Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.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: Edits Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 12:17:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 618 Edits Hillary Clinton has indicated that she would like to be called ''Presiden- tial Partner'' rather than ''First Lady'' -- perhaps to avoid the stigma of being known as prima donna inter pares. The election brought us a landslide, all right: term-limits proposals won in all 14 states where they were on the ballot. In 13 of those states -- in- cluding California, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Florida -- they took from 55 to 77 per cent of the vote, with the overall average a decisive 66 per cent. Term limits collected an aggregate of nearly 21 million votes, dwarfing Bill Clinton's 14 million in those same states, and more than Ross Perot won nationwide. Here was the electorate speaking in a roar -- yet the major news media, while hyping Mr. Clinton's ''mandate for change,'' have said next to nothing about it. (They're trying not to tell us something.) The only close vote was in Washington state, where Tom Foley campaigned hard to discourage the proposal, and it still won with 52 per cent. This was a tremendous victory. But we've been served notice that the Democrats and their media friends will do all they can to keep it from going further. Washington Theater presents: Line-Item: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts. Act I: Little Rock. Democratic congressional leaders, who opposed giving Republican Presidents a line-item veto, meet with President-elect Clinton and discuss giving him modified veto. Speaker Foley, wearing Greek mask, proclaims his approval of line-item veto, provided it can be overrid- den by simple majority vote. Mr. Clinton (crossing left to right and back) calls plan ''intriguing.'' Act II: Inside the Beltway. Washington powers, reading entrails, divine that reform is looming. Clouds descend, depositing Senator Robert Byrd, other lawmakers, snorting opposition. Chorus of Clinton aides assure lobbyists (behind arras) that line-item veto is not a priority. Rejoicing lobbyists return, via trapdoor, to Hades. Act III: Capitol Hill. Mr. Clinton enters as spotlight on line-item veto fades. Crossing to center, he is assailed by chorus of reporters demanding that Delphic Ora- cle speak. Mr. Clinton, in a dramatic move, loses his voice. Fog rolls in. Sound of a distant shipwreck. Curtain falls. Audience demands money back. Republican pollsters Neil Newhouse and Bill McInturff warned at the re- cent GOP Governors' Conference that, in the words of the Washington Post, ''The party's conservative image is turning off many voters.'' Of course, the negatives that independent and Democratic voters associate with conservatives -- ''narrow-minded . . . more or less well-off financially, and don't give a hoot about anyone . . . restrictive . . . rigid, not flexible'' -- are standard criticisms, balanced by the equally standard positive associations with conservatism. Polls also show Americans identifying themselves in nearly equal proportions as Republicans and as Democrats, and nearly twice as many calling themselves conservative as liberal. Reducing taxes and government spending is still by far the most frequently iden- tifed conservative goal. We note that Mr. McInturff has a long record of unconservatism -- further reason for taking his analysis with a grain of salt. The GOP Conference was enlivened at its last session when Governor Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, in response to a question, said that the United States is a ''Christian nation. . . . It's just a simple fact of life.'' Governor Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, feeling a need for damage control, draped his arm around Mr. Fordice's shoulders and said that his fellow governor had forgotten to add ''the Judaeo part.'' Doubtless provoked by Mr. Campbell's blow-dried unction, Mr. Fordice replied: ''If I wanted to do that I would have done it.'' Governor Fordice was less than tactful. His original observation is accurate sociologically and historically; inaccurate constitutionally and, for most Christians, theologically (nations simply do not belong to an order of things that can be said to follow Christ, or par- take of His nature). But Governor Campbell's response and the flap that ensued have less to do with any of this than with the fact that ''Christian'' and ''fundamentalist'' have become devil-adjectives in mainstream politi- cal discourse, signaling the presence of extremists and knotheads. If that is what Governor Fordice was objecting to, we have some sympathy for him. The reason for George Bush's election loss, according to a Haitian Catholic priest, is that Mr. Bush has been under a voodoo curse ever since he re- fused to reinstall former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. We suspect there really was a curse -- but it kicked in when the President abandoned voodoo economics. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has handed former President Nixon a legal victory, much to the annoyance of his enemies. From 1789 to 1974, Presidents treated their papers as their own property -- carting them off, donating them to libraries, shredding the bad stuff, whatever. Then Watergate precipitated a revolution, and Congress passed legislation confiscating Mr. Nixon's papers (ostensibly for purposes of the judicial inquiry) and decreeing that henceforth official presidential papers would be the property of the U.S. Government. The Supreme Court up- held its constitutionality, and Mr. Nixon lost that battle. But he then ar- gued that even if the taking was legal, it was nonetheless a taking of what precedent had treated as personal property, and that he was therefore en- titled to fair compensation. His able lawyers documented the practices of all Chief Executives from Washington to Johnson, and the appellate court agreed. This is a tribute to three honorable judges -- two of whom were Carter appointees -- who unanimously read the law as it was, instead of following the mob. Angola, one of the seeming successes of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, is going sour. The elections at the end of September produced a dis- puted result, and the 17-year conflict between the Marxist MPLA regime and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels has erupted again into violence. With the departure of Cuban troops under the 1988 accords, the U.S. seemed to lose interest. The UN observers who were to monitor the election num- bered only 400, in a vast country of 5 million voters. (In neighboring Na- mibia in 1989, by contrast, the UN provided 4,200 peacekeeping troops and 1,700 observers, for a voting population of just half a million.) Among the results: severe under-registration of the rural electorate that consti- tutes UNITA's base; widespread reports of bribery, stolen ballot boxes, and police intimidation; mysterious power blackouts in key provinces as votes were being counted. In the renewed violence, regime forces launched a full-scale military assault on UNITA's headquarters in Luanda; over one thousand people were killed, including UNITA's vice president, members of Savimbi's family, and two UN peacekeepers. We should have no illu- sions about Savimbi and his fellow UNITA leaders -- as Radek Sikorski pointed out in these pages three years ago, though not Marxists, they are hardly Jeffersonian democrats either. But the U.S. has an obligation to finish what it started -- to ensure a fair political outcome that includes UNITA. On October 13, a special commando team of German police seized 4.8 pounds of enriched uranium from a car in a Munich parking lot. The same day, police in Munich, Frankfurt, and Bochum arrested seven men alleged to be part of a ''nuclear mafia'' smuggling nuclear material out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for sale to the international black market. Federal German authorities say they have investigated over 100 cases of such deadly and illicit trade in 1992, up from 29 in 1991. The danger grows. The episode dramatizes not only the need for vigilant law enforcement but also the reasons why the West has a large stake in the restoration of social order and legitimate authority in the former Communist East. SPORICIDIN UPDATE: The FDA, which last year banned the Sporicidin cold sterilizing solution (see ''Who Will Regulate the Regulators?'' NR, Nov. 2) and then discovered that the only flaw was in the government labs' tests, is still attacking its victim. In order to get Sporicidin back on the market, the company must perform three series of tests to prove the worth of products that had been repeatedly approved by government agencies and used by hospitals without complaint for 14 years. One set is to prove the solution is compatible with materials in hospital equipment (perhaps the hospitals failed to notice it dissolving their glassware and in- struments?); a second, to show ''product stability'' (though there are no government protocols on how to demonstrate this); a third, a repetition -- ''within thirty days'' -- of the sporicidal efficacy tests which the FDA itself took six months to bungle last year and which independent laboratories have told the FDA would require ninety days. In addition, ''Sporicidin must cease making any statements representing that there has been no change in the formulation of its disinfectant products.'' That is, Sporicidin must cease telling the plain truth because the plain truth makes the FDA look like a bunch of fools. After six telephone calls and two faxes asking 1) what change the FDA believed had been made in the product, 2) if the FDA acknowledges that there has been no change, why it is demanding that the company keep silent, and 3) whether an outside observer could not reasonably conclude that the agency is doing its best to cover up its blunders, FDA spokesman Sharon Snider talked with our man Peter Samuel. She informed him she could not get answers to his questions though she understood such answers did exist. Eight social workers have been killed and hundreds stabbed, beaten, or threatened by their clients over the past five years, according to the New York Times. Child-support enforcement, the ''mainstreaming'' of mental patients, and the federal law requiring caseworkers to confront parents about reported child abuse undoubtedly explains much of the violent up- surge. But the underlying theme, ignored in the Times report, is clear: the people taking violent action are overwhelmingly from poor and broken homes where the freedom to live without politicians, bureaucrats, and so- cial workers can only be dreamed about. Conservatives have always main- tained that government social programs harm the alleged beneficiaries. In their rudimentary way, the beneficiaries are agreeing. The Church of England has voted to ordain women, a move that seems equally remote from the spirit of early Christianity and of Henry VIII. Time, ever nudging us toward