Jonathan Chait: All Related Content

It would seem, on the face of it, that the only thing standing between George W. Bush and the presidency is a persistent reservation about his intellect. The doubts have crystallized around a reporter's now-famous pop quiz, in which the Texas governor could not identify various difficult-to- pronounce heads of state. Bush, according to many in the press, needs to wonk himself up, and fast. He needs to cocoon himself with all those Stanford Ph.D.

If there is one thing that most everybody agrees upon regarding the ideological legacy of the Clinton presidency, it is that there is none. President Clinton, left and right typically concur, is a man of polling and expediency, and almost infinite flexibility of viewpoint. A subset of this thinking, indigenous to the left, holds that Clinton does stand for something, sort of, but it's really nothing more than warmed-over Republicanism.

Were he not a reactionary and a demagogue, I would feel sorry for Pat Buchanan. Not long ago he held a respected position within the Republican Party, wherein he gave keynote speeches at political conventions, represented the conservative viewpoint on TV talk shows, and was courted by party leaders. Now he has become a figure of almost universal disrepute.

If the details of the proposed Republican federal budget were widely known and understood, it is hard to believe that even one American in ten would vote to keep the GOP in control of Congress. Thankfully, few or none of the abominations that Congress proposes will actually survive a veto--the Republicans' political feebleness is their most endearing attribute. And yet the budgetary machinations in Congress offer a telling demonstration of the moral and intellectual decrepitude of the present Republican view of government.

Congress has spent the summer in the thrall of a weird kind of giddiness.

The discovery that the budget surplus may be a trillion dollars larger than previously believed has prompted visions of a kind of domestic End of History. No more scrimping and scrounging: There is talk of new tax cuts, paying off the national debt, new prescription drug coverage, and, well, pretty much anything anybody wants.

Most people are relieved by the fact that the Asian economic crisis did not turn into the worldwide, government-overturning, riot-and famine-inducing catastrophe some predicted, and no doubt Paul Krugman is relieved, too. But the entrepreneur in Krugman must also feel a small twinge of remorse. His new book, The Return of Depression Economics, was written in the darkest moments of the Asian flu, and it is packaged as a doomsaying prophecy.

To justify a new increase in military pay, the Pentagon and legislators are citing a 13 percent "pay gap" between the salaries of servicemen and their civilian counterparts. Ignoring for a moment whether a dramatic increase in military pay is needed, the 13 percent figure is bogus. Even though the Congressional Budget Office debunked the statistic in March, several military representatives continue to cite it in congressional testimony.

Do taxes really drive Americans crazy? Amity Shlaes thinks so. Her new book, The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What To Do About It, argues that America is on the verge of a civic tax revolt. Voters, she writes, "cry out for tax relief," and when tax breaks are given to them they "discover the puny size of the break" and "turn angry." But the book demonstrates only that taxes have driven Shlaes crazy.

The most irritating thing about newspapers is their convention of presenting disagreements on matters of fact as nothing more than differences of opinion. Recently, a city official here resigned because he used the word " niggardly." A Washington Post story reported that the word "means different things to different people." Most of the Washingtonians quoted felt it could be taken as a slur, but others did not. And who is the Post to say which side is right?

No sooner had President Clinton unveiled his plan to save Social Security than it was savaged as big government run amok.

Republicans are reacting so hysterically precisely because the plan -- a solid proposal surrounded by poll-driven vacuities in his State of the Union address -- is not wild liberalism. Rather, it is fiscal conservatism -- what Republicans used to stand for before they invented supply-side economics -- devoted to progressive ends.