-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The "Brains" behind Bush
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 23:00:32 -0600 (CST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rich Winkel)
Organization: PACH
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,393863,00.html
The brains behind Bush
There's the conservative prophet who espouses Victorian values.
Then there's the born-again Christian who bases his morality on
Hollywood westerns... Julian Borger unveils the key thinkers advising
a would-be president
Special report: the US elections
Tuesday November 7, 2000
The world's most powerful capital is today holding its breath,
waiting to discover who its new tenants will be. If Al Gore pulls
off a miracle it will presumably be business as usual - more or
less the same breed of earnest young Democrats that has been
filling the Starbucks branches on Pennsylvania Avenue for the past
eight years.
If George W Bush triumphs, however, Washington will have to brace
itself for a cultural tidal wave rolling in from Texas. If elected,
the governor from Austin would inevitably bring a new crowd of
advisers, wonks, gurus and hangers-on from the governor's mansion
in Austin.
There will be many immediate changes. Overnight, cowboy boots will
become de rigueur with business suits, and the Texas twang (in both
its authentic and ersatz varieties) will reverberate around the
cafes of Georgetown.
But beneath the froth, there will be another, more profound, cultural
transformation at the epicentre of the world's sole superpower.
Gore has the reputation of making key decisions on his own. To know
him is to know who is going to be behind the wheel.
Bush is an entirely different kind of operator. He keeps normal
business hours, and expects his team to agree on a policy decision
and present it to him in digestible form, rather like Ronald Reagan.
So, as with Reagan, the identity of those advisers will take on a
particular significance for the US and the world should America
swing right today.
They are, to say the least, a pretty interesting bunch - a different
tribe entirely from the slick, pragmatic New Democrats in power at
the moment. They have more in common with the Reaganauts than the
subsequent court run by Bush the Elder.
Bush's key economic adviser is Larry Lindsey, an early adherent
from the Reagan era of supply-side economics. The doctrine (famously
derided as "voodoo economics" by the governor's dad), provides an
academic rationale for giving tax cuts to the rich. The theory is
that rich people would invest their windfall in the stock market,
providing a morale-boosting injection of funds and investment
capital to create jobs, providing "trickle-down" wealth to the
ordinary people. The supply-siders thus provide a do-gooder gloss
to the Bush tax-cut plan, which would hand $81bn (60% of the total
reduction) to the richest 13m taxpayers.
The foreign affairs team also has an 80s feel to it. Condoleeza
Rice, the likely national security adviser in the event of a Bush
win, worked for the governor's father, but is a child of the cold-war
mentality which reigned supreme under Reagan. Together with Paul
Wolfowitz (another hard-line Reaganaut and possible defence
secretary), she advocates a much tougher, adversarial stance towards
Russia and China, and a much more hard-headed assessment of vital
national interests, stripped of the humanitarian interventions
which have flourished under the Clinton-Gore administration.
In terms of economic and foreign policy then, a Bush White House
is likely to be merely a throwback. It is the underlying ethos
(what the governor would undoubtedly call "the heart") of a future
Republican administration that would be truly exotic, even bizarre.
Bush's favourite slogan "compassionate conservatism" is no empty
jingle - it is actually borrowed from a body of work by a pair of
obscure conservative gurus, whose influence would surely grow
exponentially if the Republicans recapture the White House. One is
Myron Magnet, a cultural hawk from the right-wing Manhattan Institute.
His rival for George W's heart and soul is a Marxist turned born-again
Christian from Texas, Marvin Olasky, who believes the whole machinery
of state-provided social welfare should be scrapped in favour of
a return to 19th-century-style religious charities and soup kitchens.
Olasky has come on a long intellectual journey. Born into a Boston
Jewish family in 1950, he renounced his religion at the age of 14
and became an avowed atheist. At Yale, he joined the Communist
party and in 1972 travelled to Moscow on a Russian freighter, to
prove his Marxist-Leninist ardour.
His 180-degree transformation came only a year later, apparently
as a result of watching a lot of Hollywood westerns. He was doing
a graduate degree in American culture at the University of Michigan,
focusing on US cinema. He later said that the profound moral sense
of right and wrong he found in the western genre, raised in his
Marxist mind the nagging question: "What if there is a God?"
The answer seems to have been not far behind, because Olasky quickly
renounced his Communist affiliation, and converted to evangelical
Christianity.
He now teaches journalism at the University of Texas, but most of
his effort is spent in publishing a right-wing Christian conservative
journal ambitiously called World (largely devoted to the denunciation
of Bill Clinton and all his evils) and running the church he founded
in Austin, the Redeemer Presbyterian.
The Redeemer church teaches that women have no place in leadership,
having already engineered the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.
Olasky once said that there was "a certain shame attached" to the
idea of voting for a woman, because it meant that men had failed
in their role.
Olasky also believes that liberal journalists have "holes in their
souls" and practice "the religion of Zeus", which came as something
of a surprise to the east-coast press. "What could he mean?" they
wondered. Frank Rich, a veteran columnist at the New York Times,
and one of those accused of having a hole in his soul, said: "He
still hasn't told me whether the religion of Zeus goes in for Bar
Mitzvahs."
These distractions aside, the driving force behind Olasky's church
work and his prolific writing is the war against social welfare.
His 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, argues that the
Great Society programmes launched in the 1960s sapped the moral
strength from the poor by providing a prop: "Every time we tell
someone he is a victim, every time we say he deserves a special
break today, every time we hand out charity to someone capable of
working, we are hurting rather than helping," he argued.
Instead, Olasky teaches that charity should be channelled through
faith-based organisations, which would distribute largesse accompanied
by the required religious fortification, to counter the character-rotting
impact of giving things away for nothing. To stand up his conclusions,
he once dressed up as a beggar and wandered the streets, reporting
back that although he was given food and shelter, his true craving,
for a bible, was left unfulfilled.
Olasky's golden age for Christian charitable works was the 1890s,
when the grateful poor were ministered to by "slum angels" who gave
"gladly" through "Jesus's love". It is Thatcherism plus God.
All this explains a lot about what has been going on over the past
five years in Texas, where social services and government health
care have been under intense pressure, even as Governor Bush was
informing the rest of the world of his heartfelt compassion.
Myron Magnet is cut from similar cloth as Olasky. The conservative
prophet sports big Dickensian bushy whiskers (apparently inspired
by a stay at Cambridge University), and a Victorian philosophy to
match. His seminal work, The Dream and the Nightmare, espouses many
of the same ideas as Olasky, arguing that many of the country's
present social problems are a direct result of the 60s counterculture,
which "permitted, even celebrated, behaviour that when poor people
practice it will imprison them inextricably in poverty."
Bush said the book "really helped crystallise some of my thinking
about cultures, changing cultures, and of part of the legacy of my
generation". The underlying philosophy has surfaced in his campaign
rhetoric in the form of his biting criticism of the philosophy of
"If it feels good, do it".
>From an examination of the brains behind Bush's catchphrases, this
is more than a promise not to have oral sex in the Oval Office. It
suggests a Bush victory next week would bring a new political class
to town which looks backwards for its inspiration, not just to the
halcyon days of Reagan, but far further, to a bygone Victorian age
where there were bibles in the soup kitchens, and the poor knew
their place.
(c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
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