the progressive heights, pronounces femi- nism in the churches ''the second Reformation,'' never mind that most of Christendom still rejects the first Reformation. And the feminists haven't convincingly explained why the Twelve Apostles were what they would call an ''all-male club.'' After all, it's pretty clear Who bears responsibility for that selection process. The usual explanation -- that Jesus was constrained by the customs of the time -- seems pretty feeble, considering that His ''hard sayings'' drove off potential followers and brought down the wrath of the authorities. As Chesterton pointed out, a man who adapts smoothly to his environment doesn't end up on a cross. The suspicion lingers that it's the C. of E., not Jesus Christ, that displays subservience to contemporary pressures. The American Catholic bishops . . . We're not even going to finish this item because we know nobody will read past the first four words. Oh heck. The American Catholic bishops have shelved their long-awaited pastoral letter on women, which, after nine years of debate and revision, wound up in favor of equality but not ordination, which Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland said would drive a generation of women away from the Church, and they finally said the hell with it. Catcalls should be addressed to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, D.C. They don't give National Book Awards for nothing. The award used to rec- ognize excellence in writing; for the past decade or so, it has recognized contributions to, and beneficiaries of, liberal ideology. As a prerequisite, currently, an author either must belong to a minority (gay, black, Asian, or a combination) or must expose some repugnant feature of American history or politics (Vietnam, the nuclear arsenal, the treatment of blacks). So this year's winner in the nonfiction category seemed appropriate enough: Paul Monnette for Becoming a Man, about coming out as a homo- sexual. But how to explain the winner for fiction, Cormac McCarthy? Mr. McCarthy is a white male heterosexual in good standing. His novel, All the Pretty Horses, celebrates the American Southwest. He's also a terrific writer. Heads will roll. Don't forget your sweater, but bring a bathing suit too! You still hear about the greenhouse effect from time to time, but with the cold snap this summer and fall, that talk has mostly died down. Lately the media have taken to warning of an upcoming ice age -- to be brought on, Newsweek carefully adds, by the greenhouse effect. About which somebody should inform the young man at UC Berkeley, called ''the Naked Guy'' by his fellow students, who has been protesting sexual repression by parading around campus in his birthday suit. The university asked a committee to study the matter and propose a response before the ice age sets in. A Social Disease? IT HAS QUICKLY become a media ''fact'' that the Bush campaign's focus on a divisive social conservatism, particularly during the Houston Con- vention, is what lost the election. This is echoed by those few Republicans who have always opposed social conservatism. Very interesting. But we seem to remember a sign at Clinton headquar- ters that read, ''The economy, stupid.'' As consultants Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin point out, ''Every post-election survey has shown that this election was fought on the economy, and it was President Bush's weakness on economic growth, jobs, taxes, and government spending that allowed both Ross Perot and Bill Clinton to take votes from him.'' Some members of the Reagan majority are admittedly uncomfortable with social conservatism -- but every member of a coalition is dissatisfied with some part of its program. Republicans do not have the option instead of outbidding the Democrats for their core constituencies. Gay-rightists and militant feminists, for example, have no reason to leave the Demo- cratic Party, which has pledged to impose their agendas on the Supreme Court and the armed forces. But what of women in general -- the famous gender gap. Since the gen- der gap was first noticed, in 1980, moderate Republicans have blamed it on the social issues, especially abortion. But in 1980, 1984, and 1988 the gap overwhelmingly helped Reagan and Bush, who had massive majori- ties among men and slight leads among women. This year, when the Re- publicans lost, the gap actually shrank, as men moved in large numbers from Mr. Bush to Ross Perot. Mr. Bush's support among men and women differed by less than 1 per cent, while Mr. Perot -- who was ardently pro- choice -- drew 21 per cent of men and only 17 per cent of women. Moreo- ver, Mr. Bush suffered no gap at all among white women, and unmarried women supported him more than did unmarried men (34 versus 32 per cent). Diluting the social issues, indeed, might drive away important parts of the coalition. White born-again Christians were 17 per cent of the elector- ate and went 61 per cent for Mr. Bush (down 20 points in four years -- economics counts for something with them too). Southern whites, 24 per cent of all voters, gave him 48 per cent of their votes -- and most defectors went to Mr. Perot, not to Mr. Clinton. Single-issue pro-life voters account for between 8 and 13 per cent of the electorate; how do the GOP moderates propose to hold on to them? We should also remember that the Republican Convention produced not a dip in the polls, but an initial bounce of 9 to 15 points. Indeed, Republican tracking polls found that the Convention's first night, when Reagan