Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Life in the Post-Cold-War World Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 13:09:31 EST Message-ID: Life in the Post-Cold-War World MUST THE U.S. DISENGAGE? The impulse to leave foreign affairs to the foreigners has gained strength from the Soviet breakup, Saddam's survival, and our own economy. But before we come home, we should ask, If we don't take a leading role, who will? JED C. SNYDER Mr. Snyder is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Stud- ies at the National Defense University. He served in the State Depart- ment during the first Reagan Administration and has been a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The views expressed in this arti- cle are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. A NEW round of questioning has begun in a very old debate: Should the United States continue to deploy military forces globally? The context of this debate -- the first U.S. presidential election of the post-cold-war era -- is the only new factor, although it is also the critical one, raising the second question: Does the end of the cold war vitiate the need for a sub- stantial American combat presence in Europe? Put simply, the absence of a serious military threat from the former So- viet Union appears to delegitimize the very foundation of the postwar se- curity structure. Add to that the increased support among key European governments for a supra-European collective security structure (where the role of the United States is at best unclear), and powerful arguments that American budgetary pressures and urgent domestic priorities require sub- stantial reductions in spending on defense and foreign assistance, and the historic American desire to disengage becomes nearly irresistible. The debate was reopened by the struggle between the Congress and the executive branch over defense-spending levels. The Bush Administration's $281-billion proposed defense budget for fiscal year 1993 is the second year of a budget projection that would reduce defense spending by $50.4 billion over six years. As this article goes to press, the House and Senate have approved a compromise defense authorization bill of $274.3 billion, or $6.5 billion less than the President's request. Yet the President's pro- posed expenditure is already 3 per cent less than that called for in the 1990 budget-summit agreement. And with the expiration of the 1990 exec- utive - legislative budget agreement (which prohibited transfer of military expenditures to domestic programs) Congress can be expected to slash de- fense spending significantly next year no matter who is President. Under the Bush Administration's five-year plan, U.S. military forces would be reduced overall by 25 per cent. In addition, more than six hun- dred U.S. overseas military installations and facilities would either be turned over to host nations or closed, with the expectation that the entire U.S. overseas basing structure will be reduced by nearly 40 per cent. These reductions would leave a U.S. military force smaller than at any time since before the Korean War -- a ''Base Force'' of 1.6 million service personnel (a reduction of more than 500,000 from the post-Vietnam peak) by FY 1997. The Base Force concept has been severely criticized by a number of de- fense authorities in Congress, the most prominent being the House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Les Aspin. In a series of widely circulated papers, Mr. Aspin has formulated four defense-spending options, of which Option ''C'' has attracted the most attention. Mr. Aspin's ''C'' strategy is supposedly designed to allow U.S. forces to respond simultaneously to two major regional conflicts (Persian Gulf and Korea, for example) plus a third humanitarian effort (like that assembled to aid the Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War). It would also provide the capability to rotate U.S. forces for a sustained military presence in a longer crisis. He claims that his ''C'' force -- which would reduce the Administration's Base Force by an additional three Army divisions, eight Air Force wings, and more than a hundred Navy ships -- could also handle a third smaller contingency, on the order of the one in Panama. Mr. Aspin's principal argument is that the Base Force concept recognizes only the first revolution in Soviet affairs -- the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. It has not, he argues, been re- vised to reflect a second revolution -- the failed August 1991 coup by So- viet hardliners against Gorbachev. He concludes that ''the residual, post- Soviet conventional threat is not sufficient to greatly influence the size of U.S. conventional forces.'' ''Regional aggressors'' (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, China) should now be the principal threat which drives U.S. defense planning; and that requires a significantly smaller military force than proposed by the Bush Administration. Visions and Perceptions THE ADMINISTRATION has been criticized for proposing a strategy and military budget that lacks creativity and vision. But, in fact, the underly- ing philosophy is not significantly different from that of Mr. Aspin. Con- sidering Defense Secretary Cheney's analysis, as presented during testi- mony before the Senate Budget Committee in February, one is struck by the similarity, for example, of his emphasis on new regional threats. And Mr. Aspin would probably agree with Secretary Cheney's conclusion that because ''the history of the twentieth century is replete with instances of major, unanticipated strategic shifts over five, ten, or twenty years . . . a proper appreciation for uncertainty is therefore a critical part of a realistic defense strategy that builds forces today for crises five, ten, or twenty years away.'' But there is at least one very important difference. As Secretary Cheney puts it, ''the future may also come to depend on others' perception of our will and capability to reconstitute forces and to deter and defend against strategic attack, should that prove necessary.'' Put simply, if key regional allies perceive an American unwillingess to confront new threats, then there will be no chance of encouraging new collective-security frameworks, and eventually larger security roles for allies. (Further, Mr. Aspin dis- counts the growing concern among Russologists that Boris Yeltsin could be overthrown by a coalition of disgruntled military officers and radical anti-reformers, thus dashing the only realistic hope for a democratic Rus- sia whose foreign appetites can be contained.) In sum, debates over de- fense spending levels become academic, and we may find ourselves alone as a pariah superpower. Mr. Aspin seems willing to take that risk; Mr. Cheney is not. The budget debate became more heated than usual, partly as the result of an unprecedented leak of a sensitive Pentagon planning document. The entire text of the draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) report, the Pen- tagon's biennial, six-year strategy blueprint, was obtained by the New York Times in early March. The initial press accounts focused on the doc- ument's reported assertion that ''the U.S. cannot become the world's po- liceman'' and its acknowledgment that rivals for global leadership could emerge, and that American policy should strive ''to sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership.'' Much of the criticism of the conceptual basis for this strategy blueprint can be traced to a fundamental disagreement between ''New World Order'' idealism and Bush Administration skepticism of multilateralism and col- lective security. Many defense conservatives (including this author) share that skepticism and applaud Dick Cheney for expressing it openly. It is difficult to comprehend how -- in the light of the general failure of multi- lateral institutions like the UN, CSCE, and EC to respond effectively to the rising wave of ethno-nationalist civil wars in the Balkans and Central Asia, for example -- one could reasonably object to a skeptical approach to ''collective security.'' In addition, virtually all of the European decision- making bodies have either excluded or minimized U.S. participation. In sum, it would seem that the much-maligned DPG's conclusion that ''the United States should be postured to act independently when collective ac- tion cannot be orchestrated'' is anything but imprudent. It is difficult to see how such a statement could cause controversy, except among those who reject a priori a leading role for American power and influence in the 1990s. The adherents of retrenchment are unimpressed by arguments about superpower status and American leadership. They assert that the United States should neither maintain nor seek security responsibilities or com- mitments, and that the emerging ''New World Order'' affords a marvelous opportunity to roll back American power and influence overseas, begin- ning with Europe, which has formed the bedrock of U.S. grand strategy for nearly five decades. The retrenchers have proclaimed the 1990s to be the ''era of multilater- alism.'' This is not a genuinely enthusiastic embrace of, say, the UN or the EC, but rather a perceived opportunity for the United States to dump re- sponsibility upon feeble institutions less noted for their records as deci- sion-making bodies than for excruciatingly lengthy debates on issues like the appropriate level of corn gluten exports or the acceptable amount of government subsidies for French farmers. Multilateral approaches to se- curity threats -- as Lady Thatcher, for one, has pointed out -- are more likely to delay decisive action than to resolve crises. Advocates of multilateralism are fond of pointing to the success of the UN in rolling back Iraqi aggression. This is a naive reading of the UN's role in the Gulf War. While the Bush Administration was wise to seek a UN blessing for Desert Storm, the United Nations essentially acted as a fig leaf for a mission that many of the coalition members felt was neces- sary but politically correct only if cloaked in the UN charter. Ironically, the passage of time may reveal that President Bush's decision not to pur- sue the war further had more to do with his reluctance to upset the fragile coalition than a (legitimate) concern over casualties. The UN did, how- ever, help to establish an important principle of New World Order polic- ing, that of shared cost. It is unlikely that the coalition members could have been pressured to contribute as large a share of the Desert Shield and Desert Storm expenses without the glare of international diplomacy, which the UN provided. The result was a pledge (fulfilled) by the allies to contribute $54 billion to the $61-billion cost of the Gulf War. Of Two Minds ADVOCATES of the new multilateralism point with enthusiasm toward Europe as the proving ground for many of their hypotheses. But Europe- ans are clearly ambivalent about their grand unification plan. On the one hand, they realize that their evolution as a major center of global eco- nomic and political intercourse is an inevitable (and positive) step in their maturation. With maturity, on the other hand, comes responsibility, risk, and expense -- all of which have been avoided or minimized by the willing- ness of the United States to act as Europe's guardian. Americans are similarly of two minds. Accustomed to referring to the Western Europeans as a homogenized group of U.S. ''allies,'' they also ap- plaud Europe's progression, since it could mean a respite from the enormous costs associated with underwriting Europe's security. The United States wants to maintain influence over those aspects of Europe's future that affect it directly, while eschewing its status as the sole finan- cially responsible guardian. There is one role that seems to everyone to be worth preserving -- that of referee. The role of intermediary between and among the European al- lies, particularly on security and defense questions, is a uniquely Ameri- can one, and the Europeans reluctantly acknowledge U.S. success in ful- filling it. What they have tended to discount, however, is the accumulated level of American impatience at the behavior of allies who seem to want the benefits of American protection and magnanimity on strictly Euro- pean terms. The ''trans-Atlantic bargain'' was sustainable so long as a po- tent Soviet threat acted to eclipse the intra-European rivalries and even the occasionally serious U.S. - European rifts. It is doubtful that it can survive in the ''New World Order'' without significant reform and a new strategic focus. But the reforms