Presidential Candidates Stumbling Through Minefields

by Christopher Caldwell

What an education. It's only now that I discover why ex-Staten Island Rep. Susan Molinari had the shortest career in the history of television punditry. At one point last week she was apologizing for Gov. Bush's cocaine history: "Take all the reporters," she said snottily, "and all the pundits and all the politicians and say, step forward if you haven't, you know, made those kinds of mistakes in your past and you're disqualified from anything further, and there wouldn't be too many people around."

Well, that's right, Susan. But isn't it funny how people have this double standard that makes them more cautious about the unhinged ambitious types who aspire to rule them?

At least we weren't missing anything back in the capital -- or elsewhere. Imagine being a reporter sent down to cover last Saturday's Alabama straw poll. Billing their event as "the bellwether of the South," the organizers were hoping to draw... Alan Keyes and Orrin Hatch. Now there's an event worth spending a weekend milling around in the 112-degree heat for.

It was an especial relief to see the political shows full of John McCain's recent attempts to finesse the abortion issue. Because that's a "dead week" story if ever I heard one. For those who missed it, McCain, while continuing to call himself "pro-life," professed an indifference to whether Roe v. Wade gets overturned, in either the short or the long term. In other words, he's a pro-choice politician with a lot of pro-life donors to please.

No one seemed to get that. Matt Cooper of Time was right to link McCain's declaration to similar ones by Elizabeth Dole and George W. Bush. But he got the implications exactly backwards. "I think all of them," Cooper said, "are kind of winking to Republican primary voters, saying, 'Look, I'm basically pro-life, but hey, we need to be more moderate on this if we're going to win the general election... I may sound moderate, but I'll take you to pro-life policies.'"

Cooper's wrong. These GOPers are doing exactly the opposite: they're winking at pro-choice voters. They're saying, "Look -- you know what it takes to get nominated in my party. Give me a pass on the rhetoric, and I'll guarantee you, you'll never have to worry about your abortion rights again." Ronald Reagan was the master at this game. As governor, he signed the law making abortion legal in California and, as president, he never once deigned to meet with pro-lifers during their annual march on the Mall. But you can fool your base for only so long. The danger to Bush is that cynical Republican presidential candidates have gone to the well of duplicity one time too many, and that the pro-life diehards who man the phone banks in the border and Great Lakes states will see through him and simply not show up. That's what crucified the Republicans in the 1998 midterm elections.

Al Gore and Bill Bradley face a similar predicament when deciding how sincere they have to be in courting the black left. Most campaigns have to make a push- comes- to- shove decision about whom to betray -- suburban America or the fetus-wavers/trashcan bangers who make up their activist base. Those who decide to betray suburbia get punished, and that's why Bradley's public embrace of Al Sharpton last week was such a mistake. As soon as suburban America understands that Bradley means what he says about "economic justice," it will drop Bradley like a hot potato. In meeting with Sharpton, Bradley didn't deny himself the Democratic nomination. But he removed any chance that he can defeat George W. Bush -- even if W is shown to keep a Folgers can of Colombian rock in his desk drawer in Austin.

Bradley's declaration of unelectability was the big story of last week. But in my week of watching all the Inside Politics I'll see all year, it was George Skelton of the LA Times -- replacing someone or other who's probably staying two doors down from me in Delaware -- who enunciated the greatest vapidity. Skelton went into a spiel about how -- despite polls showing Bush has an excellent chance of breaking the Democrats' Clinton-era lock on California -- it's John McCain who could be the strongest Republican in the Golden State. Skelton, suspected of being a nonsmoker, may like McCain's sponsorship of the 1998 tobacco agreement. But he claimed to think campaign finance reform was the key in California. Why? "The West is independent, more so than the East," Skelton bragged. "Voters out here appreciate independence... We're a long way from Washington."

That's just wrong. If the brains of the federal government are in Washington, New York and Boston, its two bountiful tits are located west of the Mississippi and in the Deep South. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan chaired the Senate Finance Committee, he published an annual document called the "Fisc," which showed the relation between what individual states paid into the federal government and what they got back. The Southern Republicans who've taken over the congressional leadership are considerably less eager to publicize this document. Not surprising. Because what it shows is that Southern and Western states (ironically, the hard-Republican, "get Washington off our backs" states) basically live off of money that Washington siphons out of the Northeastern states (ironically, the hard-Democratic, Washington-knows-best states).

The four states that traditionally compete for the honor of getting most shafted by the federal government are New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. They all regularly pay about a buck-fifty in federal taxes for every dollar in federal payouts they get back. And the most cosseted, Washington-dependent, I'll- do- what- you- say- as- long- as- you- keep- the- money- comin' state in the union is New Mexico, which receives well over two bucks in services for every dollar it sends to DC.