and Buchanan spoke, produced the single most positive response among voters. Half of all voters surveyed around the same time thought family values should be a campaign issue. But the Bush campaign, simultaneously cynical and timorous, offered no defense when the media attacked the theme as ''divisive'' and ''exclusionary,'' and dropped it one week later. As a result, only 15 per cent of voters thought it important by election day -- but 65 per cent of them went for Mr. Bush. And since his advisors found no theme to replace it, they never compen- sated for those voters who went AWOL. A broad but tolerant social conservatism clearly commands majority support in America today. Nearly three-quarters of Americans describe themselves as ''extremely,'' ''very,'' or ''somewhat'' religious. Few Ameri- cans want to impose their moral and religious views on others. Still less, however, do most Americans want government to impose a radical moral and sexual agenda on them or their children via the public schools, or to subsidize and promote forms of expression that insult their most deeply held beliefs. We see no consistency in a philosophy of government that bans a crucifix on public property but finances a crucifix immersed in urine -- unless it is a philosophy of covert hostility to religion and tradi- tional morality. Conservatives and the Republican Party need not retreat from social conservatism. But they must clarify how that conservatism fits into the overall Republican philosophy of limited government. The overwhelming majority of conservatives oppose government action against homosexuals; but we also oppose turning people who are united only by sexual practices into a ''protected class'' with civil privileges. Similarly, while pro-lifers would like to persuade their fellow citizens to protect the unborn, the real political agenda today must be to restrict the ''right'' to abortion on de- mand created in Roe v. Wade -- of which most Americans also disapprove. And the best thing the government can do for most families, aside from avoiding the Hillaryesque temptation to usurp the role of parents, is to reduce the tax burden, which now falls most heavily on married couples with children. Such policies, as well as being right, are also popular. Vide a feature no less pronounced than the gender gap: ''the marriage gap,'' in which un- married voters lean to the Democrats while marrieds favor the GOP. This gap was 7 points in Mr. Bush's favor. In short, social conservatism gives strength to the GOP coalition -- as long as it is one part of that coalition, which is all social conservatives ask. Mr. Bush's defeat is directly tracea- ble to his abandonment of other parts of the Reagan agenda; it is foolish to point the finger to the single element that he retained. The (Long-Term) Economy, Stupid THE ECONOMY suffers from two ailments. For twenty years productivity growth has slowed, mainly because government has been diverting ever larger chunks of national income from private investment to consumption and regulation. Apart from that, there are short-run problems stemming from the 1990 recession and the recession-like recovery of the past 18 months. During the campaign Governor Clinton promised to make short-term economic stimulus his number-one priority. Now that he is elected, he can afford to be honest about the state of the economy: GDP, consumer spend- ing, exports, and spending on durable equipment are all at record real highs, while employment, a notoriously lagging indicator, has started to rise. With consumer debt levels falling and banks starting to lend again, the economy inherited by Bill Clinton is far healthier than the economy he described in his campaign. Short-term stimulus, therefore, makes no economic sense. It might, in the first place, take years for a ''short-run'' package of infrastructure and investment tax credits to materially stimulate the economy. And the mere announcement of such plans would immediately raise the specter of mega- deficits and Carter-style inflation. The resulting rise in interest rates would squelch the upward momentum already under way. Mr. Clinton's efforts to temper expectations about an early economic package are encouraging. He is not without short-run options, however. Prudent appointments at Treasury (Paul Volcker?) and OMB (almost any- one except the incumbent) would instill a sense of confidence not seen since the early Reagan years. Consumers will spend, companies will in- vest, and entrepreneurs will start new ventures if they are sure that Mr. Clinton will put economic growth ahead of government growth. A credible plan to cut the deficit in half by 1996 would be the best short- term medicine. This will require spending caps on Social Security and Medicare, something the Democrats have rejected in every deficit-reduc- tion battle over the past ten years. If history is any guide, liberal Demo- crats will instead demand tax hikes on the wealthy, which ultimately will affect everyone in the upper half of the income spectrum, with every $1 raised supporting $1.59 worth of spending -- and the renewed prospect of Darmageddon. But who knows? With their own man in the White House and the deficit now theirs, the Democrats may finally accept the responsibility they have avoided for so long. If not, they will assuredly have to accept the blame. Passport to Scandal THE State Department office that expedited the response to a Freedom of Information Act inquiry about Bill Clinton's passport records is being treated in Washington as if it were the Gestapo reincarnate. The Depart- ment's Inspector General concluded on November 18, reasonably enough, that the search was improperly speeded up for political purposes. But this is surely one of the lesser scandals of our nation's history, and we suspect much of the hyperventilation in Washington has equal political motivation. Clearly, there was much curiosity among Republicans -- and probably other Americans -- about Mr. Clinton's Iron Curtain travels and rumors that he had considered renouncing his citizenship out of anti-Vietnam passion. Elizabeth Tamposi, in charge of the Passport Office (and a polit- ical appointee), wisely refrained from a fishing expedition. Then bona-fide FOIA requests came in from news organizations. Instead of tossing them in the hopper (usually a six-month wait), officials accelerated the search and segregated the files (along with those of Ross Perot and of Mr. Clin- ton's mother). Nothing damaging was found (and in any case the Privacy Act, unless waived by the subjects of the inquiry, would have barred re- lease of any of it). Meanwhile, a far more insidious scandal was emerging in Washington and getting far less attention. The ongoing inquisition by Iran - Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh had become blatantly politicized. A revised indictment against Caspar Weinberger, which could have been presented either weeks earlier or weeks later, was filed the Friday before election day. It gives details, irrelevant to the trial process, of Mr. Bush's participation in a key Oval Office discussion of arms for Iran. This timely intervention was the handiwork of Mr. Walsh's new aide, James Bros- nahan, a Democratic activist, self-promoter, Clinton contributor, and con- firmed Republican-hater. There are also grounds for asking if the Clinton campaign had advance word of the new indictment, since their gleeful press release on it was dated the day before it was filed. (They claimed a typo, and the media, setting aside their Watergate paranoia on this one occasion, accepted the explanation without demur.) The Washington double standard sees nothing amiss in the malodorous Brosnahan affair, and continues its witchhunt against political figures in the lame-duck Bush Administration. But what did you expect? Green Jobbery BRETT HULSEY, environmental-policy advisor to President-elect Clin- ton, told a recent conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists that ''the electorate proved we don't have to choose between the environ- ment and jobs.'' That reminds us of a new Australian prime minister who, on being told by an aide that one of his campaign brainstorms flew in the face of the law of supply and demand, declared: ''Then we'll just have to repeal that law. We have a mandate to do it.'' Clinton's green aide, a former Sierra Club representative, told the con- ference that his new boss has tougher anti-pollution standards ''on the top of his agenda'' -- up there with infrastructure -- and that his new approach to the environment will create a whole host of extra jobs. Of course you can ''create'' tens of thousands of jobs with almost any government initiative if you are completely unconcerned about whether those jobs are productive jobs, about how they are financed, and about the consequences for the rest of the economy. The environment can provide the political justification for whole new armies of inspectors to supervise recycling, waste disposal, ozone depletion, global-warming gases, toxic materials, water pollution, and all the rest. If only the EPA had the man- power to prosecute the cases, it could incarcerate thousands of environ- mental ''criminals.'' For instance, only a handful of scoundrels like John Pozsgai and Bill Ellen are currently serving time for the awful crime of dumping soil in their own swampland. VP-elect Al Gore's contribution to this environmental-job-creation brainstorming has been to propose that new technology be vetted for its environmental impact. Given that hundreds of thousands of production engineers, designers, and managers -- as well as all the independent in- ventors and tinkerers out there -- are changing the design and manufac- ture of products every day, a system to vet ''technological change'' would exhaust even the most ambitious bureaucratic empire-builders. Such sys- tems of regulation invariably err on the side of caution, weighing risks more heavily than benefits -- as AIDS sufferers can attest from the FDA's reluctance to permit potential therapies to be used even by terminally ill patients. Would the Environmental Impact Technology Review Board (EITRB) ever have allowed the introduction of the automobile, the airplane, or pen- icillin? We can imagine the powerful arguments that could have been made against allowing the use of electric power if America during Thomas Edison's time had been afflicted by an EITRB. But such a board would have created plentiful jobs for technology-judging attorneys. The Joint Economic Committee of the Congress released on November 7 a devastating paper, ''Derailing the Small Business Job Express,'' which examines regulation's job-destroying record over the past four years. It points out that tens of thousands of small firms -- bakeries, gas stations, restaurants, auto-body shops, small print shops, dry cleaners, and the like -- are being ''strangled by green tape.'' Simply getting EPA permits to op- erate under new Clean Air Act rules has been estimated to cost $16,000 for typical firms. Gillespie's report adds: ''Given the small size of these [business] operations, CAAA [clean air act amendment] related costs in the tens of thousands of dollars will be sufficient to sink many firms, and will have severe impacts on their ability to employ workers.'' The Clintoni- ans threaten to ''do more'' for the environment than Mr. Bush. We fear they are sincere. Worse than a Crime IN RENEWING his campaign pledge of ''immediate repeal'' of the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces, President-elect Clinton proved that he is not always the canny politician of reputation. The President of the United States must be, above all, a plausible Com- mander-in-Chief of the armed forces. This role lifts him above the normal and somewhat disreputable level of ''politics'' and makes him an almost monarchical figure of national unity. The legitimacy of the Federal Gov- ernment depends heavily on the popular faith that this government, for all its defects, is in the final analysis our defender. Accordingly, any President's popularity is closely tied to his ability to play the role of Commander-in-Chief with authority, which is why war he- roes have so often won the office and Michael Dukakis didn't. Harry Tru- man badly damaged his Presidency by firing a great war hero in Korea; Jimmy Carter shrank to risible dimensions when he seemed incapable of responding adequately to enemies abroad. Mr. Clinton has obvious problems with this role, never having done mil- itary service and having, in fact, taken extraordinary steps to avoid it. Now, in his first public gesture as future Commander-in-Chief, he has shown a gross insensitivity to the soldier's life he was spared. The ban on homosexuality in the military is an entirely rational attempt to keep the explosive element of sexual desire out of the cramped conditions of bar- racks life, just like having separate quarters for women. As one wag has put it, President-elect Clinton seems not to understand that soldiers don't like to take showers with the kind of men who like to take showers with soldiers. In taking this position, Mr. Clinton has antagonized the very men, from Colin Powell to the humblest grunt, whose unquestioning loyalty he would otherwise have enjoyed as a matter of course; he has politicized in- stitutions whose virtues require exemption from politics; he has insulted a moral and virile code in order to introduce his generation's New Moral- ity where it is likely to disrupt workable arrangements; he has under- scored various questions about his own character which a fawning press had tried to squelch. A man with better credentials might have been able to effect this ''re- form,'' assuming that such a man wanted to attempt it. In Mr. Clinton, however, it can only seem the presumption of a man for whom politics is all, and tradition nothing. It's surely a new sort of Commander-in-Chief who declares cultural war on his own troops. Notes from the Jungle ASKED what he foresaw as the terminus of civilization's decadence, T. S. Eliot envisioned people shooting each other at random. In 1964 James Burnham observed in Suicide of the West that American cities were be- coming ''jungles,'' which liberalism was unable either to see or to deal with. His remark was widely cited -- by liberals, of course -- as ''alarmist thinking.'' Against all the bien-pensants of his day, Burnham expected the situation to get worse. The returns are now in. The alarmists have failed us. The Eliots and Burnhams were insufficiently hysterical, their voices too low, their predic- tions too modest. America's cities have become jungles in which the beasts are armed, and the random shootings claim even children. At Jenner Elementary School in Chicago, three pupils have been shot to death this year. But why should we be shocked? ''After all,'' writes George Will, ''Chicago averages a shooting every 34 minutes and a murder every 8 hours, and the more than 13,000 shootings so far this year have killed 17 children under 14.'' One 9-year-old told him she tries to stay away from windows in her high-rise: ''I be scared because my bed is by the window.'' Residents of New York, Washington, Detroit, Atlanta, and Los Angeles can supply their own competing horror stories. ''Alarmism'' turns out to have been the optimist's name for prophecy. Our alarmists did their best, but their imaginations were limited; and an- yway, few listened. Would Isaiah and Ezekiel have gotten any more attention? ******************************************************************** ANNOUNCING: A CONSERVATIVE JAMBOREE On January 20, 1993, Bill Clinton will be inaugurated 42nd President of the United States. The following weekend, the National Review Institute will convene a Conservative Summit at the Mayflower Hotel, deep inside the Beltway. There will be post-mortems and prognostications, talk of Mr. Clinton's possible successors and seminars on What to Do till the Doctor Arrives. For more information, see the ad on page 33 of this issue. ******************************************************************** The Hillary Watch She isn't like Jackie or Mamie or Grace (I'm talking Grace Collidge); but Rosalynn's pace And Nancy's persona are starting to show, While something suggestive in Hillary's ''No!'' Reminds me, God help us, of Eleanor, who, For cranky old pots is the give-away clue. W. H. VON DREELE Goodbye to All That Mr. Weinberger's due to be tried For the notes he unwisely denied As a pardon recedes Like a snake through the weeds And the President ebbs like the tide. W. H. VON DREELE 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