currently being discussed seem more likely to under- mine than support it -- starting with the 35,000-strong Franco-German army corps announced in May. The ''European Corps'' is designed suppos- edly to form the nucleus of a European army. Other European countries have been invited to contribute to the Corps. The German forces assigned to the headquarters in Strasbourg will be the first stationed on French territory since the end of World War II. The primary role of the Corps is to act outside of NATO's formal treaty area in both defense and peacekeeping roles. Although both Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl released state- ments that this new European Corps would ''contribute to strengthening the Alliance,'' and that it ''will not affect existing obligations to other organizations,'' it seemed designed to directly challenge NATO's recent deci- sion to create a more multinational structure of its own (including a 70,000-man, British-commanded rapid-reaction force to deal with NATO crises). Clearly, Mitterrand considered the new NATO approach a chal- lenge to French desires to lead Europe's hypothetical integrated defense, and was able to drag Kohl along. (German Defense and Foreign Ministry officials privately are horrified by Kohl's subservience to Mitterrand, al- though with relatively inexperienced leaders at both ministries it is un- likely that Kohl will get a serious argument from either of them.) Predictably, French and German interpretations of the Corps's role are distinctly different. The Germans insist it will wear two hats, answerable both to NATO and to the Western European Union (WEU) -- a sub-group within NATO pointedly formed to exclude the U.S. The French, mean- while, see no formal connection to NATO and want the Corps's forces as- signed exclusively to the WEU. WEU leaders are themselves uncertain about the Corps's role. This, despite a decision at the Maastricht summit to give the WEU a central military mission in matters of non-NATO or out-of-area defense, while making the WEU subordinate to NATO on Alli- ance military questions. Interestingly, Germany's ''constitutional prob- lem'' of deploying its troops beyond the NATO boundaries does not now seem to be as much of a problem as it was, say, during the Gulf War. In all of this, the silence of the British is regrettable. London is so pan- icked by the prospect of the U.S. departure that it is likely, in the end, to support the new Franco-German axis as a replacement. Without active British resistance to European duplication of NATO's structure and mis- sions, the United States will find itself isolated from its own allies. And, ultimately, the French will have cause to regret that. As a senior French Defense Ministry official acknowledged to me last year, ''The French are witnessing the unfolding of their greatest nightmare. Just as the Germans are reunifying, the Americans are preparing to leave.'' De Gaulle, who resented American power but respected American leadership, would be horrified. Instability as the New Paradigm A HASTY RETREAT from Europe -- where, incidentally, the bulk of heavy U.S. combat divisions deployed during the Gulf War were stationed -- could have an immediate ripple effect both there and elsewhere. In 1990, the United States deployed over 314,000 troops in Europe, in- cluding two full Army corps of nearly five divisions and nine fighter wings. By 1995 the United States plans to reduce this forward presence to 150,000. On March 18, the U.S. VII Corp, based at Stuttgart, Germany (which provided the nucleus of U.S. ground troops for Desert Storm), was disbanded. Along with V Corp (which remains based in Frankfurt, Ger- many), these two units formed the backbone of the U.S. military presence in Europe for nearly five decades. At the ceremony marking the end of VII corp, then - Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg sought to reassure his nervous countrymen that the departure of these troops was ''not the final word on the American commitment in Europe.'' But this may be just the beginning, if the Fortress America proponents have their way. Although the Bush Administration regards the 150,000 as a floor, many in Congress and elsewhere regard it as a ceiling. The new defense author- ization bill as approved by both Houses of Congress includes language that would cap the U.S. military presence in Europe at 100,000 by October 1, 1995. Clearly, there is a legitimate question regarding the necessary size of an American NATO garrison. But it is also true that the European allies have come to measure the seriousness of the U.S. commitment to Europe's security by the willingness of the United States to deploy a siz- able garrison on the continent. The judgment of most military specialists is that one complete armored corps and its support (roughly 100,000 troops) is the minimum sustaina- ble fighting force. That will therefore probably be the benchmark em- ployed by U.S. allies to evaluate the seriousness of the commitment. And it seems likely that the number of remaining U.S. troops will receive even greater attention now that the American ground presence is essentially nuclear-free. At the height of the cold war, ground-based nuclear weapons acted to protect the U.S. ground forces. With the fading of the threat and the removal of the ground-based nuclear deterrent U.S. troops have in ef- fect become the tripwire. A Euro-hostile Congress is likely to focus on this as it whittles away the size of the U.S. ground force on the Continent. Dragon's Teeth ALTHOUGH the most dangerous challenges are admittedly not centered in Europe, how the United States behaves there will likely be regarded by American allies (and adversaries) as precedent-setting. Consider where the next major threats may appear. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, one of the last surviving totalitarians, has no doubt applauded the premature withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea, where their role as a tripwire was more likely to be tested than in Europe, even at the height of the cold war. The nuclear withdrawal was made on the promise by Pyongyang that North Korea would open its worrisome nuclear facilities to international inspection. So far, three IAEA inspections of the North's nuclear facilities have been carried out. There has been, however, a deafening silence from both the IAEA and the North Koreans on the results of those inspections. This is ominous, since the IAEA has a history of trumpeting successful in- spections, particularly in the light of its failure to detect Iraq's clandestine weapons programs. Add to the nuclear concerns an earlier decision by the Bush Administration to reduce Asian military deployments by 10 per cent, and a somewhat unstable and unpredictable dictator like Mr. Kim could conclude that he now had an invitation to test the bounds of behavior per- missible in the New World Order. In the Middle East, Saddam Hussein's ''defeat'' nevertheless leaves an intact military of considerable size, a still simmering underground nuclear program, a leader seemingly undeterred by the humiliating losses during Desert Storm, and ''moderate'' Arab neighbors who seem to have already forgotten the threat posed by the butcher of Baghdad. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Hafez al Assad now publicly oppose the use of additional force to remove lingering Iraqi ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities. Add to that Saudi Arabia's refusal to allow sufficient levels of U.S. pre-positioned equipment to remain on its soil and it be- comes clear that a rapid return of U.S. forces would be difficult should the need arise. Nor is the blind ambition for political hegemony a uniquely Middle Eastern phenomenon. Witness the brutal behavior of the Serbian leader- ship in Yugoslavia. Although the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic did not proclaim himself to be the new Saladin, as did Saddam Hussein, he has made clear that the world created by Yalta and Potsdam no longer exists and that its constraints no longer impress him. And his attacks on Muslim areas in what used to be Yugoslavia are not, even on the most cold-blooded calculation, merely ''internal matters'': they ultimately risk a military response by Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. This suggests the advisability for NATO of maintaining military forces that could act rapidly to defuse explosive situations. However, achieving agreement to use NATO forces anywhere in Eastern Europe, an already difficult task, will be nearly impossible in the absence of an American mil- itary component. Witness the failed efforts of the EC to broker a settlement in Yugosla- via. The EC ministers initially failed even to agree on a political approach to the civil war there, in large part because the French and German gov- ernments were supporting opposing sides. When agreement on a ceasefire plan was finally reached among the EC governments, their envoy, Lord Carrington (a statesman of considerable reputation), found he lacked the authority even to be taken seriously by any of the parties to the dispute. Meanwhile, in July, the WEU and NATO each agreed to deploy a naval task force to the Adriatic to monitor the UN trade embargo against Ser- bia. The U.S. Sixth Fleet also deployed a carrier battle group. Although three separate fleets (numbering more than a dozen warships) were de- ployed, none were authorized to do anything more than report violations of the UN embargo. NATO's failure to act is particularly troubling, since it is the only organization among the many being suggested for new roles in the ''New World Order'' (EC, CSCE, WEU, UN) with sufficient forces and political weight to act in a crisis. The key ingredient, however -- polit- ical will -- is lacking. A similarly incendiary situation has boiled over between Turkish-speak- ing Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians in the former Soviet repub- lics of Azerbaijan and Armenia. This ethnic war directly affects a NATO ally -- Turkey, whose new Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, has warned President Bush directly that if Armenians continue to kill Azerbaijanis, the Turkish public will insist on Turkey's intervention. The NATO alliance has taken a tentative step toward involvement: at its June meeting, NATO foreign ministers approved use of NATO forces for peacekeeping operations outside of the Alliance's formal boundaries -- but only if the request came from the now expanded, 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This effectively makes NATO the out-of-area enforcement arm of the CSCE, but NATO leaders insist that their forces be deployed only if a ceasefire is in place and if the parties agree in advance to such intervention. Neither the Azeris nor the Armenians are likely to do so. The danger of a Soviet threat to the West clearly evaporated with the dissolution of the USSR. Nevertheless, the 15 successor states to the So- viet empire will be in a period of uncertain and wrenching transition for at least a decade, during which time unforeseen and unpredictable secu- rity challenges are likely to surface. While a more complete analysis of post-Soviet security questions will have to await another article (to appear in NR later this fall), after nearly a year and several summit meetings it is clear that efforts to build and sustain a post-Soviet union through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have been largely unsuccess- ful. The continuing search for some confederation among the former So- viet republics on the one hand, and the emergence of increasingly militant ethnic secessionist movements in places like Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Central Asia, on the other, are likely to threaten stability in Eurasia and therefore present security problems for the U.S. and its allies. Regardless of whether the CIS survives as a confederation, Russia will certainly continue to dominate Eurasia economically, politically, and mil- itarily. While Russia does not pose an immediate military threat to the West, large questions about its foreign-policy intentions remain, promi- nent among them the custody of some twenty thousand nuclear weapons and the ultimate resolution of an evolving strategic competition with its bordering rival, Ukraine. Clearly, as Central and Eastern Europe slowly transform themselves from a theater of U.S. - Soviet confrontation toward a region of fiercely independent, nationalistic societies, the presence of U.S. forces in Western Europe is likely to remain a useful instrument for maintaining U.S. influ- ence, particularly