Cheeseball in Paradise

Dear though it was to Ronald Reagan's heart, Montesquieu's idea that economic freedoms are the same as personal freedoms is not something that many conservatives ever really swallowed. It's true that a country with zero economic freedom, like the old Soviet Union, is likely to have zero freedom of any kind. But once you get into the middle of the spectrum, the relationship is less stark. The socialist societies of Europe and elsewhere don't exactly look like a prison house compared to ours. A couple of gubernatorial races this election, however, are beginning to make a Reaganite of me. Politicians in both parties have always shown ingenuity in parting people from their money. Of late, though, they've shown an unaccustomed antilibertarian boldness.

Let's take Florida, where lawyer Bill "Bake" McBride is challenging incumbent Jeb Bush. McBride is one of those glad-handing idiot savants?in short, the basic politician type. He has, almost literally, no expertise on anything he's talking about. In general, the more passionately he orates on an issue, the less he knows about it. McBride is trying to take advantage of an unexpectedly tight race by backing, with all his heart and soul, a referendum that would shrink Florida class sizes by law. He talks about it everywhere.

And yet at a debate last week, when he was challenged by both moderator Tim Russert and Bush about how much the new class-size law would cost, the question knocked him flat. It was the first time it had ever occurred to him. Eight billion? Russert wondered. Twenty-seven billion? "I think it's somewhere in between," McBride replied. Bush turned to Russert afterwards and said, "You sense my frustration."

Who doesn't? Perhaps the clearest indication of the sort of person McBride is was given by the endorsement he received last Wednesday?from Jimmy Buffett. Anyone who passed through college between 1975 and 1995 knows that there is no more trustworthy badge of moron status than an enthusiasm for this three-chord clown with his seventh-grade-talent-show lyrical sophistication. You remember the Jimmy Buffett People from college, don't you? Thoroughly uninterested in reading or thinking, obsessed with booze but not particularly skilled at holding it, so esurient for dope that they left tooth marks on their bongs, slobbering over women but too immobilized on the couch to ever get out of the dorm long enough to find one. But the really annoying thing about the Buffetteers was their tendency to address you as if you were as clueless as they were. "Hey, let's go out drinking!" they'd say. "I'll pick the bar and you pay!"

So no wonder Buffett endorsed McBride; buffettismo has set the tone for McBride's whole run. An ominous sign is the ad campaign McBride has been airing for his school-improvement program. It's not just ingenious but bold. "McBride pays for his plan with a 50 cent per pack cigarette tax," the ad boasts?boasts, because the poor people who smoke are (sadly) oblivious to the fact that they're being targeted because they're poor. They think politicians want to tax them in order to help them get over this awful habit of theirs. Cigarette taxes reflect classic Buffetteer thinking. The politician comes up with Program X, which costs a certain amount of money. Then he has to ask where he gets the money to pay for it. Does he ask the people who can afford to pay for it, which is perfectly defensible in socialist terms? Or does he ask the people who will use the program, which is perfectly defensible in capitalist terms? Neither of the above. He cheats people who lack the wit to resist, and then makes believe the program doesn't cost anybody anything.

The people cheated are always the poor. In McBride's case it's through cigarette taxes. In the case of Republican Sonny "A la recherche du temps" Perdue, who's running for Georgia governor against incumbent Roy Barnes, it's through lotteries. (Perdue says Barnes is not allowed to talk about Georgia's HOPE scholarship program because he opposed the lottery that funded it in the early 1990s.) Either way, such politicians are big spenders only to the extent that they can bypass any public discussion of what they're doing. It's like the Buffetteer approach to sex. Instead of meeting a girl at the party, you have your way with the one passed out in the third-floor bedroom where the coats are piled.

Mass Psychosis

Every kind of confusion about money is rampant in this year's governor's races. In Massachusetts, Democrat Shannon O'Brien is accusing Republican Mitt Romney of costing Massachusetts money through one of his business failures. Romney's firm, Bain Capital, worked with Stage Stores, in which Massachusetts had a small investment. By a wacky syllogism, O'Brien figures that (1) when Stage Stores lost money, Massachusetts lost money; (2) Romney worked with Stage Stores; ergo (3) Romney stole money from Massachusetts. Jeesh.

To be clear here, if Massachusetts has any pride at all, it will throw Romney out on his ass. Romney's heart and soul (not to mention investments) are all in his native Michigan and his adopted Utah, and only a desperately self-loathing people would elect a man chief executive of his third favorite state. If I still lived there, I would vote for O'Brien as often as my Irish-Democrat friends could arrange. But if O'Brien can't tell the difference between a business failure and an act of corruption, things do not bode terribly well for a commonwealth under her leadership.

Then we have Arizona, perhaps the most corrupt and financially mismanaged state in the union. The state now faces a $1 billion budget deficit. Worse, after four decades as one of the country's most resilient economies, Arizona has dropped into an even deeper recession than the rest of us are enduring. That's a particular problem for Arizona, which is one of those places it's hard to see the point of if you can't make a ton of dough there.

It's shocking, then, to see how little of the crisis is reflected in the bitter governor's race between Republican Matt "Tim" Salmon and Democrat Janet "Ristorante" Napolitano. Last week, Napolitano was harping on a paltry campaign contribution that Salmon had received several years ago from Arthur Andersen. Now, anyone who runs for office takes contributions from companies. Arthur Andersen, bizarre though it may seem to us now, was until six months ago the pride of the American accounting industry. Napolitano, like Shannon O'Brien, has pulled out her Krazy-Syllogism kit, and has come up with (1) Matt Salmon got some money from Arthur Andersen several years ago; (2) Arthur Andersen was the accountant for now-bankrupt Enron; ergo, (3) Matt Salmon is responsible for all the corporate corruption in America.

War Wins

We appear finally to be reaching a resolution of this vexing question of whether Americans plan to cast their votes next week based on the economy or on the antiterror war. The question is "vexing" partly because left-leaning journalists and columnists have been tied into knots at the prospect that a Republican House could preside over such an abysmal economy and still get reelected. Part of the vexation, too, involves the practical needs of politicians. They insist the economy is important because there's no electoral formula (at least in our day and age) for campaigning on war. The line of both press and pols is that Americans care more about the economy than they do about Iraq. And that's not true.

Typical was USA Today's blarney last week about "recent polls" [here they mean the discredited New York Times front-page job of three weeks ago] "in which 30% or fewer say war and terrorism are their top concerns." But that 30 percent would have been a high number even at the height of the Cold War. And when you ask the guns-versus-butter question directly, the results are unambiguous. Bizarrely, USA Today itself is one of the rare news organs to have done that. Last week, the network asked, "Which of the following will be more important to your vote: the possibility of war with Iraq, or economic conditions?" The former won out, 47-39.

Paul Wellstone, RIP

Politics?particularly campaigning?is a battle. From afar, it's easy to put the death of a politician in a plane crash into some kind of facile metaphorical perspective. And God knows we're used to this by now: Tower, Heinz, Carnahan? just to start the list. But there's something about a politician going down with his wife and daughter that is tragic beyond any hope of finding a consoling metaphor. Paul Wellstone's views didn't have much in common with the ones you'll find expressed in this column. But he was always a man of integrity. May he and his wife and daughter rest in peace.

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