methodists convened this spring, they took quite a number of pro-life steps. Delegates adopted a supplemental statement that lengthily denounced the global problem of gender-selective abortion while describing abortion as "violent" and something to oppose when chosen for "trivial reasons." Opposition to abortion as a means of birth control was strengthened, and language opposing parental notification requirements was neutralized while adult "notification and consent" and family consultation were endorsed for minors' abortions. The Social Principles now indicate a clear preference for life with a sentence to "affirm and encourage the Church to assist the ministry of crisis pregnancy centers … that compassionately help women find feasible alternatives to abortion."
More significantly, this last General Conference removed much of the pro-abortion language that had remained in place for 36 years. 1972 rhetoric about circumstances that "warrant" abortion, "unacceptable pregnancy," and support for abortion being somehow "[i]n continuity with past Christian teaching" were stricken from the Social Principles, which now declare that "we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child." Now the abortion problem with the United Methodist Social Principles has been reduced to a single sentence, which "supports[s] the legal option of abortion" during unspecified "tragic conflicts of life with life."
It is true that the pace of pro-life progress has been frustratingly slow, and the vagueness of that single sentence has enabled liberal denominational officials to continue claiming a mandate for promoting pro-abortion policies in the church's name. Yet the encouraging fact remains that for the last 20 years, every abortion-related change to the denomination's Social Principles has been life-affirming. There are now also positive signs of change in the denominational hierarchy, with at least three bishops in as many years taking the groundbreaking step of speaking out against abortion.
The biggest disappointment for the pro-life Methodist cause came when a margin of just 32 General Conference delegates (out of 800 voting) sustained the denomination's continued affiliation with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which stridently opposes any legal restriction or moral disapproval of abortion. The vote was suspiciously scheduled at a time when more than 100 of the increasingly international denomination's pro-life-leaning African delegates were absent. The vote was also influenced by a massive and apparently unprecedented effort by RCRC staff and volunteers before and during the General Conference to lobby delegates, at several points with blatant dishonesty about the extent of their uncompromising extremism. Yet the fact remains that the United Methodist vote on RCRC affiliation was nevertheless the closest it has ever been.
It is also worth remembering that there is recent precedent for an abortion-affirming denomination to reverse course. Two other mainline Protestant denominations, the American Baptist and the Northern Moravians, have chosen to sever their past ties with RCRC. America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, adopted a resolution in 1971 that anticipated the Supreme Court's reasoning two years later, demanding legal abortion for reasons as vague as the threat of consequences for the mother's emotional health, effectively making any abortion impossible to prohibit.
In 1974, they adopted a mealy-mouthed resolution calling for "a middle ground" on abortion without any supporting any concrete limitation. Among RCRC's early supporters were several Southern Baptist seminary professors and Foy Valentine, who remained that denomination's chief public spokesman on social issues until 1986. Yet through a struggle of many years, the Southern Baptist Convention has renounced its support for abortion, adopted a position in line with historic Christian teaching, and become a critical institutional bulwark of the pro-life movement.
Many pro-life United Methodists are cautiously optimistic that a similar change may be underway in their own denomination.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Apology Time
Although I was never a McCain fan one thing I thought I knew for sure is the ultimate decency of the m:
an until I saw how the people around him treated Sarah Palin. Like it or not she was the one who drew the large crowds not McCain.
This is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
an until I saw how the people around him treated Sarah Palin. Like it or not she was the one who drew the large crowds not McCain.
This is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.
It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."
And what does it say when the campaign team of a man who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate cannot agree on (much less present) a coherent answer to why he should be elected president of the United States -- except that he's not Barack Obama?
Sunday, November 9, 2008
George W Bush
The attacks on the 2nd President Bush have been brutal. This President has had monumental triumphs and monumental mistakes. Mostly let's remember the President for the man he has been. From the time who took the oath of office he took the high road with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress he reached across the isle in much the same way that Reagan did. He reached out to the leader of the Liberals Ted Kennedy for friendship and legislation. Unfortunately his attempt at goodwill with the opposing party did not have any positive results.
This has been a wild ride this past eight years and it is important to note the challenges we faced as a country with this President:
2000 ELECTION:
This is where the crazies on the left started hating the President. By every objective measure the Florida electors were duty bound to cast their vote for President Bush. At every turn the Bush team showed they could meet the challenges of the various ways the Gore team and the Florida Supreme court were changing the rules of the game. Finally after so many changes for 37 days the supreme court ruled and the Gore team accepted the loss. Even the analysis by the major media (Wasington Post, New York Times, etc...) agreed Bush won the state and therefore won the presidency.
CHINESE HOSTAGES:
Many may have forgotten but this was the first foreign policy crisis and where most experts in that field expected our country to spend most of our energies on. When these men in uniform were taken hostage by the Chinese and accused of espionage there was very little we could do. The President utilized all the diplomacy in his arsenal to convince the worlds #2 super power to do the right thing. It must be noted that the attack heard by most is Bush does not use diplomacy. This first challenge has proven his detractors wrong.
TECH BUBBLE:
When President Bush first started running for President in 1999 we were in the midst of a period of unprecedented economic growth. What the Bush team saw and no one prepared for was that most of the economic and stock price growth were based on unsustainable prices in the technology sector. We had companies with stock prices in the tripple digits and no earnings. Unlike today there are no recriminations like the housing bubble. This affected our economic growth for a period of the most of the first term of President Bush. Due to the job losses in the tech industry we had near zero job growth in the economy. The Bush economic team dealt with this in a very conservative way and they cut the heck out of taxes. This is what finally got our economy moving and it took the cuts 2001 and 2003 to get us out of this mess but in the end there were millions of jobs created.
9/11:
This is what the Bush Presidency was made for. The several previous attacks on our interests in the world were treated as a simple nuisance and a job for law enforcement. The second that 2nd plane hit the President's own words were "we are at war." The major question had there been a Gore Presidency would we have gone after the perpetrators and let that be it. The left, including Obama, hate the term "war on terror". We can not answer such a hypothetical but the words of the left in the post 9/11 era certainly are indicators on what their approach would be. The President did something that Alexander "The Great", the British, and the Soviet Union could not do and that is he over threw the sitting government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a finished project but mostly due to our success in other regions are the enemy reconstituting themselves there.