on Europe's periphery. Further, the presence of Ameri- can forces assists in ensuring some level of integration of Western policy. As the establishment of the WEU, the CSCE, and the European Corps -- not to mention the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), formed at the NATO Summit meeting in Rome last November, and including the 16 NATO members, the 5 former Warsaw Pact nations, and the 15 former Soviet republics -- indicates, Europeans clearly enjoy forming associations. But at the moment, it would seem that the only accomplishment of which they can boast is the creation of large and probably competing institutions designed to fill the vacuum that the Americans are expected to leave. So long as there is no one effective institutional framework supported by all of Europe's major powers, then there is little prospect of united European action on any issue. After the Cold War THE COLD WAR required tenacity and commitment, whereas the emerg- ing security environment requires creativity and vision. In order to retain a leadership position among both the Western nations and those periph- eral to or outside of our alliance systems, U.S. defense and foreign-policy architects must broaden their conception of security, both in its national and international contexts. What the adherents of retrenchment fail to grasp is that superpowers, if they wish to influence events toward the protection of their vital inter- ests, can never really ''come home.'' They are condemned to balance a do- mestic agenda with foreign commitments. This, admittedly, is not a par- ticularly creative or profound discovery, but it also is not empty nostalgia for the good ol' days of American imperium, if in fact they ever existed. There are simply no substitutes visible on the horizon for U.S. global lead- ership. ***************************************************************** Framing the Questions THE TWILIGHT OF THE CAMPAIGN George Bush is no Great Communicator. But we mustn't let that make us forget how much of the Reagan coalition he has listened to, and what Bill Clinton would tell it instead. HADLEY ARKES Mr. Arkes is the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. His most recent book is Beyond the Con- stitution. A VISITOR to the family quarters of the White House remarked to me of his surprise at the American President whose picture figured most prom- inently in the photos that surrounded Mr. Bush in his most intimate set- tings. Asked to guess, I could not, and neither could any of my friends who have made the study of politics their vocation. The right guess came fi- nally from a friend in mathematics, who always sees politics from an odd angle. He said: LBJ. The story made me recall that, when Mr. Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, George Bush went to the airport to pay his respects to Lyndon Johnson. Later, when Mr. Bush ran for the Senate in Texas, he paid his respects again. The story will one day be filled in, and we will learn more about the ties that connected George Bush to Lyndon Johnson. But the connection takes on the eeriest quality this year, as events seemed to spin out of control for President Bush just as they did for Presi- dent Johnson. The irony is that he had sought, in the Gulf War, to avoid Johnson's main mistake: time and again he would say, ''No more Viet- nams,'' no more wars with ill-defined missions. And yet, Bush has man- aged to replicate the deeper problem that undermined LBJ's Presidency, and produced its most devastating effect in the Tet Offensive. The Tet Lesson THAT Offensive, early in 1968, came as a jolting surprise, and the lesson drawn in the panic of the hour was that the enemy remained vigorous and audacious, that we were nowhere near achieving our end in Vietnam. At that moment, the ''best and the brightest'' began to lose their nerve. But of course the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Vietcong, who suffered massive casualties and exhausted themselves as a political and military force. The extravagant, wrong lessons were drawn because of the panic, as the reporters were suddenly left on their own, with the need to supply a meaning to the event. But as Peter Braestrup showed in his memorable book, Big Story, the panic sprang from the surprise, and the surprise oc- curred because Lyndon Johnson had made no effort to prepare the public for the offensive he knew was coming. Braestrup has drawn the striking contrast to Mr. Nixon in dealing with the May Offensive in 1972: The Ad- ministration alerted the public to the coming attack; the President went on the air to explain just what measures he had ordered. By framing the problem for them, Nixon saved the reporters from the need to impart their own meaning to it. George Bush had the chance to observe both Johnson and Nixon closely, but somehow he managed to miss the lesson. He has permitted his ad- versaries in the media to speak in his place and supply the most implau- sible caricatures of his policies. In the case of the economic program, the ''story line'' became that the President had no program. And what has be- come understandably baffling to the President is just how difficult it has been to dislodge that ''story line'' once it took hold. The Administration had made its character plain in a pattern of deci- sions, spread over three years, and that pattern should be evident by now even to the dimmest reporters. Of course, the Administration had fallen into some grievous mistakes, most notably in permitting a massive in- crease in spending and regulation, but it has shown a pronounced aver- sion to the notion of ''solving'' social problems by laying, upon private em- ployers, the responsibility to remedy problems they did not make. The Ad- ministration has not been inclined, that is, to try to solve the problem of unemployment by making it more expensive to hire additional workers. Nor does it seek to treat the problem of rising costs in health care by im- posing price controls on drugs. And yet, in the curious world we inhabit now, an Administration that persistently prefers a freer economy is ac- cused of a want of purpose. Apparently, if I am bent on a policy of rent control, I would be credited with having a policy on housing, but if I show the good sense to avoid this false remedy, I am accused of a want of policy. What has been needed, from the President and his colleagues, is the kind of talk that sets in place the understanding from which everything else, intelligibly, springs: the initiatives and the vetoes, the paths of policy taken and the paths deliberately left untaken. When the President does not supply this kind of talk, he should not be surprised when his own fol- lowers drift off in a state of mild panic mixed with incomprehension. On no issue has this point been borne out more tellingly in recent weeks than on the issue of abortion. The New York Times has carried accounts of Republican businessmen who have defected to Clinton on the issue of the economy. But all of them claimed, as a further propellent for their move, the issue of abortion. As the readers of these columns know, Mr. Bush has been supplied over the last four years with proposals to stake out a program of moderate steps on abortion. The President might have offered, first, proposals that were heavily favored by the American people: to forbid abortions in late term, or abortions carried out because the child was likely to be blind or lame. With these modest moves the President could have established some momentous points: that some abortions are not justified; that they may rightly be restricted; that unborn children may be protected. By this means Mr. Bush could have broken through the fog implanted by the media. With all of their resources of investigative journalism, the media have still not managed to convey to the public the rudimentary fact that abortions can be performed for any reason, throughout the entire length of the pregnancy. Bush could have embarrassed his adversaries in the media by breaking this news out. In this respect, the emblem for the campaign -- and the Administration -- might have been furnished by my friend Robert George of Princeton University. A few of us had been talking about how good the President had been on this question -- in vetoing the use of fetal tissue, in resisting all varieties of measures to promote public funding of abortion. ''But that is Bush's problem,'' said Robbie George: ''He has been all action, and no talk.'' Of course abortion has not been the animating issue for most people in this election, but the handling of this question marks the serious changes that have taken place in the American political class. The President and Vice President are uneasy speaking of the subject because they sense that most of the public are uneasy in speaking about it. A rural audience in Illinois in the 1850s had the wit to follow Lincoln and Douglas as they unfolded some rather complicated essays in moral argument. But it may be that the people have lost a certain practice in principled reasoning be- cause the speakers cast before them have stopped offering examples of it. Consider the reaction to Mr. Clinton's scheme for the economy. In the past, politicians would have raised the question of whether these meas- ures were unconstitutional, and perhaps even immoral: To fix a responsi- bility on the part of employers to pay for the medical insurance of their employees was to transfer property from person A to person B. It looked, in other words, like a taking of property without compensation. It was a move, on the part of the government, to create benefits without having to justify new taxes to pay for them. Against this kind of sleaziness, the pro- visions in the Constitution were meant to cast up barriers and warnings. But in a legal sensibility that has become deadened, the warning signs are no longer seen, and the questions are not even raised. And yet, Mr. Bush held back this season from a decision to index capital gains through an executive order, precisely because lawyers in the government harbored se- rious doubts about the legality of the move. But if the President is willing to honor these concerns, even when they cut against his interests, why is he reluctant to sound the issue in the campaign? Unasked Questions OF COURSE, the press has ruled out any questions touching on the mo- rality of Clinton or his policies, and it has nearly ruled out, as immoral, any questions critical of Clinton. Even the usually decorous Robert Mac- Neil asked the President testily whether there was no limit on what he was willing to do to win. This kind of slander has become routine. In the past, there might have been calls for equal time, or a faint gesture toward equity. But the passivity here seems to mark another gesture of capitula- tion to the class -- and the culture -- that rule the media. Behind the hold- ing back there may simply be a sense that it does not matter: None of this hostility would have defeated Ronald Reagan, and it may no longer seem so important after George Bush has left the scene. I have been surprised by the number of conservatives who have confided to me that they would be relieved, overall, to see Bush depart. They have been utterly certain that Clinton will not last beyond one term. But in this estimate, they show a want of concreteness and imagination. One moment, during the second ''debate,'' might have summarized eve- rything. President Bush had pronounced in favor of term limits for con- gressmen. Governor Clinton opposed the plan: He would preserve the right of people to keep their favorite congressmen, but he would strike at those wrongful uses of money to keep politicians in office. He would ban the PACs with their massive gifts of cash. Given a choice, that is, Clinton gravitates to the ''reform'' that makes the government larger: more forms to be filed, requiring more administrators to review the forms, in agencies grown larger. More complaints then, needing the guidance of lawyers, and more judges to hear the complaints. The problem is an entrenched political class, and the solution is more administration, and a larger public sector. On the matter of abortion, Clinton promises to entrench, to make irre- versible, the policy of promoting abortion, not merely as a private choice, but as a public good. Some Republicans may think that Clinton will rid them of the pro-lifers, by virtually knocking them out as a political force. But it was Ronald Reagan who drew to the party the evangelicals and Catholics who were concerned about the ''life issues,'' and if these people lose their attachment to the party, it may