Wednesday, August 23, 2000

By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Having heard all the keynote speeches at both the Republican and Democratic conventions, I have to give him his due: President Clinton’s speech was the best of the bunch.

Yes, W’s speech was also very good, and it had more memorable zinger lines. GOP speeches were chop full of good zinger lines.

And Gore’s speech was pretty good as well. He articulated his positions well.
But Clinton remains one of the smoothest, most polished, most natural-sounding speakers that I have ever heard in politics.

I have to wonder how many of the millions of people watching the speech even remember that he sounds equally natural when he is lying and when he is telling the truth.

Anyway, Clinton zeroed in on the Democrats’ best strategy for November when he reminded us that the Republican Party was 100 percent opposed to his plan to improve the economy back in the early days of his administration. He painted a beautiful picture of how the Democrat-controlled Congress approved that plan and the economy has blossomed ever since.

He conveniently left out several facts, two of them extremely important.
First is that, contrary to the picture Clinton paints, the economy had already come out of recession and begun its recovery when he took office. It was humming along quite nicely.

Second is that following enactment of his economic plan, which included the largest tax increase in the history of the world, the economic recovery slowed down and continued to creep along at a very slow rate until something changed.

What changed was that Republicans took over the Congress in 1994 and got the federal budget a little better under control, and the economic growth has clipped along since then at double the rate it was growing during the first two years of the Clinton Administration.

Clinton’s message is simple: “I’m the reason the economy is so good, and if you elect Al Gore he will continue the same policies and the economy will remain good. If you elect frat boy Bush, it’ll all come tumbling down.”

For 25 years, I’ve been telling people that the president has very little effect on the federal budget or the economy. It’s the Congress that passes the budget and the Congress that should get the blame if deficits go up and the economy goes down, and Congress that should get the credit if the deficit goes down and the economy rises.

I said it when Jimmy Carter was president and his own party pointed the finger of blame at him when it was spend-happy Congress that was causing the problem. I said it when Reagan tried to get deficits under control but couldn’t because Congress was controlled by Tip O’Neill.

I say it again now that Congress has erased the deficits in spite of a president whose proposed budgets would have tripled those deficits.

Another interesting part of the Democratic strategy that Clinton articulated nicely is the party’s opposition to tax cuts. He actually managed to sell the idea that tax cuts are an unwise way to “spend” the budget surplus, and even referred to tax cuts as “squandering” the surpluses.

I really believe this election will hinge on whether Republicans can effectively counter this idea that it’s somehow risky or unwise to let us keep more of our incomes. And they’ll have to find a way to deal with the nonsensical assertion that tax cuts only help the super rich.

Clinton plays the class envy card very well.

I’m not really all that worried about who wins the White House in November, though.

I think W. would work a little better with Congress and would even be able to push through some moderate-to-liberal social programs that Gore would agree with but wouldn’t be able to sell. Both parties are partisan, and that’s just the way it is.

We also desperately need to rearm the military, and Bush would do that. Gore probably would not.

But if we can avoid a major military conflict, I could live with four or eight years of Gore.

What scares me silly, though, is that Congress will change hands.
If that happens, a Bush presidency might just be able to use the bully pulpit to keep things from completely falling apart. But if Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, prepare to watch taxes soar (though the increases will probably be disguised in a variety of ways). And prepare to watch spending rise even faster than taxes.

And pray that Gore has enough sense not to send our military into a serious ground conflict, even though he claims that it’s “ready.” Our people would perform superbly, as always, but I don’t want to think about how many casualties we would suffer due to lack of equipment, supplies and strength of numbers.

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