IRAQ:
Most people view this a a "war of choice" and maybe it was. It is important to recall what was going on before we went ahead with this war. Saddam Hussein was financially supporting terrorists throughout the middle east. Iraq was shooting down our planes in the so called "no fly zone" which in itself is an act of war. The largest outrage is the "Oil for Food" scandal. This was the U.N. sanctioned bribary scam.
The decision was made and the invasion was planned by General Franks and executed flawlessly. On the other hand the post invasion was a disaster and unlike Vietnam Bush listened too intently to the Generals on the ground. It was evident for a couple of years that he needed more troops on the ground and it was not until late in the war that in a very stern meeting where General Sanchez could not answer appropriately why we did not need more troops that President Bush decided to make a change in leadership to General Petreus. At this writing this appears to have worked as long as President Obama does not screw it up.
CREDIT CRISIS:
This was a long running crisis that has many fathers but the question was is how the Bush team handled it. History will have to bear this out but in the short run it appears we as a nation have made the same mistakes that F.D.R. made in the New Deal but not the same mistakes that the Hoover Administration made in raising taxes. From a purely ideological stand point having the government so entwined with industry is a failure for the long run. So now as Republican's we have set a path for the Democrat Administration. This is the biggest disappointment I see with the Team Bush. Mistakes like this have happened in our history before and have been corrected so let's all hope this one will as well.
Even though the Bush Administration ended on a sour note he will be missed by me. I like the man's integrity and style. I like the confidence he has in our way of life as American's. One area he has taught me greatly on and that is his experiment as a big government Republican. In the beginning I thought wrongly it was worth a try to give a little on the government side to woo supporters but in the end that never worked and we sold out our ideals as a party.
I hope that President Bush has a wonderful Post Presidency and he is remembered for the difficulties he faced while in office. Who knows he may be remembered kindly when the historical record is examined with an unbiased eye.
This has been a wild ride this past eight years and it is important to note the challenges we faced as a country with this President:
2000 ELECTION:
This is where the crazies on the left started hating the President. By every objective measure the Florida electors were duty bound to cast their vote for President Bush. At every turn the Bush team showed they could meet the challenges of the various ways the Gore team and the Florida Supreme court were changing the rules of the game. Finally after so many changes for 37 days the supreme court ruled and the Gore team accepted the loss. Even the analysis by the major media (Wasington Post, New York Times, etc...) agreed Bush won the state and therefore won the presidency.
CHINESE HOSTAGES:
Many may have forgotten but this was the first foreign policy crisis and where most experts in that field expected our country to spend most of our energies on. When these men in uniform were taken hostage by the Chinese and accused of espionage there was very little we could do. The President utilized all the diplomacy in his arsenal to convince the worlds #2 super power to do the right thing. It must be noted that the attack heard by most is Bush does not use diplomacy. This first challenge has proven his detractors wrong.
TECH BUBBLE:
When President Bush first started running for President in 1999 we were in the midst of a period of unprecedented economic growth. What the Bush team saw and no one prepared for was that most of the economic and stock price growth were based on unsustainable prices in the technology sector. We had companies with stock prices in the tripple digits and no earnings. Unlike today there are no recriminations like the housing bubble. This affected our economic growth for a period of the most of the first term of President Bush. Due to the job losses in the tech industry we had near zero job growth in the economy. The Bush economic team dealt with this in a very conservative way and they cut the heck out of taxes. This is what finally got our economy moving and it took the cuts 2001 and 2003 to get us out of this mess but in the end there were millions of jobs created.
9/11:
This is what the Bush Presidency was made for. The several previous attacks on our interests in the world were treated as a simple nuisance and a job for law enforcement. The second that 2nd plane hit the President's own words were "we are at war." The major question had there been a Gore Presidency would we have gone after the perpetrators and let that be it. The left, including Obama, hate the term "war on terror". We can not answer such a hypothetical but the words of the left in the post 9/11 era certainly are indicators on what their approach would be. The President did something that Alexander "The Great", the British, and the Soviet Union could not do and that is he over threw the sitting government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a finished project but mostly due to our success in other regions are the enemy reconstituting themselves there.
IRAQ:
Most people view this a a "war of choice" and maybe it was. It is important to recall what was going on before we went ahead with this war. Saddam Hussein was financially supporting terrorists throughout the middle east. Iraq was shooting down our planes in the so called "no fly zone" which in itself is an act of war. The largest outrage is the "Oil for Food" scandal. This was the U.N. sanctioned bribary scam.
The decision was made and the invasion was planned by General Franks and executed flawlessly. On the other hand the post invasion was a disaster and unlike Vietnam Bush listened too intently to the Generals on the ground. It was evident for a couple of years that he needed more troops on the ground and it was not until late in the war that in a very stern meeting where General Sanchez could not answer appropriately why we did not need more troops that President Bush decided to make a change in leadership to General Petreus. At this writing this appears to have worked as long as President Obama does not screw it up.
CREDIT CRISIS:
This was a long running crisis that has many fathers but the question was is how the Bush team handled it. History will have to bear this out but in the short run it appears we as a nation have made the same mistakes that F.D.R. made in the New Deal but not the same mistakes that the Hoover Administration made in raising taxes. From a purely ideological stand point having the government so entwined with industry is a failure for the long run. So now as Republican's we have set a path for the Democrat Administration. This is the biggest disappointment I see with the Team Bush. Mistakes like this have happened in our history before and have been corrected so let's all hope this one will as well.
Even though the Bush Administration ended on a sour note he will be missed by me. I like the man's integrity and style. I like the confidence he has in our way of life as American's. One area he has taught me greatly on and that is his experiment as a big government Republican. In the beginning I thought wrongly it was worth a try to give a little on the government side to woo supporters but in the end that never worked and we sold out our ideals as a party.