find itself shrunk again to the constituency of Goldwater. It was no small genius on the part of George Bush that he recognized what Ronald Reagan had wrought. As he sought to be Reagan's successor, he traveled to exotic parts of the Reagan coalition, and he learned how to absorb the varied accents of this movement, along with its varied inter- ests. Before that odyssey, I too had been dismissive, in 1980, of this Yalie, who had disclosed no particular sense of mission as he advanced in his career from one high post to another. But his achievement came, as I say, in absorbing as his own the coalition that Ronald Reagan had built. I cling to whatever slender hope exists that the voters will sober up at the last moment and not turn the government over to the campus politi- cians of the 1960s, who grew older without growing up. But if they do de- cide on a change, the Republicans may suffer a further surprise: They may discover how much they miss George Bush. They will miss his gameness, his spirit, his persisting buoyancy and energy. They will also miss his con- servatism, and they will discover just how much harder it is for anyone else to connect the sections of the party as he connected them. They may conclude, wistfully, as Mencken did of Grover Cleveland, that he was a good man in a bad trade. ***************************************************************** Debates, 'Debates,' and Showbiz Mr. Como teaches rhetoric at York College in New York City. GEORGE BUSH sure can be a heavy sleeper, and some nights it takes a helluva wakeup call to get his attention. But once he hears the buzzer. . . . Would that there were two more weeks before the election, and two more debates. I mean, of course, a cross between Quayle - Gore and Presi- dential III, both of which the good guys won -- hands down. But what does ''won'' mean? A short answer is any or all of three things: gaining the most votes, making the best impression, or making the best case. These criteria apply, mutatis mutandis, to formal debating as well as to popular, hybrid, political-campaign debates. Juries vote, and the Ox- ford Union ''divides the house''; debate coaches counsel fluency, direct eye- contact, and varied and appropriate gesture; and debate judges calculate winning arguments. So: To some degree every debate is a Rorschach test. Of course, within an electoral context, only votes count. With respect to the other two criteria, however, and notwithstanding the Vice President's nervous laugh, a touch of ''hyperkinesis,'' and the incivility of excessive interruption (I've now said the worst), my first ink blot says Quayle cleaned Gore's clock. The senator was well prepared but over-rehearsed: wooden, unresponsive, too frequently disarmed and thus lacking in conviction. His technique can best be described as High School Formulaic. Quayle, on the other hand, rarely let a ripe opportunity pass, from his response to nega- tive campaigning (''See my press clippings for the last four years''), to his ridicule of 60 Minutes (''Don't believe everything you see on television, Senator''). Though it should not be expected of the Vice President that he establish campaign themes and sustain arguments in support of them, Quayle did just that, notably with respect to the environment. Presidential I and II, respectively two days before and after Quayle - Gore, were not debates. By debates I do not mean ''town meetings'' (that's showbiz: mostly camera angles and body language -- Oprah's and Phil's caring, sharing, and daring), nor panel interviews (these are hardly more than crypto-press-conferences). Bush - Clinton were surely not Lincoln - Douglas: There is no Lincoln (a Douglas would not be too easy to come by, either), there is no Single Great Issue, and there is an insufficient public for the real thing. We tire easily and then alibi, eventually complaining of too many numbers, or that the effective debater is simply a ''good actor.'' (Have you noticed that the Great Communicator was not even a good actor -- until he scaled the Everests of stand-up, direct, in-person oral communication? Then he became, well, ''just a good actor.'') Perot won the ''debate.'' And although the President performed ade- quately -- appearing self-assured and by no means aloof from either the ''issues'' or the office -- Clinton demonstrated marked and legitimate strengths: intelligence, programmatic knowledge and command, persis- tence, rhetorical adroitness. But for a telling lack of settled maturity (he seems ''in touch'' with everything and everyone except himself and, like an adolescent, is genuinely incapable of admitting error and so must re-in- vent his past), he might be a heavyweight. Of course he won the second engagement. The President was himself, natural, a bit less yielding than usual, and (as William Safire aptly put it) ''comfortable under pressure.'' Perot wore thin but still was not made to pay, especially for so woefully miscasting our greatest (and otherwise deeply capable) living hero as a bumbling running-mate. The format, Clinton, and perhaps the campaign are typified by this fact: The most ''forceful'' question -- ''How can you help us if you don't know what we're feeling?'' -- was the most banal. To his credit, the President did all but dismiss it. In the third encounter the President did what the campaign should have been doing all along and what good debaters accomplish. Early, per- sistently, and emphatically, he 1) established a useful context: economic woes are global and we are suffering less than in our past and less than most of the developed world, less than under the last Democratic Presi- dent (you just can't say ''Jimmy Carter'' too often!); 2) defined terms his way -- ''middle class'' (if you make $36,000 -- not Clinton's $52,000 -- ''watch your wallet''), ''trickle down'' (as in ''trickle-down government''), and ''investment'' (not the government taking our money to make work); and 3) co-opted the issues. In a debate, these are discovered; in a ''debate'' they are too often ''made'' by ''the people,'' as was the case with Presiden- tial II when one interrogator sadly confused personality with character. Bush, with assertive calm, emphasized the latter, commandingly dis- missed Perot's Iraq gambit, delineated his leadership (in contrast with Clinton) on NAFTA and Desert Storm, and adroitly usurped . . . the econ- omy: homeowners, with low interest for re-financing loans, are better off; people on fixed incomes, with low inflation, are better off; and the superb, ''He'd be in charge -- that's what I'm afraid of!'' Nixon (as fine a debater as our electoral process has ever seen) won his fourth encounter with Arthur of Camelot even in television terms; but it was the least watched, and people had already made up their minds. This year a substantial percentage of voters has not yet decided, and Presiden- tial III was watched by 88 million people; its 44.6 rating was the highest of all the debates. Maybe the President is not the only one who finally heard the wakeup call. -- JAMES COMO ***************************************************************** Cradle of Scandals THE TARBABIES OF AMERICAN POLITICS Dont look for the bizarre impact of Iran and Iraq on American policy to lessen in days to come. DANIEL PIPES Mr. Pipes is director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. FOR 12 YEARS, two distant, medium-sized, and hitherto not very impor- tant states have bedeviled American Presidents. Jimmy Carter had to cope with the fall of the Shah, the U.S. embassy seizure, and Iraq's attack on Iran. Ronald Reagan had Iran's attack on Iraq, the Iran/Contra scan- dal, and the U.S.S. Stark and Vincennes incidents. George Bush had the October Surprise, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, ''Iraqgate,'' and Saddam's survival in power. Why Iran and Iraq? And what does the future hold? It takes a bit of effort now to remember, but U.S. - Iranian relations had long prospered. When the Iranian constitutionalists needed help with fi- nances early in 1911, whom should they bring to Teheran as treasurer- general but an American, W. Morgan Shuster? When again in need of fi- nancial advice in 1922, they hired another American, Arthur Millspaugh. Americans returned the favor. They celebrated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the very model of a benevolent king. ''What is going on in Iran is about the best thing going on anywhere in the world,'' Lyndon B. Johnson enthused in 1964. Things began to sour about 1970, when the Shah led OPEC in raising the price of oil. The first energy crisis not only caused economic problems (recession, inflation), but it prompted a deep sense of pessimism in the West. It wasn't apparent at the time, but this confrontation started a new era for Iran and the United States. By 1977, when Jimmy Carter came into office, the oil market had stabi- lized. In keeping with the traditional U.S. - Iranian amity, Carter spent New Year's Eve in 1977 with the Shah and toasted Iran as ''an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.'' As if prompted by this testimonial, the Shah went on the offensive one week later and personally approved a scurrilous newspaper attack on Ayatollah Khomeini. Outrage at the article prompted anti-government riots, with attendant killings; the Iranian custom of commemorating the fortieth day after a death led to a recurring cycle of violence. By January 1979 the Shah had fled Iran; Ayatollah Khomeini returned a month later. The Shah's collapse deeply hurt American interests. Militarily, an ally in a critical region turned into an enemy. The supply of Persian Gulf oil became extremely vulnerable. To make matters worse, the Islamic Repub- lic quickly emerged as the most profoundly anti-American regime any- where in the world. Whatever their views of the United States, Kremlin commissars wore ties; Khomeinists saw the necktie as a symbol of West- ern imperialism. In November 1979, a group calling itself Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam assaulted the U.S. Embassy complex in Teheran, begin- ning 444 humiliating days of hostage-holding. The seizure became a sym- bol for American paralysis. The rescue attempt of April 1980 only made matters worse. Two Ameri- can aircraft collided, killing eight soldiers. The U.S. military -- no, the whole country -- felt intensely humiliated. The absolute nadir came when an ayatollah visited the site and prodded the incinerated remains of American soldiers on the desert floor. The hostages haunted the 1980 presidential campaign. As election day approached, speculation increasingly focused on an ''October Surprise'' -- concessions by Carter that would get the hostages out. But the Iranians despised him too much for that. Partly to show their hostility (and partly because they feared Ronald Reagan), they let the Americans leave Iranian airspace precisely as Reagan took the oath of office and Carter's Presi- dency came to an end. At least Reagan started with a fresh slate. For a year, he enjoyed rela- tive quiet from Iran. Then, building on its successful use of hostages in Teheran, the Iranian leadership encouraged the tactic elsewhere. Shiites in Lebanon took the hint. Beginning with the capture of David Dodge, president of the American University of Beirut, in July 1982, they held Americans (and other foreigners) hostage, a sore in the American body politic for ten years. Guilt about abandoning the hostages made appeasement a constant temptation. In 1985, the Administration capitulated. The duplicity of the Iran/Contra scheme -- with its imbroglio of keys, cakes, begged money, and Central Americans -- permanently wounded the Reagan Presidency. In addition to taking hostages, Iranian-backed terrorists also killed Americans, starting in April 1983, when they bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Killing Americans had a strategic purpose: to intimidate the U.S. and chase it out of the region, a goal achieved in Iran and Lebanon but nowhere else. The Vincennes incident topped off years of U.S. - Iranian skirmishes in the Persian Gulf region. Iranian aggressiveness in the Iran - Iraq War had led to repeated encounters with American forces. U.S. ships protected Kuwaiti tankers, destroyed Iranian gunboats, and threatened worse. In July 1988, the Vincennes shot down an Iran Air passenger plane. Though the downing was inadvertent, the Iranians interpreted it as part of an American conspiracy to support Iraq. To the Iranians' despair, the world responded only limply to this outrage. Finally understanding the extent of Iran's isolation, Ayatollah Khomeini days later decided to ''drink a cup of