I hope that President Bush has a wonderful Post Presidency and he is remembered for the difficulties he faced while in office. Who knows he may be remembered kindly when the historical record is examined with an unbiased eye.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
A Good History on the Mortgage Crisis
John Steele Gordon gives a good synopsis of how all of this happened:
Even after the end of Jim Crow in the 1960’s, the effect of redlining lingered, perhaps more out of habit than of racial prejudice. In 1977, responding to political pressure to abolish the practice, Congress finally passed the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring banks to offer credit throughout their marketing areas and rating them on their compliance. This effectively outlawed redlining.
Then, in 1995, regulations adopted by the Clinton administration took the Community Reinvestment Act to a new level. Instead of forbidding banks to discriminate against blacks and black neighborhoods, the new regulations positively forced banks to seek out such customers and areas. Without saying so, the revised law established quotas for loans to specific neighborhoods, specific income classes, and specific races. It also encouraged community groups to monitor compliance and allowed them to receive fees for marketing loans to target groups.
But the aggressive pursuit of an end to redlining also required the active participation of Fannie Mae, and thereby hangs a tale. Back in 1968, the Johnson administration had decided to “adjust” the federal books by taking Fannie Mae off the budget and establishing it as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE). But while it was theoretically now an independent corporation, Fannie Mae did not have to adhere to the same rules regarding capitalization and oversight that bound most financial institutions. And in 1970 still another GSE was created, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac, to expand further the secondary market in mortgage-backed securities.
This represented a huge moral hazard. The two institutions were supposedly independent of the government and owned by their stockholders. But it was widely assumed that there was an implicit government guarantee of both Fannie and Freddie’s solvency and of the vast amounts of mortgage-based securities they issued. This assumption was by no means unreasonable. Fannie and Freddie were known to enjoy lower capitalization requirements than other financial institutions and to be held to a much less demanding regulatory regime. If the United States government had no worries about potential failure, why should the market?
Forward again to the Clinton changes in 1995. As part of them, Fannie and Freddie were now permitted to invest up to 40 times their capital in mortgages; banks, by contrast, were limited to only ten times their capital. Put briefly, in order to increase the number of mortgages Fannie and Freddie could underwrite, the federal government allowed them to become grossly undercapitalized—that is, grossly to reduce their one source of insurance against failure. The risk of a mammoth failure was then greatly augmented by the sheer number of mortgages given out in the country.
That was bad enough; then came politics to make it much worse. Fannie and Freddie quickly evolved into two of the largest financial institutions on the planet, with assets and liabilities in the trillions. But unlike other large, profit-seeking financial institutions, they were headquartered in Washington, D.C., and were political to their fingertips. Their management and boards tended to come from the political world, not the business world. And some were corrupt: the management of Fannie Mae manipulated the books in order to trigger executive bonuses worth tens of millions of dollars, and Freddie Mac was found in 2003 to have understated earnings by almost $5 billion.
Both companies, moreover, made generous political contributions, especially to those members of Congress who sat on oversight committees. Their charitable foundations could be counted on to kick in to causes that Congressmen and Senators deemed worthy. Many of the political contributions were illegal: in 2006, Freddie was fined $3.8 million—a record amount—for improper election activity.
_____________
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned about half of the $12 trillion in outstanding mortgages, an unprecedented concentration of debt—and of risk. Much of the debt was concentrated in the class of sub-prime mortgages that had proliferated after the 1995 regulations. These were mortgages given to people of questionable credit standing, in one of the attempts by the federal government to increase home ownership among the less well-to-do.
Since banks knew they could offload these sub-prime mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, they had no reason to be careful about issuing them. As for the firms that bought the mortgage-based securities issued by Fannie and Freddie, they thought they could rely on the government’s implicit guarantee. AIG, the world’s largest insurance firm, was happy to insure vast quantities of these securities against default; it must have seemed like insuring against the sun rising in the West.
Wall Street, politicians, and the press all acted as though one of the iron laws of economics, as unrepealable as Newton’s law of universal gravity, had been set aside. That law, simply put, is that potential reward always equals potential risk. In the real world, unfortunately, a high-yield, no-risk investment cannot exist.
In 2006, after an astonishing and unsustainable climb in home values, the inevitable correction set in. By mid-2007, many sub-prime mortgages were backed by real estate that was now of lesser value than the amount of debt. As the market started to doubt the soundness of these mortgages, their value and even their salability began to deteriorate. So did the securities backed by them. Companies that had heavily invested in sub-prime mortgages saw their stock prices and their net worth erode sharply. This caused other companies to avoid lending them money. Credit markets began to tighten sharply as greed in the marketplace was replaced by fear.
A vicious downward spiral ensued. Bear Stearns, the smallest investment bank on Wall Street, was forced into a merger in March with JPMorgan Chase, with guarantees from the Federal Reserve. Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government in early September; Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America; AIG had to be bailed out by the government to the tune of $85 billion; Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy; Washington Mutual became the biggest bank failure in American history and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase; to avoid failure, Wachovia, the sixth largest bank in the country, was taken over by Wells Fargo. The most creditworthy institutions saw interest rates climb to unprecedented levels—even for overnight loans of bank reserves, which are the foundation of the high-functioning capitalist system of the West. Finally it became clear that only a systemic intervention by the government would stem the growing panic and allow credit markets to begin to function normally again.
_____________
Many people, especially liberal politicians, have blamed the disaster on the deregulation of the last 30 years. But they do so in order to avoid the blame’s falling where it should—squarely on their own shoulders. For the same politicians now loudly proclaiming that deregulation caused the problem are the ones who fought tooth and nail to prevent increased regulation of Fannie and Freddie—the source of so much political money, their mother’s milk.
To be sure, there is more than enough blame to go around. Forgetting the lessons of the past, Wall Street acted as though the only direction that markets and prices could move was up. Credit agencies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch gave high ratings to securities that, in retrospect, they clearly did not understand. The news media did not even try to investigate the often complex economics behind the housing market.
But remaining at the heart of the financial beast now abroad in the world are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the mortgages they bought and turned into securities. Protected by their political patrons, they were allowed to pile up colossal debt on an inadequate capital base and to escape much of the regulatory oversight and rules to which other financial institutions are subject. Had they been treated as the potential risks to financial stability they were from the beginning, the housing bubble could not have grown so large and the pain that is now accompanying its end would not have hurt so much.