poison'' and call off the fight against Iraq. Thus did Americans inadver- tently bring the Iran - Iraq war to an end. Tarbaby-like, troubles with the Islamic Republic keep sticking. Charges that George Bush was directly involved in the Iran/Contra affair keep popping up. The Vincennes incident recently returned to the news, as U.S. News & World Report argued that the fault lay with a belligerent Amer- ican pilot. Most dramatically, the ''October Surprise'' won't go away. This theory accuses candidate Reagan of reaching a deal with the ayatollahs not to release American hostages before the 1980 election. Though re- search, both journalistic and congressional, has disproved any veracity, the theory threatens to live on in the popular imagination, poisoning American political life with its implication that the two Reagan Admini- strations were fundamentally illegitimate. Meanwhile, Next Door THE Iraqi people long viewed the U.S. with something like the favor of their Iranian neighbors. They appreciated Woodrow Wilson's hesitations about British rule and looked to the U.S. for justice. Even during Desert Storm, we heard, for example, of the Baghdad merchant who stated: ''We were bombed but we were happy. We thought it would be an end to our misery.'' But since the coup d'etat of 1958, Iraqi governments have been steadily hostile to the West. In the 1970s, for example, Baghdad had a major role in putting together the Rejectionist Front, a grouping of hard-line anti- Israel and anti-American states which vehemently condemned any reduc- tion in the Arab - Israeli conflict. However high the rhetorical pitch, how- ever, at least Iraq did not actually invade its neighbors. When Saddam Hussein became president in July 1979, this changed. He turned Iraq into a military machine, adding, for example, some eight hundred tanks within the next year. But his real interest lay in non-con- ventional weaponry -- biological and chemical agents, missiles, the famed supergun, and, to top it off, nuclear weaponry. The prospect of Saddam with The Bomb so distressed Israel's leaders that they launched the world's only pre-emptive strike against a nuclear installation in June 1981. Strangely, the U.S. condemned Jerusalem and delayed the shipment of F-16 aircraft. Here, as so often in the years to come, Washington gave Saddam the benefit of the doubt. Saddam began his expansionist career by invading Iran in September 1980. He made two mistakes: misjudging the Iranian response and not continuing on to attack Teheran itself. Far from capitulating, the Iranian leadership was galvanized. By mid 1982, Iranian forces threatened to move into Iraq. ''A plague on both your houses,'' came the American reaction. The U.S. Government viewed Iraq as the aggressor but could not support Teheran so long as it held 52 hostages. Only when the Iranians went on the offen- sive in 1982 did the Reagan Administration -- rightly fearing the expan- sion of Iranian radicalism throughout the Middle East -- tilt toward Iraq. Learning nothing, forgetting nothing, the Iraqi dictator invaded Kuwait in August 1990. He again misjudged the will of the enemy and again stopped too early. Saddam himself, in a rare admission, recognized it was a mistake ''not continuing the attack all the way to Saudi Arabia's East- ern Province and then occupying it.'' This mistake gave President Bush a chance. For seven months, he focused his attention on formulating a re- sponse, putting together a coalition, and conducting a war. However well the war went, Bush had little time to enjoy its benefits before ''Saddam still has a job, do you?'' bumper stickers turned up. Not only did Saddam stay in power, but his truculence and brutality remained intact. To protect the Shiites, the Western powers imposed a no-fly zone in southern Iraq. This increased the possibility of U.S. forces again in combat against Iraqis. Even if you overwhelmingly vanquish the Iraqi tarbaby, it sticks to you. It stuck in another way too: appalling irregularities in U.S. Government conduct vis-a-vis Iraq during 1988 - 90 have come to light. It transpired that employees at the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) had made $2.86 billion in unauthorized loans to the Iraqi govern- ment. Investigators found evidence of coverups in both the U.S. and Ital- ian governments, prompting Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special prosecutor. The issue not only became an election liability for the Bush Administration but threatens to become another permanent scandal. Shape of the Future IRONICALLY, American policy in the Persian Gulf since 1977 has been essentially successful. The Red Army did not exploit the Shah's fall to oc- cupy Iran. The Iran - Iraq war did not provoke spiraling oil prices and a worldwide depression. Kuwait did not disappear, Saddam did not deploy nukes, nor are Iranian forces occupying Baghdad. Yet most Americans would deem Washington's policy in the Persian Gulf region an abject failure. In part, this discrepancy has to do with the imperfect nature of the American accomplishment -- disasters averted rather than visions attained. In part, it follows from Washington's secre- tive, triangular, and somewhat amoral tactics, methods which make most Americans queasy. But we'd better get used to these deficiencies, for they typify the bal- ance-of-power policies which characterize politics in a non-cold-war world. The Persian Gulf pattern is likely to repeat itself in regard to China and its neighbors, Russia and its former colonies, the Arabs and Israel, and even the South African government and the African National Congress. The more quickly Americans accept the pattern, the better their country's foreign policy will function. ***************************************************************** Government and the Jobless HOW TO INCREASE UNEMPLOYMENT Historically, the worst thing government can do about unemployment is try to end it. RICHARD VEDDER and LOWELL GALLAWAY Messrs. Vedder and Gallaway both teach economics at Ohio University, where they are affiliated with its Contemporary History Institute. Mr. Gallaway is a visiting scholar at the Joint Economic Committee of Con- gress. This article was adapted from their forthcoming book for the Inde- pendent Institute, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth Century America (New York: Holmes & Meier). HISTORY tells us that when unemployment is high, presidential incum- bents lose. That includes every incumbent President in the twentieth cen- tury who has faced 7 per cent unemployment on election day and a higher unemployment rate than two years earlier: Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter. That is the situation George Bush faces today. An unhappy public wants something done about the sluggish economy. Yet the evi- dence from the past tells us that the best thing government can do to re- duce the ranks of the unemployed is -- nothing. In response to the Panic of 1907, Congress created a central bank to maintain stable economic conditions. The Federal Reserve System began operations on January 1, 1914, and within six years prices in the U.S. had doubled. In the seventh year of its operation, 1920, the nation had the largest single-year deflation of its history, with wholesale prices falling more than 36 per cent in a single year. Wages also fell, but not quite so precipitously. Hence real wages -- wages adjusted for the purchasing power of the dollar -- rose for a time, pricing some labor out of the market and causing a nearly 12 per cent un- employment rate in 1921. Whether the monumental price, output, and jobs instability would have occurred in the absence of the Fed is unknown, but the new central bank certainly did not win any medals for stabilizing the value of the currency and the level of output, probably its principal function. The policy sins of 1920, however, pale into insignificance compared with those of a decade later. A rather conventional downturn in economic activ- ity, accompanied by the 1929 stock-market decline, led to calls for govern- ment action. An activist President, Herbert Hoover, was more than happy to comply. Imbued with an underconsumptionist philosophy that became orthodoxy a few years later when John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory, Hoover successfully urged business leaders to keep wages high so as to maintain purchasing power. Rather than falling as they usu- ally did in downturns, wages were maintained at prosperity levels until 1931. Increasingly impoverished employers laid off workers rather than pay them less. Other policy errors (for example, the Smoot - Hawley tariff and a 1932 ''rob the rich'' income-tax hike) contributed to the downturn. Recovery began in March 1933, but double-digit unemployment remained for seven more years. The main reason for this was that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal continued the Hoover high-wage policy. The National Industrial Re- covery Act, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, and, later, the Fair Labor Standards Act all contributed to dramatically increasing labor costs. In the 1970s, it became fashionable to blame the prevailing stagflation and recession on external forces (just as Hoover did in the 1930s), particu- larly the nefarious OPEC cartel. While OPEC certainly did not help the economy any, the stagflation was building long before the price of oil tri- pled. The misery index -- the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates -- rose from a range of 6 to 7 in the mid 1960s to above 10 to 1970 and 1971. The Keynesian remedy of stimulating the economy by inflating prices (thereby lowering real wages, making it attractive to hire more workers) was losing its effectiveness. Lincoln was right -- you can fool all of the people some of the time, which is what expansionary monetary and fiscal policy did in the mid 1960s, as relatively docile workers accepted modest money wage increases eaten up by inflation. Lincoln was also right, however, that you cannot fool all the people all the time. By the 1970s, workers were becoming very inflation-conscious, and fiscal stimulus was followed by increasing demands for higher wages. After the 1973 oil embargo, the government tried the orthodox Keynesian remedy -- deficit-financed spending increases accompanied by big in- creases in the money supply -- with singularly unimpressive results. The 1960s Great Society had also contributed to an increase in the ''nat- ural rate'' of unemployment by pushing up the adjusted real wage. New programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid made low-income workers in- creasingly fussy about the types of jobs they would take. While Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker and President Reagan were hardly Leninists, they saw the wisdom in Lenin's 1921 pronouncement that sometimes you have to take one step backward in order to take two forward. Volcker and Reagan ended the policy of inflationary stimulus that had proved so ineffective (the misery index had reached 20 in Jimmy Carter's last year as President, the highest level since the Great Depres- sion). Inflation rates tumbled. In the short run, workers were fooled. They were demanding and getting large wage increases based on an assump- tion of high inflation. Real wages rose sharply in early 1982, creating un- employment. But within a year, workers realized that the disinflation was for real. Wage demands moderated, leading unemployment to fall, setting the stage for the nation's longest peacetime expansion. Beware Experts A READING of modern American macroeconomic history leaves four very vivid impressions: 1) The American worker needs prosperous capitalists to provide job opportunities. 2) Governmental efforts to reduce unemploy- ment most often worsen the problem. 3) Long-term improvement in living standards requires improvements in productivity, better understood by reading Adam Smith than John Maynard Keynes. 4) ''Experts'' are dan- gerous and should be listened to skeptically; if a case can ever be made for warning labels, it is with regard to macroeconomic forecasts. When a business's profits are high, wage costs absorb a relatively small portion of each sales dollar; businesses find that by hiring more workers they can expand profits further. Moreover, they tend to become optimistic about the future, enhancing both hiring and investment spending. When profits fall, on the other hand, businesses must reduce labor costs either by explicitly reducing money wages or by letting workers go. Market forces tend to end recessions naturally by forcing a fall in the adjusted real wage. Thus the 1920 - 21 recession, initially worse than the Great Depression, dissipated within a year or so under ''do nothing'' Pres- idents (first Woodrow Wilson, who was seriously ill and thus unable to pursue his activist inclinations, then Warren Harding, who was not in- clined to intervene). Falling money wages ended the unemployment prob- lem. The Great Depression, by contrast, got worse after continual labor- market meddling. More recently, the 1982 recession lasted only about a year, with virtually no special attempts on the part of the Reagan Admin- istration to end it. As labor markets softened, real wages fell, increasing the attractiveness of labor. This is where productivity comes in. Low wages may increase employ- ment, but rising living standards require higher wages. That would seem to pose an unattractive choice: relatively plentiful jobs but a low living standard, or high wages and relatively few jobs. While that tradeoff does exist, plentiful jobs and high wages can co-exist, by raising the output of workers over time. During the last two decades, productivity advances of American labor have been anemic, averaging less than 1 per cent a year. This has been blamed on virtually everything from the Arabs manipulating oil prices to the alleged tendency of American business leaders to be uninterested in long-run economic progress. The evidence suggests, however, that much of the problem lies elsewhere. Net capital formation in America today is less than it was early in this century or is now in other industrialized na- tions, in large part because of the punitive taxation of capital. Moreover, much of the new capital that has been formed has been diverted into meeting regulatory mandates rather than enhancing productivity. If the Americans with Disabilities Act forces bus companies to widen aisles, lowering capacity, then ''passenger miles per transit worker'' will fall. If legislation mandating maximum class size in public schools is adopted (as it has been in several states), then ''output per teacher'' in- evitably falls. If the Civil Rights Act leads firms to hire less qualified workers than otherwise, again productivity will fall. In general, regula- tory mandates drag down productivity, causing unemployment, reduced living standards, or a combination of both. In short, being kinder and gentler by approving a morass of new envi- ronmental, civil-rights, minimum-wage, and other legislation has hurt American workers. But, then, economic history is full of examples of the ''experts'' making major errors in their reading of the economy and human behavior. In 1929 Irving Fisher of Yale, perhaps the leading economist of the day, said: ''Fulfillment of the pledges by the nation's business leaders . . . that wages will not be reduced . . . should suffice to bridge across the business recession.'' John Maurice Clark of Columbia called Hoover's high-wage policy ''a great experiment in constructive industrial statesmanship.'' As World War II wound down and the government began cutting spend- ing and moving to a budget surplus from a huge budget deficit, economists were near unanimous in predicting double-digit unemployment. The real- ity? The unemployment rate in the three years after the war never reached 4 per cent on an annual basis. In the early 1980s, noted econo- mists such as Paul Samuelson and James Tobin monumentally mispredicted, forecasting continued stagflation. So did the big new economic consulting firms with their econometric models which corporations paid millions to receive -- the most egregious example of market failure in modern times. As we contemplate policy initiatives in the new Administration to com- bat economic stagnation, remember that historical experience says new governmental initiatives are certain, in the long run, to cause more harm than good. ***************************************************************** Clinton's Industrial Policy Mr. Rutledge, an economist, is chairman of Rutledge & Co., a merchant bank in Greenwich, Connecticut. IT IS an irony that today, just as most of the world is celebrating the tri- umph of capitalism over socialism and market forces over central plan- ning, American voters appear to be preparing to take a step backward. The Clinton economic program is one of higher marginal tax rates, micro- meddling in the affairs of business, managed trade, and industrial policy -- the misguided idea that a committee of wisemen in Washington will be able to make better decisions about which industries, technologies, and companies are critical to our country's future welfare than the market- place. Last week I had a chance to spend several hours with Rob Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington spend tank. Mr. Shapiro is a longtime member of Clinton's inner circle, and is being touted as a possible OMB Director in a Clinton Administration. I have to admit going into the meeting as a skeptic. By the end of the meeting my skepticism was gone -- I was terrified. The Clinton philosophy is in sharp contrast to traditional approaches to setting economic policy. Conservatives, such as Ronald Reagan, take a hands-off, free-market approach. Old-fashioned liberals, like Johnson, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, advocate hands-all-over-you policies. Clin- ton's approach, which his advisors actually call ''the third way,'' is to use the government as a catalyst to provide workers and firms with access to ''the common resources of production.'' ''Once that access has been achieved, the government steps back,'' Shapiro said (and I'll swear he said it with a straight face). Thus, in a very important sense, Clintonomics is a radical departure from traditional Democratic thinking. Clinton is the first Democratic can- didate since the 1930s whose economic program is not based on Keynesian demand management. Clinton's emphasis on using taxes, subsidies, and credits to induce changes in business behavior is somewhat reminiscent of supply-side, in- centive-based thinking. But Clinton's policies rely on the dark side of sup- ply-side thinking. They attempt to manipulate market prices in order to engineer a social or economic outcome the private market would not other- wise produce. In this sense, Governor Clinton's policies are potentially much more dis- ruptive than those of Jimmy Carter, who explicitly rejected the market mechanism when dealing with the economy (remember price, wage, and credit controls?). Carter's policies shut markets down, bringing about sud- den financial crises, which ultimately forced the government to revert to the market mechanism. Clinton policies, if he gets the chance to imple- ment them, will distort market outcomes, which could impede economic performance for a long time. In a market economy, the most important role of prices is as a commu- nication system to transmit the information that each of us needs to or- ganize our daily economic lives. This is a massive undertaking. Commit- tees of wisemen, regardless of their Nobel Prize count, just don't know enough to decide which industries or which companies are more important to our future than others. Once they start tinkering with prices, they cease to be reliable indicators of wants and scarcities, and economies break down, as they did in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Similarly, Clinton's tax policy is not an economic policy so much as a social policy designed to reallocate the burden of taxation from low- to high-income taxpayers. They will add a new tax bracket (36 to 38 per cent), raise the alternative minimum tax for individuals, and add a 10 per cent surtax for incomes over $1 million. The Clinton team hopes to collect $20 billion per year in new revenues from the increase in the top rate alone. They do not believe these people will take evasive action. The slow- thinking millionaires will simply hand over their wallets to the government. Tax policy also plays a crucial role in setting interest rates. Higher mar- ginal tax rates reduce the after-tax income on security investments rela- tive to investments in property and other tangible assets. Changes in rel- ative after-tax returns thus will induce private investors to attempt to re- balance their $48-trillion portfolio of assets -- to try to sell securities in favor of real assets, much as they did in the 1970s. This may be good news for property investors, but it is bad news for the security markets, pushing interest rates higher and stock prices lower. But the most destructive element of the Clinton program is taxes on capital. Clinton is opposed to a cut in the capital-gains rate because it would benefit owners of the existing capital stock. Instead, he intends to target lower capital-gains rates for new businesses only. In the first place, there is no difference between new capital and old capital in today's re- structuring-driven international marketplace. Capital today is almost to- tally fungible. The Clinton people are going to be surprised how fast peo- ple can turn old businesses into new ones if the price is right. Clinton's policy misses the point of lowering capital-gains rates in the first place. Lower capital-gains taxes attract capital by improving the after-tax return on capital deployed in the United States, relative to re- turns available in other countries. It doesn't matter who owns it -- it mat- ters who gets to use it to create wealth. We need to win the international competition for capital to give American workers the tools to raise produc- tivity and living standards. But how do you explain that to someone like Rob Shapiro, who actually says that, to the extent that rates of return on capital matter at all, it is pre-tax returns that count? No wonder I'm getting that sinking feeling we all remember from the Carter days. -- JOHN RUTLEDGE ***************************************************************** Taking Sides HERE NOW, THE NEWS . . . What happens when the umpire picks up a bat and glove? Ask George Bush. LORRIN ANDERSON Mr. Anderson, a veteran of United Press, the Minneapolis Tribune, Agence France-Presse, and the Washington Post, is a former editor and producer for WNBC-TV in New York. He would like to thank the Media Research Center and its director, Brent Baker, for valuable assistance. Good evening. More bad news today for the American people -- and another jolt for the shrill re-election campaign of George Herbert Hoover Bush. For the third straight month unemployment declined only slightly, and experts say the few local signs of economic recovery cannot mask the spreading calamity. ''In many ways, it's worse than the depths of the Great Depression,'' said one prominent economist with ties to the Administration, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. The gulf between rich and poor contin- ues to widen, as the middle class is squeezed, the rich reap the benefits of the Republican ascendance, and the nation is stuck with a staggering bill for the excesses of the Eighties. The President stopped ducking debates, finally, but he has failed to de- liver the knockout punch his handlers saw as his last hope. Dan Quayle, on the other hand -- starting to look more like a menace than a joke -- may have scored a few points with his manic assault on Al Gore. President Bush's transparent attempt to divert the voters' attention by harping on ''family values'' has seemingly gotten him nowhere. Despite the smears thrown at Governor Clinton under the guise of the ''character'' issue, and despite the gratuitous attacks on his progressive wife, the mod- erate ''New Democrat'' maintains his lead in the polls, in large part, ex- perts say, because of popular revulsion at the ugly, hate-filled GOP Con- vention. As the conservative analyst Kevin Phillips points out, the Bush campaign's attempt to divide us by bashing gays, blacks, working women, and single mothers has backfired. The President, meanwhile, obstinately refuses to produce a cure for AIDS, pointing hollowly to the expenditure of $4 billion a year while fail- ing to provide what's really needed, leadership that meets the moral stan- dards of Magic Johnson. Saddam Hussein sits coddled and cocky in Baghdad. And hurricanes, drought, skin cancer, and toxic waste stalk our fragile, dying planet, mainly, most experts say, because of the President's lofty disdain for environmental peril. WELL, OK, it's exaggerated. But not, in thrust or in tone, one whole hell of a lot -- not that much different from the message sent out day after day, night after night, by the Evening News and the New York Times. There are pockets of journalistic honesty, and occasional partisanship in the other