Herbert Hoover famously remarked that “the trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too greedy.” That is true. But another and equal trouble with capitalism is politicians. Like the rest of us, they are made of all-too-human clay and can be easily blinded to reality by naked self-interest, at a cost we are only now beginning to fathom.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The New Leader of the World
From the Wall Street Journal:
Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government.Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content." . . .Until now, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany have tried to maintain a united front on Iran. But according to the senior Israeli source, Sarkozy fears that Obama might "arrogantly" ignore the other members of this front and open a direct dialogue with Iran without preconditions. So the president of France is criticizing an American politician for not being tough enough on a despotic Middle Eastern regime? Is this Erret (le bizarro monde), or are we going to have to reconsider our stereotypes of the French?
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Obama and Education Policy
Another Communist in Obama’s OrbMeet Michael Klonsky, Obama's "social justice" education expert.By Andrew C. McCarthy
The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama’s radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers. The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue’s least important aspect: Obama’s abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with committed Leftists — e.g., the portrayal of Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” (Petrified of being smeared as a racist, McCain has never mentioned Davis, whom Obama identifies only as “Frank” in his memoir. And, of course, utterance of Jeremiah Wright’s name is verboten in McCain circles, notwithstanding that his Trinity Church, where Obama was a 20-year member, is a font of Marxist Black Liberation Theology and thus critical to our understanding of Obama’s invocations of “change” and “spreading the wealth.”)With what little media oxygen there has been sucked out by the largely uninformative discussion of Ayers (and his wife and Weather Underground ally, Bernadine Dohrn) — in which the mantra “unrepentant terrorist” has been a pale substitute for the critical matter of the Ayers’s ideology that Obama plainly shares — much has been missed. Significantly, that includes another key Obama contact, Mike Klonsky.Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website. To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs, in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition: This is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows Klonsky … or Ayers … or Dohrn … or Wright … or Rashid Khalidi …The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology. Klonsky’s communist pedigree could not be clearer. His father, Robert Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the mid-Fifties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the United States government — a violation of the Smith Act, anti-communist legislation ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court. In the Sixties, Klonsky the younger teamed with Ayers, Dohrn, and other young radicals to form the Students for a Democratic Society. It was out of the SDS that Ayers and Dohrn helped found the Weatherman terrorist group.Klonsky took a different path, albeit one that led inexorably to a new partnership with Ayers, which Obama mightily helped underwrite. Upon splitting off from the SDS, Klonsky formed a Maoist organization, first known as the “October League,” which ultimately became the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” Klonsky was CP(ML)’s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao’s regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky’s party as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people.” Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education.After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom. The concept may be called small schools, but Klonsky and Ayers uniquely grasp the force-multiplier effect. In a small class, the teacher preaching the “social justice” gospel that American capitalism is a racist, materialist, imperialist cauldron of injustice can have greater impact on the students he seeks to mold into his conception of the “good citizen” — and on the teachers he is teaching to be preachers. Writing trenchantly about how this system of “critical pedagogy” short-changes the basic education needs of disadvantaged children, the City Journal’s Sol Stern observes that theorists like Klonsky and Ayers:
nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K-12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus … teachers [are urged] not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.
Klonsky himself confirms that this is precisely the goal (italics mine):
[S]uccessful social justice education ensures that teachers strike a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect children’s lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling. These are “examples of lessons where you can really learn the math basics,” he says, “but the purpose of learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue.”
When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that’s not all. Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards. The grand total comes to $1,968,718.Furthermore, as education remains one of Obama’s core areas of concern — a fact that should frighten you — he gave Klonsky a microphone during the campaign. On the Obama campaign’s official website, Klonsky ran a blog for the candidate, as Klonsky put it, on “education politics and teaching for social justice.” He ran it, that is, until blogger Steve Diamond called attention to it back in June. A that point, the campaign scrubbed the site of all Klonsky traces — a fitting Stalinesque purge, described by Diamond here (and reminiscent of similar efforts to erase the campaign’s false claims about Obama’s relationship with ACORN).Of course, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” John Stuart Mill called conservatives “the stupid party.” For countless American intellectuals, including many eventual giants of the Right, disdain for bourgeois values led to a ruinous infatuation with the Soviet Union — the audacity of their hope for perfecting mankind blinding them to the unremitting misery wrought by communist ideology. In 1951, the legendary liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas insisted that, though communism might be a threat abroad, the movement in this country was a mere “bogeyman” that had been “thoroughly exposed” and “crippled as a political force.” We now know that even as he wrote those words, communists had covertly infiltrated the U.S. government at high levels and that, as a political force, the movement was just getting started. The Klonskys and Ayers were still on the horizon.Now today’s elites, including some prominent conservative intellectuals, thumb their noses once again at the stupid party. They look longingly at the putatively cerebral Obama, a fit more to their liking even if his politics are, they hope, just a tad wayward. But the Leftist revolutionaries are under no such illusions. In Obama, they see the fulfillment of their dreams to remake America. As Klonsky has explained, “My own support for Obama is … a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”So get ready for Klonsky’s “social justice.” It’s what Barack Obama calls “change.”— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).
The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama’s radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers. The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue’s least important aspect: Obama’s abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with committed Leftists — e.g., the portrayal of Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” (Petrified of being smeared as a racist, McCain has never mentioned Davis, whom Obama identifies only as “Frank” in his memoir. And, of course, utterance of Jeremiah Wright’s name is verboten in McCain circles, notwithstanding that his Trinity Church, where Obama was a 20-year member, is a font of Marxist Black Liberation Theology and thus critical to our understanding of Obama’s invocations of “change” and “spreading the wealth.”)With what little media oxygen there has been sucked out by the largely uninformative discussion of Ayers (and his wife and Weather Underground ally, Bernadine Dohrn) — in which the mantra “unrepentant terrorist” has been a pale substitute for the critical matter of the Ayers’s ideology that Obama plainly shares — much has been missed. Significantly, that includes another key Obama contact, Mike Klonsky.Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website. To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs, in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition: This is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows Klonsky … or Ayers … or Dohrn … or Wright … or Rashid Khalidi …The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology. Klonsky’s communist pedigree could not be clearer. His father, Robert Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the mid-Fifties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the United States government — a violation of the Smith Act, anti-communist legislation ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court. In the Sixties, Klonsky the younger teamed with Ayers, Dohrn, and other young radicals to form the Students for a Democratic Society. It was out of the SDS that Ayers and Dohrn helped found the Weatherman terrorist group.Klonsky took a different path, albeit one that led inexorably to a new partnership with Ayers, which Obama mightily helped underwrite. Upon splitting off from the SDS, Klonsky formed a Maoist organization, first known as the “October League,” which ultimately became the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” Klonsky was CP(ML)’s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao’s regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky’s party as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people.” Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education.After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom. The concept may be called small schools, but Klonsky and Ayers uniquely grasp the force-multiplier effect. In a small class, the teacher preaching the “social justice” gospel that American capitalism is a racist, materialist, imperialist cauldron of injustice can have greater impact on the students he seeks to mold into his conception of the “good citizen” — and on the teachers he is teaching to be preachers. Writing trenchantly about how this system of “critical pedagogy” short-changes the basic education needs of disadvantaged children, the City Journal’s Sol Stern observes that theorists like Klonsky and Ayers:
nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K-12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus … teachers [are urged] not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.
Klonsky himself confirms that this is precisely the goal (italics mine):
[S]uccessful social justice education ensures that teachers strike a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect children’s lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling. These are “examples of lessons where you can really learn the math basics,” he says, “but the purpose of learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue.”
When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that’s not all. Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards. The grand total comes to $1,968,718.Furthermore, as education remains one of Obama’s core areas of concern — a fact that should frighten you — he gave Klonsky a microphone during the campaign. On the Obama campaign’s official website, Klonsky ran a blog for the candidate, as Klonsky put it, on “education politics and teaching for social justice.” He ran it, that is, until blogger Steve Diamond called attention to it back in June. A that point, the campaign scrubbed the site of all Klonsky traces — a fitting Stalinesque purge, described by Diamond here (and reminiscent of similar efforts to erase the campaign’s false claims about Obama’s relationship with ACORN).Of course, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” John Stuart Mill called conservatives “the stupid party.” For countless American intellectuals, including many eventual giants of the Right, disdain for bourgeois values led to a ruinous infatuation with the Soviet Union — the audacity of their hope for perfecting mankind blinding them to the unremitting misery wrought by communist ideology. In 1951, the legendary liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas insisted that, though communism might be a threat abroad, the movement in this country was a mere “bogeyman” that had been “thoroughly exposed” and “crippled as a political force.” We now know that even as he wrote those words, communists had covertly infiltrated the U.S. government at high levels and that, as a political force, the movement was just getting started. The Klonskys and Ayers were still on the horizon.Now today’s elites, including some prominent conservative intellectuals, thumb their noses once again at the stupid party. They look longingly at the putatively cerebral Obama, a fit more to their liking even if his politics are, they hope, just a tad wayward. But the Leftist revolutionaries are under no such illusions. In Obama, they see the fulfillment of their dreams to remake America. As Klonsky has explained, “My own support for Obama is … a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”So get ready for Klonsky’s “social justice.” It’s what Barack Obama calls “change.”— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
More Income Redistribution From Obama
Obama Talks Nonsense on Tax Cuts
Revenues will inevitably be diverted from Social Security.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Now we know: 95% of Americans will get a "tax cut" under Barack Obama after all. Those on the receiving end of a check will include the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes under his plan.
AP
In most parts of America, getting money back on taxes you haven't paid sounds a lot like welfare. Ah, say the Obama people, you forget: Even those who pay no income taxes pay payroll taxes for Social Security. Under the Obama plan, they say, these Americans would get an income tax credit up to $500 based on what they are paying into Social Security.
Just two little questions: If people are going to get a tax refund based on what they pay into Social Security, then we're not really talking about income tax relief, are we? And if what we're really talking about is payroll tax relief, doesn't that mean billions of dollars in lost revenue for a Social Security trust fund that is already badly underfinanced?
Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economic professor who serves as one of Sen. Obama's top advisers, discussed these issues during a recent appearance on Fox News. There he stated that the answer to the first question is that these Americans are getting an income tax rebate. And the answer to the second is that the money would not actually come out of Social Security.
"You can't just cut the payroll tax because that's what funds Social Security," Mr. Goolsbee told Fox's Shepard Smith. "So if you tried to do that, you would undermine the Social Security Trust Fund."
Now, if you have been following this so far, you have learned that people who pay no income tax will get an income tax refund. You have also learned that this check will represent relief for the payroll taxes these people do pay. And you have been assured that this rebate check won't actually come out of payroll taxes, lest we harm Social Security.
You have to admire the audacity. With one touch of the Obama magic, what otherwise would be described as taking money from Peter to pay Paul is now transformed into Paul's tax relief. Where a tax cut for payroll taxes paid will not in fact come from payroll taxes. And where all these plans come together under the rhetorical umbrella of "Making Work Pay."
Not everyone is persuaded. Andrew Biggs is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Social Security Administration official who has written a great deal about Mr. Obama's plans on his blog (AndrewGBiggs.blogspot.com). He notes that to understand the unintended consequences, it helps to remember that while people at the bottom pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes, they are accruing benefits in excess of what they pay in.
"It's interesting that Mr. Obama calls his plan 'Making Work Pay,'" says Mr. Biggs, "because the incentives are just the opposite. By expanding benefits for people whose benefits exceed their taxes, you're increasing their disincentive for work. And you're doing the same at the top of the income scale, where you are raising their taxes so you can distribute the revenue to others."
Even more interesting is what Mr. Obama's "tax cuts" do to Social Security financing. As Mr. Biggs notes, had Mr. Obama proposed to pay for payroll tax relief out of, well, payroll taxes, his plan would never have a chance in Congress. Most members would look at a plan that defunded a trust fund that seniors are counting on for their retirement as political suicide.
And that leads us to the heart of this problem. If the government is going to give tax cuts to 44% of American based on their Social Security taxes -- without actually refunding to them the money they are paying into Social Security -- Mr. Obama will have to get the funds elsewhere. And this is where "general revenues" turns out to be a more agreeable way of saying "Other People's Money."
When asked about his priorities during the second presidential debate, Mr. Obama said that reform of programs like Social Security would have to go on the back burner for two years or so. "We're not going to solve Social Security and Medicare unless we understand the rest of our tax policies," he said.
The senator is right. But you have to read the fine print of his tax cuts to know why.
Revenues will inevitably be diverted from Social Security.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Now we know: 95% of Americans will get a "tax cut" under Barack Obama after all. Those on the receiving end of a check will include the estimated 44% of Americans who will owe no federal income taxes under his plan.
AP
In most parts of America, getting money back on taxes you haven't paid sounds a lot like welfare. Ah, say the Obama people, you forget: Even those who pay no income taxes pay payroll taxes for Social Security. Under the Obama plan, they say, these Americans would get an income tax credit up to $500 based on what they are paying into Social Security.
Just two little questions: If people are going to get a tax refund based on what they pay into Social Security, then we're not really talking about income tax relief, are we? And if what we're really talking about is payroll tax relief, doesn't that mean billions of dollars in lost revenue for a Social Security trust fund that is already badly underfinanced?
Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economic professor who serves as one of Sen. Obama's top advisers, discussed these issues during a recent appearance on Fox News. There he stated that the answer to the first question is that these Americans are getting an income tax rebate. And the answer to the second is that the money would not actually come out of Social Security.
"You can't just cut the payroll tax because that's what funds Social Security," Mr. Goolsbee told Fox's Shepard Smith. "So if you tried to do that, you would undermine the Social Security Trust Fund."
Now, if you have been following this so far, you have learned that people who pay no income tax will get an income tax refund. You have also learned that this check will represent relief for the payroll taxes these people do pay. And you have been assured that this rebate check won't actually come out of payroll taxes, lest we harm Social Security.
You have to admire the audacity. With one touch of the Obama magic, what otherwise would be described as taking money from Peter to pay Paul is now transformed into Paul's tax relief. Where a tax cut for payroll taxes paid will not in fact come from payroll taxes. And where all these plans come together under the rhetorical umbrella of "Making Work Pay."
Not everyone is persuaded. Andrew Biggs is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Social Security Administration official who has written a great deal about Mr. Obama's plans on his blog (AndrewGBiggs.blogspot.com). He notes that to understand the unintended consequences, it helps to remember that while people at the bottom pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes, they are accruing benefits in excess of what they pay in.
"It's interesting that Mr. Obama calls his plan 'Making Work Pay,'" says Mr. Biggs, "because the incentives are just the opposite. By expanding benefits for people whose benefits exceed their taxes, you're increasing their disincentive for work. And you're doing the same at the top of the income scale, where you are raising their taxes so you can distribute the revenue to others."
Even more interesting is what Mr. Obama's "tax cuts" do to Social Security financing. As Mr. Biggs notes, had Mr. Obama proposed to pay for payroll tax relief out of, well, payroll taxes, his plan would never have a chance in Congress. Most members would look at a plan that defunded a trust fund that seniors are counting on for their retirement as political suicide.
And that leads us to the heart of this problem. If the government is going to give tax cuts to 44% of American based on their Social Security taxes -- without actually refunding to them the money they are paying into Social Security -- Mr. Obama will have to get the funds elsewhere. And this is where "general revenues" turns out to be a more agreeable way of saying "Other People's Money."
When asked about his priorities during the second presidential debate, Mr. Obama said that reform of programs like Social Security would have to go on the back burner for two years or so. "We're not going to solve Social Security and Medicare unless we understand the rest of our tax policies," he said.
The senator is right. But you have to read the fine print of his tax cuts to know why.
Our Future With Mr. Obama
By JAMES TARANTO
Yesterday we noted that Joe Biden had warned supporters in Seattle that he expects a major crisis to strike during the first six months of an Obama administration, told them that he expects Obama's response to the crisis to be unpopular, and exhorted them to be prepared to stand by him, even if he appears to be wrong.
Hugh Hewitt thinks he knows what Biden has in mind:
Biden has been receiving the sorts of briefings that nominees receive, and he's been to the sort of meetings where our allies talk candidly of the gathering storm they see coming closer.
And Biden suspects that Obama will react to the coming crisis in a way that demoralizes the country and which shatters public confidence in Obama.
Biden dismisses the ability of the American military to deal with far flung threats, tells the audience "Mark my words," and then preemptively implores them to "be prepared to stick with us," after telling them "we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him."
The most obvious interpretation of this ramble is that an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran.
Yesterday we noted that Joe Biden had warned supporters in Seattle that he expects a major crisis to strike during the first six months of an Obama administration, told them that he expects Obama's response to the crisis to be unpopular, and exhorted them to be prepared to stand by him, even if he appears to be wrong.
Hugh Hewitt thinks he knows what Biden has in mind:
Biden has been receiving the sorts of briefings that nominees receive, and he's been to the sort of meetings where our allies talk candidly of the gathering storm they see coming closer.
And Biden suspects that Obama will react to the coming crisis in a way that demoralizes the country and which shatters public confidence in Obama.
Biden dismisses the ability of the American military to deal with far flung threats, tells the audience "Mark my words," and then preemptively implores them to "be prepared to stick with us," after telling them "we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him."
The most obvious interpretation of this ramble is that an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran.
Japan Gets it Right
Ruling parties agree on 2 trillion yen tax cuts for FY 2008
TOKYO, Oct. 22 KYODO
Senior members of the ruling parties reached a broad agreement Tuesday on tax cuts of some 2 trillion yen in fiscal 2008 as the core of the government's additional stimulus package to address the global financial turmoil and slowing economic activity in Japan, lawmakers said. The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito party also agreed to revise a law to facilitate an injection of public funds into regional financial institutions in order to prevent a credit crunch, they said. The two parties will meet again Thursday to reach a final agreement, paving the way for the government to hammer out the new economic package, value of which is estimated at 20 trillion yen by a senior ruling coalition official, following the first one worth about 11.7 trillion yen, which was unveiled Aug. 29 before the U.S.-triggered credit crisis deteriorated further. The new package is expected to involve state funding of about 5 trillion yen, said the senior ruling coalition official. Details of the plan to implement fixed-amount cuts in state and municipal income taxes in fiscal 2008, ending next March 31, will likely be worked out in year-end tax reform deliberations, the lawmakers said. If tax cuts worth 2 trillion yen are implemented, a sum close to 65,000 yen will be refunded to a four-member household with two children. The sum was refunded under the 1998 income tax cuts. As low-income households not subject to taxation will not benefit from fixed-amount tax cuts, some participants in Tuesday's meeting called for the distribution of one-time monetary benefits to them. The government is expected to tap reserves in the special account for fiscal investments and loans for financing the tax reduction. To revise the bank recapitalization law, the government plans to submit a necessary bill to the Diet on Friday in order to have it enacted by the end of this month. As the period of applications for public funds for regional financial institutions expired March 31, the ruling coalition envisages extending the period to the end of March 2012. The legal revision is necessary to use some 2 trillion yen set aside for recapitalization of banks under the fiscal 2008 budget. The government intends to funnel capital into regional financial institutions to enable smaller firms to meet strong year-end funding requirements. Senior members of the ruling parties also called for extending tax breaks for housing loans from their expiry slated for the end of this year and government support for policyholders of collapsed life insurance companies from the end of March 2009. In addition, they confirmed the need to reinforce support for small and midsize companies' fundraising while discussing ways of revising regional economies and cuts in expressway tolls.==Kyodo
TOKYO, Oct. 22 KYODO
Senior members of the ruling parties reached a broad agreement Tuesday on tax cuts of some 2 trillion yen in fiscal 2008 as the core of the government's additional stimulus package to address the global financial turmoil and slowing economic activity in Japan, lawmakers said. The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito party also agreed to revise a law to facilitate an injection of public funds into regional financial institutions in order to prevent a credit crunch, they said. The two parties will meet again Thursday to reach a final agreement, paving the way for the government to hammer out the new economic package, value of which is estimated at 20 trillion yen by a senior ruling coalition official, following the first one worth about 11.7 trillion yen, which was unveiled Aug. 29 before the U.S.-triggered credit crisis deteriorated further. The new package is expected to involve state funding of about 5 trillion yen, said the senior ruling coalition official. Details of the plan to implement fixed-amount cuts in state and municipal income taxes in fiscal 2008, ending next March 31, will likely be worked out in year-end tax reform deliberations, the lawmakers said. If tax cuts worth 2 trillion yen are implemented, a sum close to 65,000 yen will be refunded to a four-member household with two children. The sum was refunded under the 1998 income tax cuts. As low-income households not subject to taxation will not benefit from fixed-amount tax cuts, some participants in Tuesday's meeting called for the distribution of one-time monetary benefits to them. The government is expected to tap reserves in the special account for fiscal investments and loans for financing the tax reduction. To revise the bank recapitalization law, the government plans to submit a necessary bill to the Diet on Friday in order to have it enacted by the end of this month. As the period of applications for public funds for regional financial institutions expired March 31, the ruling coalition envisages extending the period to the end of March 2012. The legal revision is necessary to use some 2 trillion yen set aside for recapitalization of banks under the fiscal 2008 budget. The government intends to funnel capital into regional financial institutions to enable smaller firms to meet strong year-end funding requirements. Senior members of the ruling parties also called for extending tax breaks for housing loans from their expiry slated for the end of this year and government support for policyholders of collapsed life insurance companies from the end of March 2009. In addition, they confirmed the need to reinforce support for small and midsize companies' fundraising while discussing ways of revising regional economies and cuts in expressway tolls.==Kyodo
Mr. Obama and his Love for Taxes
October 21, 2008, 5:00 a.m.Obama’s New Tax WelfareBehind the 95.By Peter Ferrara
Barack Obama says he plans to cut taxes for 95 percent of American workers. That sounds terrific, but there are three problems. One, it is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan: proposed increases in every major federal tax. Two, the structure of the cuts will create perverse incentives. And three, many of the people receiving “tax cuts” don’t pay taxes to begin with, meaning they’ll be in effect getting welfare.The first point requires but a simple list. Obama proposes to raise the top two individual income tax rates by 25 percent or more, through both explicit rate increases and the phaseout of personal exemptions and all itemized deductions for upper-income earners. He’ll increase the capital-gains tax rate by 33 percent, the tax rate on dividends by 33 percent, and the top payroll-tax rate by 16 to 32 percent. He’ll create a new payroll tax for national health insurance, estimated at 7 percent. He’ll reinstate the death/inheritance tax, which is being phased out under current law, with a new top marginal rate of 45 percent. He’ll increase the corporate tax burden by 25 percent “by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens.” He’ll even increase tariffs through his protectionist trade policies.Obama argues that only higher-income workers and rich corporations will suffer these tax increases, and they can afford it. But tax and economic policy is not about who “can afford it.” Increasing these marginal tax rates greatly harms the economy — when more of the money earned goes to the government, there’s less incentive for “the rich” to work, save, invest, and create and expand businesses. This affects people trying to start businesses with investment money from wealthy folks. Not to mention people looking for jobs, which usually come from businesspeople with money. This isn’t just a theory. Ireland adopted a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate 20 years ago, when it suffered the second-lowest per capita GDP in the European Union (EU). Its economy boomed as a result, and today Ireland enjoys the second highest per-capita GDP in the EU. Ireland, with its 12.5-percent rate, raises 50 percent more corporate-tax revenue as a percent of GDP than the U.S. does with its 35 percent rate. Yet Barack Obama laughs at McCain’s proposal to reduce that corporate rate to 25 percent, the minimum needed to restore international competitiveness for U.S. companies and employers, mocking it as still more tax cuts for rich corporate fat cats. Obama’s tax plan is exactly the opposite of the supply-side economics that Reagan adopted, which produced the astounding boom of the 1980s. That boom, in fact, lasted 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, as Art Laffer and Steve Moore discuss in their new book, The End of Prosperity. Laffer and Moore explain that more wealth was produced during those 25 years than in the previous 200 years of American history. Obama’s tax plan is also exactly the opposite of President Kennedy’s, which produced another astounding boom in the 1960s. Pursuing the exact opposite policies from Kennedy and Reagan will produce exactly the opposite results. (Note also that Obama’s tax increases will not produce nearly enough revenue to finance all his lavish spending proposals, as shown by a brilliant new paper from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute. And by the way, Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 promising a tax cut for the middle class — after he was elected he dropped that idea, adopting tax increases for people making as little as $20,000 per year.)Finally, Obama’s “tax cut,” if he follows through with it, will often be a simple giveaway. As it stands right now, roughly one-third of income earners pay no federal income taxes. Many actually receive payments from the income-tax system — these payments total 3.8 percent of all federal taxes paid. Simple arithmetic holds that if one-third of earners don’t pay income tax, it’s impossible to cut taxes for 95 percent of earners.Obama’s “tax cut” is, in reality, a $500-per-worker refundable income-tax credit for workers making up to $75,000 per year, and for families making up to $150,000. The term “refundable” means that if the worker does not have enough tax liability to take advantage of the credit, the government sends the worker a check to cover the full amount of the credit anyway. It is like George McGovern’s 1972 promise of a $1,000 check for everyone, which the American people rejected as a crass vote-buying scheme.Besides the $500-per-worker credit, Obama proposes a slew of income-tax credits targeted toward low- and moderate-income people, also refundable. Obama proposes such tax credits for child care, education, housing, retirement, health care, welfare, etc.Though the people receiving these credits will spend the money, the programs will probably hurt the economy on net, because the credits will be phased out at higher income levels. This, in effect, constitutes yet another marginal tax on high-income earners, and thus another blow to their incentives to be productive. These programs alone would cost $1.3 trillion over ten years. I call it The New Tax Welfare.— Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He formerly served in President Reagan’s White Office of Policy Development, and as associate deputy attorney general of the United States under the first President Bush.— Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Free Enterprise Fund, director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel for the American Civil Rights Union.
Barack Obama says he plans to cut taxes for 95 percent of American workers. That sounds terrific, but there are three problems. One, it is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan: proposed increases in every major federal tax. Two, the structure of the cuts will create perverse incentives. And three, many of the people receiving “tax cuts” don’t pay taxes to begin with, meaning they’ll be in effect getting welfare.The first point requires but a simple list. Obama proposes to raise the top two individual income tax rates by 25 percent or more, through both explicit rate increases and the phaseout of personal exemptions and all itemized deductions for upper-income earners. He’ll increase the capital-gains tax rate by 33 percent, the tax rate on dividends by 33 percent, and the top payroll-tax rate by 16 to 32 percent. He’ll create a new payroll tax for national health insurance, estimated at 7 percent. He’ll reinstate the death/inheritance tax, which is being phased out under current law, with a new top marginal rate of 45 percent. He’ll increase the corporate tax burden by 25 percent “by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens.” He’ll even increase tariffs through his protectionist trade policies.Obama argues that only higher-income workers and rich corporations will suffer these tax increases, and they can afford it. But tax and economic policy is not about who “can afford it.” Increasing these marginal tax rates greatly harms the economy — when more of the money earned goes to the government, there’s less incentive for “the rich” to work, save, invest, and create and expand businesses. This affects people trying to start businesses with investment money from wealthy folks. Not to mention people looking for jobs, which usually come from businesspeople with money. This isn’t just a theory. Ireland adopted a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate 20 years ago, when it suffered the second-lowest per capita GDP in the European Union (EU). Its economy boomed as a result, and today Ireland enjoys the second highest per-capita GDP in the EU. Ireland, with its 12.5-percent rate, raises 50 percent more corporate-tax revenue as a percent of GDP than the U.S. does with its 35 percent rate. Yet Barack Obama laughs at McCain’s proposal to reduce that corporate rate to 25 percent, the minimum needed to restore international competitiveness for U.S. companies and employers, mocking it as still more tax cuts for rich corporate fat cats. Obama’s tax plan is exactly the opposite of the supply-side economics that Reagan adopted, which produced the astounding boom of the 1980s. That boom, in fact, lasted 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, as Art Laffer and Steve Moore discuss in their new book, The End of Prosperity. Laffer and Moore explain that more wealth was produced during those 25 years than in the previous 200 years of American history. Obama’s tax plan is also exactly the opposite of President Kennedy’s, which produced another astounding boom in the 1960s. Pursuing the exact opposite policies from Kennedy and Reagan will produce exactly the opposite results. (Note also that Obama’s tax increases will not produce nearly enough revenue to finance all his lavish spending proposals, as shown by a brilliant new paper from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute. And by the way, Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 promising a tax cut for the middle class — after he was elected he dropped that idea, adopting tax increases for people making as little as $20,000 per year.)Finally, Obama’s “tax cut,” if he follows through with it, will often be a simple giveaway. As it stands right now, roughly one-third of income earners pay no federal income taxes. Many actually receive payments from the income-tax system — these payments total 3.8 percent of all federal taxes paid. Simple arithmetic holds that if one-third of earners don’t pay income tax, it’s impossible to cut taxes for 95 percent of earners.Obama’s “tax cut” is, in reality, a $500-per-worker refundable income-tax credit for workers making up to $75,000 per year, and for families making up to $150,000. The term “refundable” means that if the worker does not have enough tax liability to take advantage of the credit, the government sends the worker a check to cover the full amount of the credit anyway. It is like George McGovern’s 1972 promise of a $1,000 check for everyone, which the American people rejected as a crass vote-buying scheme.Besides the $500-per-worker credit, Obama proposes a slew of income-tax credits targeted toward low- and moderate-income people, also refundable. Obama proposes such tax credits for child care, education, housing, retirement, health care, welfare, etc.Though the people receiving these credits will spend the money, the programs will probably hurt the economy on net, because the credits will be phased out at higher income levels. This, in effect, constitutes yet another marginal tax on high-income earners, and thus another blow to their incentives to be productive. These programs alone would cost $1.3 trillion over ten years. I call it The New Tax Welfare.— Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He formerly served in President Reagan’s White Office of Policy Development, and as associate deputy attorney general of the United States under the first President Bush.— Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Free Enterprise Fund, director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel for the American Civil Rights Union.
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