direction, notably on talk radio. But while that partisanship is la- beled and open, the spear-carriers for the Democrats, on the networks and in the news columns of the quality press, march out in solemn masks of judicious neutrality. The economy is indeed an eminently legitimate issue, perhaps the main one. The blatantly tendentious reporting, is something else again. Conser- vatives might argue that George Bush does deserve a lot of blame, for breaking the tax pledge and for going along with -- sometimes even pro- moting -- quotas and onerous new regulatory laws that tend to hobble business, especially small business. But that is emphatically not a cri- tique you often hear on the networks, where the read-my-lips reminder is ubiquitous, but almost always to show duplicity, not dubious economics. Bryant Gumbel, on NBC's Today: ''Republicans in Houston may be try- ing to shift attention to family values and foreign affairs, but this year's presidential election hinges on the economy, so we asked Mike Jensen, our chief financial correspondent, to prepare an economic report card.'' And on to Mike and the report card, a well-cobbled amalgam of graph- ics, file footage, and statistics, with an unequivocal conclusion, at top and bottom: Bush's economic record is ''far and away'' the worst of any postwar President. God knows Bush's record is nothing to write home to Adam Smith about. But Jensen focused exclusively on areas where Bush comes off the worst, like job growth, where ''the Carter Administration did the best.'' The Carter Administration? Double-digit inflation? Twenty per cent interest rates? Stagflation? No mention. No mention of current low inter- est rates. No mention of low inflation until a closing colloquy with Gum- bel, when Jensen noted that inflation has been under control only ''be- cause the economy has been so weak.'' And in case any learning-disabled voter out there missed the message, Gumbel summed up: ''The bottom line -- the worst economic performance of any postwar President.'' Jensen: ''That's it.'' And that's the drill: top play for any and every piece of bad news, almost always with pointed reminders of how politically devastating this is for the Republicans. And the game you might call Look for the Leaden Lin- ing. Thus Jensen's explanation that the only reason for low inflation is a weak economy. And thus Peter Jennings, in a squib on a rise in produc- tivity: Productivity goes up because ''with so many people being laid off, those left with jobs have to work harder.'' Day after day and night after night. With a wink and a nod and a straight face as they tell us about spin doctors. And it feeds on itself. Not everyone out there will buy the doomsday message, but inevitably it colors public perceptions. So the pollsters find out that the voters think the only issue is the economy and everything is terrible and Bush is to blame, and the polls and the selective vox-pop sound bites and the sob stories, which even in boom times you can always find if that's what you're looking for, circle back to the anchors and reporters and they can say, ''See, it's not us, it's you -- the American people telling it like it is.'' ''Clinton Offers Hand as Bush Bares Fist'' -- that was a front-page head- line in the New York Times, teasing an inside story that called a Bush tax-and-spend attack on Clinton ''a bare-fisted effort to sow fear among voters.'' You will wait in vain for the Times to use similar language to de- scribe, say, the Clinton radio ad accusing Bush of planning to gut Social Security and Medicare. But, then, Democratic scare tactics don't qualify as ''negative,'' just as Democratic attempts to whip up class envy and re- sentment are not ''divisive.'' There are many ways to lie, in print and on television, without techni- cally departing from the facts. Tone and language, emphasis, the way you paraphrase, dishonest omission, selection of quotes or sound bites, place- ment to give one side or the other the last word. Bias? ''That's really kind of silly. Most of us are professionals.'' -- Nina Toten- berg, NPR. ''You do your job, and you remember that bias is in the eye of the be- holder.'' -- Andrea Mitchell, NBC. You do your job, and one of the most exciting -- not to say rewarding -- parts is that you get to be part of a star search, for the Willie Horton of 1992. Andrea Mitchell blazes the trail: Family Values. That's it, family values. Although the wedge issue could be the L.A. riots and the Great Society. Or possibly -- I wonder -- Clinton's medical plan? But that gets into how you're going to pay for it -- no, let's keep it family values. No! roars the New York Times, ''The new Willie Horton is New York City.'' And on. And on. Gays. The New Woman. Hillary. Nowhere was the media assault on the Republicans more concerted, more ferocious, than at the Convention in Houston, transformed before our eyes into a Nuremberg rally. I'm sort of partial to NBC because I used to work there, and one meeting of the minds, on the Today Show, remains a personal favorite: Katie Couric presided over a panel made up of the Wall Street Journal's Al (''You're a neo-fascist!'') Hunt, Andrea (''Willie Horton! Willie Horton!'') Mitchell, and Tim Russert, the former counselor to Mario Cuomo who now serves as the impartial moderator of Meet the Press. KATIE: ''So negative, negative. Tax-and-spend Democrats. We are America and the Democrats are not. Hillary Clinton's a radical feminist. Al Gore's a tree-hugger -- are these the things we're going to be hearing between now and November, Andrea?'' ANDREA: ''Exactly. The conservatives have taken over this convention -- a lot of fundamentalist Christian evangelicals in the delegations -- but the moderates feel very left out. . . .'' TIM: ''An extraordinary 48 hours. It's attack and apologize, the political version of Miss Piggy -- 'Who me?' Every time they get caught saying something unkind or unwholesome or even mean-spirited -- I mean I used to be a lawyer . . . and this entire convention has been criminal lawyers trying to sneak in evidence or hearsay to the jury box and they've been quite effective in doing it.'' And lo, Ronald Reagan is magically transfigured, now that he's hors de combat and not that crazy about Bush. No longer the heartless Neander- thal of the Eighties but a shining leader of the Good Conservatives in a Manichean struggle with the Hard Right, as the Moderates march off to a hell fashioned by Pat Buchanan and evangelicals, who are MEAN MOTHERS. TIM: ''You're so right -- the politics of hope against the politics of hate. It couldn't be clearer.'' To quote the freelance writer Mark Helprin, who covered the GOP Con- vention, ''of the 15,000 in the press, who outnumber delegates by almost 7 to 1, it is probably safe to say that 14,992 are Democrats. Thus, Republi- cans may compare themselves to a gathering of ducks at which 85 per cent in attendance are duck hunters.'' Slightly hyperbolic. But a lot of the hunters don't even bother to put up a blind any more. ''Has the party gone far right enough for you? I mean there's the gay- bashing . . .'' -- Connie Chung to Pat Robertson. ''Voters see women as agents of change and they're asking for change -- they don't see guys like you.'' -- Maria Shriver to California Senate can- didates John Seymour and Bruce Herschensohn. Cautionary Voices AS USUAL, generalizations have their limits. Whatever the charges of a pervasive left-wing bias on PBS, most of them probably true, MacNeil/ Lehrer is in my view a national resource -- and not only for its depth of coverage. The personal political views of MacNeil and Lehrer are actually hard to discern from the way they conduct the show. Not that the produc- tion as a whole isn't slanted gently, or not so gently, to the left. House ''conservative'' David Gergen is a guy who seems to have ''grown'' since he was Ronald Reagan's Communications Director -- so obviously eager to avoid being thought a mossback by his Beltway buddies that he's often indistinguishable from his Democratic counterpart, Mark Shields. Occasionally a cautionary voice is raised on television itself: ABC's Brit Hume, hardly a shill for the Republicans, has spoken of the media's ''ex- traordinary ability'' to achieve ''almost a Victorian level of shock at some of the [Republican] rough-and-ready stuff. . . . ''Nobody was similarly shocked when Maxine Waters, for example, called George Bush a 'racist.' . . . It seems that when the Democrats play rough-and-tumble politics like the Republicans have in the past, we all say, 'See, they really want to win' and how smart it is. And the Republicans do and we all say, 'Well, it's dirty politics, it's negative campaigning and we should disapprove of it.''' But that's apostasy. John Chancellor summed things up in his commentary on October 14 -- a scathing catalogue of the sins of 1988, all of them Republican of course, and a satisfied observation that not only have the Democrats learned to be ''quick counter-punchers,'' but the Fourth Estate, bless it, ''decided to do a better job this year.'' So the ''arguments and ads of both [sic] parties are being much more carefully scrutinized and criticized,'' to help the voters cultivate their ''political antibodies.'' ''The weeds that are clogging the Republican presidential machine in 1992 were planted in 1988.'' Bravo! Ron Brown couldn't have said it better. Allergic to Republicans THE FACT is that many of the reporters and editors and producers who shape American political perceptions just don't like Republicans much. It's visceral. I think I understand it because I used to share it, before age and experience clouded my preconceptions. Whatever their social origins, these are privileged and prosperous peo- ple, the media spin doctors, many of them far richer in both bucks and social status than your average Republican convention delegate. Dan Rather, who once said (of Barbara Walters) that no one in the news busi- ness is worth a million dollars, pulled in more than three million last year, and it's not even the Decade of Greed any more. While they pay ostentatious lip-service to ''the beleaguered middle class,'' it's also quite clear that most of the news people find middle-class and lower-middle-class types rather distasteful in the flesh -- the Republi- can variety, anyway, especially if they are attracted to the likes of Pat Bu- chanan. So the sympathies of these American aristocrats, possibly a tad defensive about their own inordinate affluence, turn, in a not unfamiliar syndrome, to the downtrodden ethnic minorities and the noble poor, from whom, in real life, they are likely to be rather more insulated than the recalcitrant bourgeois they scorn as yahoos. And noblesse oblige: John Chancellor once described himself admiringly on the air as ''the people's surrogate.'' When you can cloak your own political opinions in the plain clothes of a latter-day Quaker, speaking truth to power -- from your own powerful pulpit -- it makes pressing for a particular point of view more comfortable all around. ''When you hear yourself held up, as you were at the Republican Con- vention -- some people have used the word 'demonized' -- does it make you hurt or make you mad?'' -- Jane Pauley to Hillary Clinton. So tell us, ladies and gentlemen of the press, how the Hard Right con- jures up demons: single mothers, working mothers, gays, blacks, Hillary Clinton. Don't bother about any fine distinction between gay-bashing and reservations about special, lawsuit-inviting group rights for homosexuals. Don't bother to note that Barbara Bush and Dan Quayle and even Quayle's wife, that Lady Macbeth, make a point of saying it's fine for women to combine career and family if that's what they want -- or have -- to do, that nobody's painting a scarlet S on single parenthood. Demoni- zation? If anybody wears a demon's horns and tail, in the media, it's the ''Christian Right,'' the ''Hard Right,'' and to a large extent Republicans in general -- which is odd, coming from people who in other contexts congrat- ulate themselves on their reverence for diversity of opinion. For intellectual content the best speech of the convention came from for- mer Education Secretary William Bennett as he nominated Dan Quayle: a brilliant exposition and defense of the social views at the heart of the Republican argument. The ideas -- cultural conflict, the social utility of traditional values -- weren't all that different from Pat Buchanan's, but expressed without the harshness of Buchanan, with generosity and an emphasis on the freedom of Americans to live and behave as they please, within very broad limits. The speech did get some good reviews in the TV coverage the same night and, later, in the print press, mostly from conservative columnists. But our Newspaper of Record all but ignored it -- no excerpts, not even a mention in the next day's voluminous Times news coverage. Only a pass- ing (though positive) reference in a Kevin Sack piece about Quayle two days later, and dishonorable mention on an editorial enemies list of ''divi- sive and occasionally savage'' convention speakers. Bennett, the Times said, had ''inveighed'' against '''rampant promiscuity.''' Clearly a divisive insult to the Promiscuous Community. So the Bush campaign, fighting a two-front war against both the Demo- crats and the news media, suffers a recurring loss of nerve, sounding re- treat, time and again, from themes that are not necessarily, as Ann Richards might put it, dogs that won't hunt. Like ''family values.'' ''Let your fears and hatreds be your guide. Invoke God to justify them.'' Why, it's Anna Quindlen, back on the Times op-ed page after her vacation, and not a moment too soon, distilling the Republican essence and sharing the anguish she felt as she watched the Convention. ''They flogged this package they called family values. And you could almost hear millions of folks saying, 'Guys, we'll take care of the values if you take care of the economy.''' Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize - winner, epitomizes the prevailing media mindset, and in this case she's being either dumb or disingenuous. Because ''values'' -- and not just things like the work ethic -- obviously have a great deal to do with the economy as well as the overall health of society. Illegitimacy, for instance, is an excellent predictor of poverty, with a high correlation to other social ills like crime. There is seldom any ac- knowledgment, in the media, that conservatives who raise the issue might actually care about the kids involved, as well as about the broader social and economic issues. I write from a conservative perspective that has deepened in the two decades since I marched against the Vietnam War and voted for George McGovern, partly because of first-hand exposure, as a field producer for local television, to the unraveling of New York City. But it's hardly a down-the-line partisanship -- I respect the passion of people who think abortion is murder, for instance, but personally I'm pro-choice, and for some odd, atavistic reason I remain a registered Democrat. I also like to toy with the conceit that on balance I'm an honest man. Bias, we know from Tom Brokaw and Andrea Mitchell, is ''in the eye of the beholder.'' Behold. It has become impossible for me to believe that an- ybody with a trace of fair-mindedness left can deny the blatant politiciza- tion of the news and entertainment media that we depend on so crucially. It is not a question of what reporters and editors and anchors and pro- ducers privately believe. It's the public intellectual mendacity, the distor- tions, the double standards, the agitprop masquerading as news, the short shrift given to uncongenial explanations for the ills of a rich and resilient but troubled society, the arrogant dismissal of the idea that some of those ills might indeed have something to do with destructive sociology and demagogic economics. And it is patently preposterous to suggest that the constant drumbeat in favor of one particular world view does not have a profound effect on politics, on economics, on social climate, on the future, as we lurch toward Bethlehem. ***************************************************************** Major Media Stylebook Mr. Bethell, an NR contributor, is Washington correspondent for The American Spectator. SCOOP! NATIONAL REVIEW has obtained a copy of Tagging the News: The Index to Correct Opinion, which, we have learned, is widely circu- lated in newsrooms. Recipients, according to an informant who has con- tacted NR, can suggest additions or corrections. A Central Committee, made up of John Chancellor of NBC, Peter Jennings of ABC, Johnny Apple of the New York Times, David Broder of the Washington Post, and Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, meets periodically and incorporates the best suggestions into the new edition. Our copy was mailed to us anonymously, by a disgruntled reporter who disapproves of what he calls the ''media mind patrol.'' What is amazing is that its existence has been kept secret for so long. Asked for his comment, L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va., said: ''We suspected that something like this existed, but it's good to get confir- mation.'' A spokesperson at the Justice Department's Antitrust Division said she had not heard of the document and ''could not say'' if it had anti- trust implications. ''Only by constant iteration can alien truths be impressed upon reluctant minds.'' -- Herbert Spencer abortion. Nobody likes it; Republicans divided over it; a private matter; a woman's choice; our next civil war. AIDS. Does not discriminate; hits the poor and minorities hardest; we are all at risk; no magic cure; outlook grim; disease of Reagan - Bush years. AIDS epidemic. Mention ravages of it; losing the war against it AIDS research. Underfunded. American dream. On hold. anti-Communists. Looking for new enemies. Baker, James. Rode to the rescue; (obs.); master political strategist (obs.); AWOL. balanced budget. No magic formula; Reagan - Bush never submitted one; (if one is submitted): dead on arrival. bastions. (Use of suburbs, all-male clubs.) black crime. Blacks main victims of it. Brady, Nick. Competent; conservatives out to get him. Buchanan, Pat. Divisive; wants to build wall around country, turn back clock. budget cuts. Always Draconian; gut programs; hit poor hardest. budget deficit. Country's most serious problem; mortgage on America. Bush, George. Exploited Willie Horton issue in 1988 campaign; promised us a kinder, gentler America; practices sound-bite politics; rootless; has Jennifer problem, too; not an agent of change; frenetic. California. Biggest prize; dream fades. catastrophe. Planet headed for it unless we change course. categories. Renounce easy ones. checks and balances. (obs.) (See: gridlock.) children's future. Mortgaged. choice. A woman's right. choices. Bush avoids hard ones. Clinton, Bill. Character flaws (obs.); has Gennifer problem (obs.); Slick Willie (obs.); comeback kid; redefined himself; puts people first; wants to invest, not spend; adult life spent in public service. Clinton - Gore. Handsome duo; articulate baby-boomers. Clinton, Hillary. Bakes chocolate-chip cookies; sensational mind; target of right-wing attacks; mention distortion of her views; new Willie Horton. consensus. Old one has broken down. conservatives. Feel betrayed by Bush. Constitution. Living document. Cuomo, Mario. Son of struggling Italian immigrants; eloquent; next Su- preme Court Justice. Darman, Dick. Budget czar; brainy; crunches numbers; works harder than anyone else. democracies. Invest in emerging ones. democracy. Details of it messy; denounce phone-in version. Democrats. Remade themselves; pledged change; embraced moderate plat- form. despair. Pervasive feeling of it in inner cities. Disabilities Act. Brought 43 million Americans into economic mainstream. Draco. Athenian statesman. (See: budget cuts.) economy. Worst since Great Depression (attribute to Governor Pete Wilson). Europe. Dream of a united one still lives. families. Come in all shapes and sizes. family values. Willie Horton issue of 1992; code phrase for exclusion and prejudice. federal judges. Under Reagan - Bush, ideologically screened. Flowers, Gennifer. Daughter of Willie Horton. formulas. No magic ones. for-profit education. McSchools. future. We should invest in our children's. gains. Religious activists try to limit gay ones. gay bashing. Resurgent; vicious hate crime among teenagers. gay pride. Celebrate it. gays. Under fire; face ugly backlash; next Willie Horton. Gingrich, Newt. Negative campaigner; brought Congress into disrepute. global cooling. (obs.) (See: greenhouse effect.) global leadership. U.S. abdicated it at Rio. God. Republicans tell us which one to believe in. (Cuomo!) GOP. Battle for the soul of it; platform tilts to the right. Gorbachev, Mikhail. World leader; changed history. Gore, Al. Raised to be President; environmental vision; centrist message; shaped by near-death of son. government. Gridlocked; still has important role to play; all too easy to blame. greenhouse effect. Most serious threat we have ever faced (poss. obs.). gridlock. (See: government.) hate. The Right spews it; Republicans practice politics of it. higher office. More women running for it. Hill, Anita. Women believe her. homophobia. Mental sickness, or moral failing; caused by right-wing hate. Horton, Willie. Exploited by George Bush in 1988 campaign. House of Representatives. Election of President might be thrown into it (obs.); Newt Gingrich tried to bring it into disrepute. ideology. Voters are tired of it. inclusion. Democrats practice politics of it. infidelity. Sleazy charges of it against Bill Clinton. investment. Clinton would increase it. Johnson, Magic. National hero; teaches nation's youth; unbowed by HIV. Judiciary Committee. All-male; women disgusted with its treatment of Anita Hill. Justice Kennedy. Grew. Justice Souter. Grew. Justice Thomas. Failed to grow. Kennedy, Edward. Unmatched legislative record; dream lives on. Kerner Report. Nothing has changed since it. labels. Reject them; old ones don't mean anything. liberal. Not a scary label any more. (See: labels). litmus test. (Use with caution; consult your editor. Bush is not allowed to have one for his Court appointees, but Clinton does have one.) Los Angeles riots. Mention pervasive feeling of powerlessness and despair; carnival atmosphere; root causes: racism, poverty. men. Still don't get it. middle class. Politicians pander to it; Clinton - Gore appeal to it (speak to your editor if in doubt). morality. Ask whose is to be imposed. name-calling. Won't work any more. (See: liberal.) New York City. Still vibrant; next Willie Horton. Nineteen-eighties. Decade of greed. Nineteen-sixties. Era of optimism; time of compassion. ozone hole. Legacy of greed. ozone layer. Atmosphere losing it. pandering. Middle-class tax cuts face accusations of it. Perot, Ross. Texas billionaire; Rorschach blot, wild card, launched on Larry King Live, talk-show candidate (obs.); quitter (obs.); still a player. personal responsibility. Calls for it have Willie Horton overtones. Phillips, Kevin. Conservative analyst. policies. Haven't failed -- haven't been tried. poor. Get poorer, hit hardest; ask if America's traditional compassion for them is wearing thin. population growth. Imperils the planet. poverty. Statistics of it soaring; root cause of riots. privilege. Suburbs, all-male clubs bastions of it. (See: suburbs; bastions.) Quayle, Dan. Draws chuckles; still lives in Ozzie and Harriet world; can't spell potato; blames elites and comes from rich family of newspaper own- ers; divisive; mention Spiro Agnew. racial fears. Code words appeal to them. rage. Always legitimate, in contrast to hate (qv). Reagan, Ronald. Frightening (obs.); genial (obs.). Reagan years. Excesses of them have names: Milken, Boesky & Trump. Republicans. Help their rich friends. right wing. Bush caves in to it. rising tide. In 1980s, failed to lift all boats. Rodney King videotape. Seventy-five seconds etched into the nation's con- sciousness. school choice. Code phrase for racism. solutions. Renounce simplistic, silver-bullet, or Band-Aid ones. Souljah, Sister. No Willie Horton. species. Vanishing. spotted owls. Endangered by greed. states. Financially strapped. statistics. Of AIDS epidemic, always grim. suburbs. Edge cities; faceless; Ross Perot country; homogeneous; bastions of: wealth, racism, privilege, gun-owners. system. Worked in Watergate; still needs fixing; tinkering will not fix it. tent. GOP should be a big one. tropical forest. Acre of it vanishes every second. Truman, Harry. Knew who he was. two major parties. Mention decline of them (obs.). United States. World's largest debtor nation; becoming a talk-show na- tion. vision. Demand planetary one. voters. (Before election) disaffected; (after election) have spoken. wallet. (See: will.) Washington. Gridlocked. Watergate. The system worked. will. Contrast with wallet, in saving our cities. women. Empowered; note their growing role in politics; can't be judged by their recipes; historic year for them; face growing AIDS risk. yachts. The rich got bigger ones in 1980s. Yeltsin, Boris. Still a question mark. -- TOM BETHELL This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM