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The Post-Columbo Era
How the courts kill good detective work.

By William Tucker, author of Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America

hink the cops are having a tough time cracking the Chandra Levy case? Try this one on for size.

Samiya Haqiqi, a 24-year-old law student at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut, drove to New York City on a Friday night in November 1999 to meet her boyfriend for dinner. She intended to break up with him. The next day her car was found abandoned in a Grand Union supermarket parking lot. She has not been seen since.

Suspicion quickly fell on the boyfriend. He claimed she never made the dinner engagement. When police asked further questions, he hired an attorney and invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. Although Haqiqi's relatives urged the Queens district attorney to issue a search warrant for the boyfriend's apartment, the D.A. refused, saying there was no "probable cause." Shortly afterward, the boyfriend moved to Canada.

A year later, the Queens detective bureau announced that Haqiqi was the victim of a "violent crime" and that the boyfriend was the suspect; but nothing happened. Last week, Detective Steven Brown of the 109th Precinct said the boyfriend still remains the principal suspect — but no arrest is imminent. "It's generally more helpful when the suspect cooperates during an investigation," he said. Any physical evidence that would tie the boyfriend to the disappearance is, of course, long gone.

At the heart of the Chandra Levy case is a grim fact of life: We are living in the post-Columbo era. Many traditional aspects of detective work have been abandoned; in fact, much of what detectives once did is now illegal. The only thing that keeps the wheels of justice turning is that most people don't know this. "People only talk to the police because they think it will look suspicious if they don't," says an experienced Manhattan assistant district attorney. "What they don't realize is that the police aren't allowed to draw that negative inference."

Defense attorneys, of course, know it all by heart. That's why you'll always hear them holler that a defendant "wasn't properly represented" when someone is convicted of a crime, particularly a death-penalty case. It's true: If all Americans knew their rights, very few people would ever be arrested for anything.

This situation is the outcome of the 1960s Supreme Court reforms, particularly Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Mapp extended the Fourth Amendment's search-and-seizure protections and search-warrant requirements to the states. Miranda extended the Fifth Amendment's protections against self-incrimination all the way back to the police station, establishing the "right to remain silent." Both decisions were reinforced by an "exclusionary rule," which said that if a defendant's rights were violated in the course of an investigation, the resulting evidence must be excluded from court.

Since that moment, the main strategy of every defense attorney has become to "put the state on trial" by challenging investigative procedures. As a result, absurdities have prevailed. Warrants were voided because of misspellings and typographical errors. Purely voluntary confessions recorded on videotape were thrown out when defense attorneys said their client "couldn't have possibly understood his rights or else he wouldn't have admitted to this crime."

Now something even worse has happened. District attorneys and police departments have become very good at abiding by the new rules; procedural mistakes are rare, and D.A.'s are very circumspect in asking for search warrants. There's only one problem: Now that the police are abiding by the letter of the Supreme Court directives, there are more and more unsolved crimes.

This is the clear and disastrous consequence of the Court's misinterpretation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. As the Fifth Amendment now stands, no one has to cooperate with the police. You don't even have to give the police your first and last names. If you are caught in a compromising situation or even standing over a bloody corpse, all you have to say is, "Talk to my lawyer." Your lawyer, of course, will tell you to keep quiet.

But that's not the difficult part. The real problem is that the police are not allowed to draw any negative inference from this refusal to answer questions. In other words, the police aren't allowed to think — and that makes a crucial difference when it comes to asking for search warrants. The Fourth Amend ment says that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." What constitutes probable cause? It can't be a hunch. It can't be just circumstantial evidence: The fact that someone is standing over a bloody corpse doesn't mean he's done anything wrong; he could have just happened by. If the suspect declines to give any explanation of the circumstances, there may be no grounds for initiating an investigation. Detective work quickly hits a stone wall.

Here's how it works in practice. On November 7, 1997, Michael Sullivan, a 54-year-old actor and art-gallery clerk, and Camden Sylvia, a 36-year-old artist and real-estate agent, who shared a Lower Manhattan apartment, mysteriously disappeared. Suspicion quickly fell on their landlord, Robert Rodriguez, who ran a locksmith shop on the building's first floor. Sullivan and Sylvia had long been at odds with Rodriguez over their $300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment. The couple claimed he was not providing them with heat, and had told him that day that they would be withholding their rent.

On November 15, police set up an interview with Rod riguez to pick up the keys so they could search the couple's apartment. Rodriguez never showed up; indeed, he disappeared altogether. Manhattan police determined that he lived on seven acres in upstate Orange County, and asked Orange County police to search the property. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau decided, however, that there was not "probable cause" for a search — and no warrant was issued. Without a warrant, Orange County cops could only send dogs to sniff the perimeter and fly helicopters over the property looking for freshly turned earth. (Both searches, incidentally, were probably illegal.)

On November 24, Rodriguez's van turned up, parked overtime in a Manhattan commercial lot. Police confiscated the van. They contacted Rodriguez's wife, but she refused to let them search it. Once again, D.A. Morgenthau ruled there was no "probable cause" for a search, and the van was released without being checked for evidence. Meanwhile, it was discovered that one David King, a former Rodriguez employee, had also disappeared mysteriously in 1991 in the midst of a dispute with the locksmith. King has never been found.

On December 9, Rodriguez resurfaced in the company of his lawyer. He met with police but refused to answer any questions. By this time friends and family of the missing couple were picketing the D.A.'s office demanding action, but Morgenthau still refused to request a warrant. The case came to a dead end. The couple has never been found.

Such "unsolved mysteries" are now becoming routine. In the JonBenet Ramsey case, the parents initially told police the little girl was missing. While the police were searching the house, the father discovered the body in an unused basement room and carried it upstairs, effectively destroying the crime scene. A highly suspect ransom note was found. Most compelling, there were no footprints leading to or from the house — in a fresh snowfall. Both parents were obviously suspects, but they didn't sit down with police for separate interrogations until months later — after extensive negotiations.

When Manhattan PR superstar Lizzie Grubman backed her van into a crowd at a nightclub on Long Island, she quickly fled the scene. Less than an hour later, someone called the police and said where she could be found — apparently in an attempt to help her avoid charges of leaving the scene. When police picked her up, however, she refused to say anything. Because the police could not even establish that she had been in the car, there was no probable cause for administering a Breathalyzer test. Thus she avoided charges of driving while under the influence.

The Supreme Court's great mistake — the one that led to all these absurd consequences — was in assuming that interrogations involved beating confessions out of people. That was never the case. In the Age of Columbo, the main purpose of interrogations was to get statements from the suspect that could be verified as true or false. It was not forced admissions, but rather falsehoods and contradictions, that incriminated people. Many an episode of Columbo ended with the guilty party suddenly realizing he has been caught in a lie. Crescendo. Fade to black. Commercial. It was simple and elegant.

The little-noticed anomaly of the Chandra Levy case is that Congressman Gary Condit has been required to give an account of himself. Legally, he did not have to let the police search his apartment. Nor did he have to say a word about his relationship with the intern. The hearsay evidence from Levy's relatives about their relationship probably wouldn't constitute "probable cause" for an investigation. It is only because of his high profile as a congressman that he has been pressured into cooperating with police.

What is truly ironic is that, even as the courts have limited detectives' work on criminal cases, the investigative powers of civil complainants have been wildly expanded. As Walter Olson documents in his book The Litigation Explosion, over the last 30 years the "interrogation" and "search-and-seizure" powers of trial lawyers have been broadened beyond recognition.

Depositions — originally a means of recording the testimony of people who couldn't physically make it to court — have become an all-purpose interrogation tool for private attorneys. If you are sued for divorce or charged with sexual harassment, you can be required to sit with the plaintiff attorney and answer questions pertaining to your sex life, your personal affairs, or any and all private matters. You have no right to remain silent. Failure to cooperate can result in contempt of court. All you can do is hire your own lawyer to advise you. You must open your bank account and complete financial records. You must submit to examination by a hostile psychiatrist and give hair, blood, and urine samples to check for drug abuse or venereal diseases. In Olson's words, "there's a presumption in favor of intrusiveness."

The discovery process has also been co-opted. In 1970, under tremendous pressure from the civil bar, the federal rules of civil procedure were amended to allow litigators access to any and all private papers. Once severely limited in scope, discovery procedures now allow plaintiff attorneys to search for anything they choose. Plaintiffs can demand corporate records going back 50 years. They can summon individual diaries, notebooks, or random doodlings. In a divorce case, you can be asked to provide names of all visitors to your house since the separation. "All this offers plenty of room for 'fishing expeditions,' where incriminating evidence turns up by serendipity," says Olson. Such random searches, of course, are exactly what the Fifth Amendment was designed to protect against; but there are no Fifth Amendment rights in civil cases.

What's going on? The obvious answer is that lawyers have seized control of the system and are running it for their own benefit. In criminal law, district attorneys are salaried public servants with very little financial stake in the system. Defense attorneys are the high rollers, making huge payoffs by establishing a good record among indigent defendants and then switching to wealthy clients. Many of the best defense attorneys are now becoming all-purpose public-relations agents, holding press conferences, conducting their own investigations, casting aspersions on other suspects, and issuing daily statements that begin, "My client says . . ."

On the civil side, however, it is the plaintiff attorneys who are the high rollers. Countless lawyers have become rich bringing "strike suits" against small technology companies that let their earnings slip, or class-action suits on asbestos or breast implants. Expanded discovery and depositions are the tools of the trade; under these circumstances, it is not at all surprising to find the whole legal profession coming down on the side of limiting police procedures while expanding the investigative powers of plaintiffs.

The only loser is the public interest — specifically, the broadly diffused interest that everyone has in seeing crimes solved. "I don't know about you but I'm getting tired of bad police work," says commentator Bill O'Reilly. "If the police can't solve the murder of a six-year-old girl in her own home, what can they do?" Unfortunately, it's not bad police work we're viewing. It's the new American justice system.

Of course, even this system has its limits. The Manhattan D.A.'s office eventually got sick of taking criticism on the Rodriguez case and started an investigation of the locksmith's tax records. It managed to convict Rodriguez on charges of tax evasion and credit-card fraud. He is now doing eight years; everyone knows he is actually doing time for a double murder for which he has never been tried.

The original Mapp and Miranda decisions hoped to end "arbitrary" procedures by the police. Stretched beyond all logical limits, however, they have produced a justice system that is even more arbitrary and capricious — a clear and present danger to the public good.

Holding the Lines
The Bush decision on stem cells was largely a success, however . . .

By NR Editors

o be a social conservative leader in modern America can be a thankless task. You must uphold truths that were so long accepted that they are no longer well understood. A conservative politician must perforce be, to some extent, a moral teacher. The task of teaching is made more difficult by the fact that we lack not just a social consensus on moral controversies, but the shared vocabulary to address those controversies. This year's debate over stem-cell research has amply demonstrated the point. President Bush's difficulty was not merely that many people do not accept the moral case against killing human embryos for research purposes; it was that they did not even find that case intelligible. So President Bush had to announce, explain, and justify his decision, but he had also to do something more: to draw the vast, ambivalent, inattentive public into a process of moral reasoning about a topic with which almost nobody is familiar.

He largely succeeded, although neither the decision nor the speech was entirely satisfactory. Bush's decision was to allow federal funding for research on stem-cell lines that had already been taken from embryos — but not funding for research on stem cells that might be taken from embryos in the future. This policy is morally defensible. It accepts past evils (the already accomplished embryo killings) without in any way depending on or encouraging future evils.

It is, all the same, not the ideal policy. We would have preferred no taxpayer funding of research on stem cells and — even more important — a ban on the killing of embryos, whatever the purpose and whether financed by the public or private sector. But we recognize that had Bush ruled out any public funding, let alone sought a ban on private embryonic-stem-cell research, Congress would have ignored him. By cooling the demand for public funding of research involving still more killing, Bush's intervention in the debate may lead to a less pernicious policy than we would otherwise get.

For Bush's intervention to have that outcome, he will have to make good on his promise to veto any expansion of funding. Pro-life critics of his decision worry that demands for more funding will be unstoppable: If the research bears fruit, scientists will want to be able to destroy more embryos or even to clone embryos for research purposes; if it does not, they will say that they would have gotten results if only they had received more funding. (It is worth noting, however, that even if Bush had blocked all taxpayer funding, private-sector research might have led to that clamor too.)

Nor is his willingness to use the veto pen all that pro-lifers should demand of Bush. He must also keep making the case for respecting life in all its stages. He did a pretty good job of that in his speech. On the debit side of the ledger were two stray references to embryos' "potential for life." But for the most part Bush was arguing for their right to continued life. Usually, pro-life Republican politicians make such arguments only before the pro-life faithful, and even then in code. Bush did it on national television in the first special address of his presidency. And the heavens did not fall.

On abortion, Republican leaders, including Bush, have been described as "all action and no talk." But in a democracy, of course, talk is a form of action, rhetoric a form of leadership. That's why Bush addressed the nation. Having begun a conversation, he is now obligated to continue it.

Palestinian Suicide
The so-called peace process is over for the time being.

By NR Editors

he recent spate of suicide bombings has done much damage to Israel, killing about 100 people, many of them young. Inhuman in itself, the enterprise is so demoralizing because it is so totally futile. Nothing can come of it except bitterness and the urge for revenge. The so-called peace process is well and truly over for the time being. Quite as ugly, and just as expected, is the growing criticism of Israel for taking the steps necessary to its self-defense.

Faced with these sustained murderous attacks, the Israelis could choose what may be called the Russian option: sending in the army, reoccupying territory, and installing some other regime than Arafat's. Japanese kamikaze pilots in the last war were prototype suicide bombers, and the United States discovered that total victory was the only way to overcome them. So far, Israel has instead adopted the far more moderate course of identifying the recruiters and organizers who send in the deluded young volunteers. This involves intelligence work, including the collaboration of Palestinians who are risking their own lives. Israel then asks Arafat to have identified terrorists arrested. His response is that he is in no position for such action. So the Israelis strike selectively, and so far have eliminated about a score of master-terrorists. Under the appearance of rough justice, the Israelis are taking a few lives in order to save many lives. It is a reasoned calculation of profit and loss. The outrage of Israel's critics — including, apparently, Colin Powell and the Bush administration — boils down to the proposition that Israelis are there to be killed, and have no right to be doing anything to prevent it.

Meanwhile the suicide bombers have done infinitely greater damage to the Palestinians on whose behalf they claim to be acting. Palestinian society as a whole is now in the grip of almost perpetual violence, self-inflicted from top to bottom, and compounded by chronic corruption and unemployment. Yasser Arafat, the nominal leader, continues to raise expectations that cannot be met. Islamic fanatics incite the people to believe that God wants them to kill Jews, and never mind the consequences. Mass hysteria has replaced reasoned calculations of profit and loss.

Israel has no responsibility for whatever the Palestinians might do to themselves. Yasser Arafat must live with the mess he has made until such time as a Palestinian successor can mend it. In the circumstances, the sole course of action still open in pursuit of peace is to separate the two communities as widely as possible, in the hope that each will go its own way. Israel has to decide what are its minimum demands for security and boundaries, which also means selecting which settlements are to be retained and which abandoned, and then implement its decisions unilaterally. Before the Six Day War in 1967, there existed in effect a Middle Eastern version of the Iron Curtain, with a crossing-point at the once-famous Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem, the local equivalent of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie. Arbitrarily imposed though it was, the arrangement nevertheless served to keep the two communities apart, and terrorism in check. The peace-process attempt to oblige them to live together against their wishes has instead opened the descent to hell.

Bombing at the Pentagon
Don Rumsfeld’s agony.

By Richard Lowry, NR’s editor

or Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, it was his own personal equivalent of the U.S.'s apology to China earlier this year: a way to placate a hectoring adversary after doing nothing wrong. In Rumsfeld's case, the adversary was a "discouraged, frustrated, and angry" Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts (as he described himself). The Republican senator blamed Rumsfeld at a hearing for the work of, in the senator's golden words, a "doofus over at the Air Force." What the doofus had proposed was eliminating 33 B-1 bombers.

The B-1 has a two-decade history of failure that many in Congress hope to stretch into a three-decade history. The Air Force didn't dare fly it during the Gulf War, and flew it in the Kosovo war only after Serbian air defenses had been suppressed. But in places like Kansas and Georgia, permanent communities have grown up around B-1 bases, with children of Air National Guardsmen sometimes joining their fathers in B-1 units (it's a warplane that brings people together). Hence, Rumsfeld's apology. For Sen. Roberts, as for so many others in Congress, the comfort of his constituents trumps the idea of building a rational, modernized American military.

And so goes Rumsfeld's effort to reform the military, which so far has a record about as impressive as the B-1's flying history. Rumsfeld's critics blame his difficulties on his early ham-handed handling of relations with Congress and the Joint Chiefs. His defenders blame the shortsightedness of a porked-up Congress and a stubborn uniformed-military leadership, as well as the chronic underfunding in the Clinton years that has left the armed forces in a perilous — and not easily reversible — state of decline. Whomever is to blame, defense-watchers now expect Rumsfeld, who at first blush seemed the foremost stud of the Bush cabinet, to be among its earliest flameouts: "Bush will fire him," predicts one expert; "a glorious retirement," predicts another.

Rumsfeld's brewing failure may seem a surprise given his matchless résumé, but it arguably was inevitable. In a prescient article in Foreign Affairs before Bush won the election last year, defense intellectual Eliot Cohen outlined a thought ful approach to military reform, with one minor caveat: "Unfortunately, the current system will not produce such a new strategy." In the Pentagon, the bureaucracy rules, and it is bureaucracy on Quaaludes, making the New York City Board of Education look sprightly and trim by comparison. The Pentagon is the only flaccid governmental organization that conservatives love to love, looking the other way as the services relentlessly protect their turf, and their weapons, in a manner straight out of Joseph Heller.

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the military has desperately needed a new direction from its civilian leadership. In the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, the military marched on with an essentially unchanged fight-in-the-Fulda-Gap strategy. Enter Rumsfeld. He was supposed to be the different drummer, bringing a new post-Cold War strategy to the Pentagon. Instead, he has been flailing, and now is in the position of having to choose between two unpalatable options: He can either jettison Bush's military-reform agenda, or make deep cuts in the current force to try to fund it, thus prompting howls from the pork-barrelers, the hawks, and everyone in between.

The mantra from Rumsfeld's circle is that money won't fix the Pentagon's problems. It is more accurate to say that money alone won't fix its problems. The current force is in what experts call a "death spiral." During the 1990s, funding for procurement declined by nearly half, a rate of decline twice that of the military budget as a whole (which in 1998 had reached a 20-year low). As weapons systems age, paying to repair and replace them becomes more and more expensive. Imagine an old car that gets more expensive to repair even as it is less reliable on the road. And with every year the military doesn't keep up the pace, the costs of "catching up" grow to the point that it becomes simply impossible to maintain the current force — hence the spiral.

Rumsfeld has repeatedly walked Congress through the dynamic. Take shipbuilding. The current strategy calls for the Navy to maintain a steady state of 310 ships. The 2001 budget — Clinton's last budget — provided for six new ships a year. That puts the Navy on track for a 230-ship force by 2030, which Rumsfeld calls "clearly unacceptable." But instead of building nine ships a year to get back on track for 310 ships, the 2002 budget also provides for just six ships. Every year the Navy stays on that 230-ship course, the cost of "catching up" to the 310-ship rate ratchets up by another $3 billion. It's like falling a little bit behind on rent every month, until the debt becomes too big to pay.

So, every year the military doesn't get a truly massive increase — estimates of the shortfall go as high as $100 billion a year, although the Congressional Budget Office has pegged it at $50 billion — the idea of maintaining the current force structure fades further from the realm of possibility. Defense reformers argue that that isn't necessarily a bad thing — sometimes it makes sense to give up all the repairs and simply buy a new car. And it's not just the equipment, but the thinking behind it, that is outdated. For about the last decade, the military has piled stopgap upon stopgap, with the word "strategy" wishfully stamped on top of it all. The so-called "two-war" doctrine — likely to be jettisoned by Rumsfeld when he completes his strategy review in Septembermore a description of the size of the existing force than a guide to its role in the new strategic environment.

Bureaucratic imperatives for too long have been allowed to drive strategic planning. "The Army, Navy, and Air Force plan for the wars they would like to fight," writes John Hillen, one of the architects of Bush's military-reform agenda last year. The Army, for instance, still yearns to build a 55-ton-count them, 55 tons-howitzer that would be lucky to make it into the same hemisphere as one of today's regional conflicts, let alone ever actually be deployed on the battlefield in time for fighting. The Navy is still captivated by the glamorous aircraft carrier, which performed splendidly in the Battle of Midway, but looms as a slow, fat target in today's missile-rich environment. The Air Force can't resist developing ever-fancier, gee-whiz fighter jets, when its emphasis should be on the long-range bombers that can take off from Missouri and bomb Belgrade.

As Hillen points out, this is the best military that anyone could imagine back when Austin Powers was first making his reputation as an international man of mystery. But the 1960s and '70s are long past, and the U.S. no longer faces the prospect of a massive land war in Europe. Instead, as Eliot Cohen, among others, has argued, it makes more sense to focus on homeland defense to counter coming ballistic-missile threats, on the international policing missions that mushroomed in the 1990s even as military funding declined, and on maintaining conventional superiority over our next likely adversary (probably China). In a war in the Pacific — where the distances are long and the fight is likely to take place in the water — tanks and short-range fighter jets are likely to be less useful than cruise missiles and long-range bombers.

Rumsfeld is trying to turn U.S. strategy in this direction, as well as promote the leap ahead that military technology should be taking in the digital age. But with limited success. The panels Rumsfeld initially convened — to get around the Pentagon's traditional bureaucracy and help him think through these issues — were immediately panned by the services and Congress, while apparently producing no definitive new ideas. Rumsfeld keeps saying that the planning, and then the funding, of new weapons systems has to await the arrival of the grand new strategy. But this is little comfort to his congressional and bureaucratic critics, who can reasonably argue that, in the absence of this changed strategy, something (the current batch of tanks, B-1s, etc.) is better than nothing, and the something isn't being properly funded.

Indeed, Rumsfeld has missed a chance to buy off his political critics with toasty visions of new weapons ("Sen. Roberts, if you thought the B-1 was great for Kansas, just wait until you try a whole new fleet of B-2s!"). But buying off critics requires the kind of money that he hasn't been able to secure from the White House. Rumsfeld's circle fitfully acknowledges the need for more cash in between avowals that money is not the problem. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says, "It is going to cost money, and it is probably going to take additional increases on top of the ones we asked for already." The White House gave Rumsfeld just a 7 percent increase in 2002, a relatively modest boost given the defense shortfall and the fact that Rumsfeld wanted about twice as much.

There probably won't be any more where that came from. Bush never promised much new defense spending in the campaign, arguing that the funding could be found by cutting dated weapons systems. Bush's critics, meanwhile, argue that the tax cut is starving defense spending. But the primary culprits are the fictional lock-boxes that define most of the surplus out of existence. As defense analysts Steven Kosiak and Andrew Krepinevich write, "It will be extremely difficult to sustain (let alone increase) the proposed FY 2002 defense funding levels for the following four years, unless the administration and Congress are willing to dip into that portion of the budget surplus generated by the Medicare trust fund and possibly the Social Security trust fund."

This is not even a competition between guns and butter, but between guns and fake butter. The administration should either find some clever way to finesse it (perhaps by cutting politically unpopular discretionary spending, e.g., corporate welfare), or forthrightly confront the absurdity of the let's-pretend game of lock-boxes. As it is, President Bush has left Rumsfeld in an impossible situation. He can adequately fund neither the current force nor the notional future force. Rumsfeld's failing, then, is really Bush's. The president also bears ultimate responsibility for the strategic meanderings that have gotten Rums feld battered almost every day in articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Big changes can't simply be left to sort themselves out in the bowels of cabinet agencies.

Take, for instance, another, related issue: building a missile defense. Bush has energetically led on the issue, making clear his determination and pushing the public argument for a system. He didn't leave it to Colin Powell to hash out with the bureaucrats at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In contrast, Bush has not clearly described, let alone tried to sell, a new national-security strategy — what we hope to accom plish in the world, against what obstacles, in concert with what friends, and with the military playing what role. This, one would think, should be a central aspect of presidential leadership, at least as important as, say, promoting Habitat for Humanity.

In light of Rumsfeld's travails, Bush also needs to reconsider the approach to the military outlined in his campaign. The promising new weapons technologies he talked about last year — swifter, lighter, smarter — are extremely important and desirable. But his means of funding them — primarily, cleaning up the Pentagon's spending practices and phasing out antiquated weapons — is politically impractical to the point of being counterproductive. In short, Bush should sell a new strategy and push for funding of new technology, but give up on trying to make all the Pentagon's spending programs make sense. Instead, he should do basically what Reagan did: throw lots of money at the problem.

It wasn't an elegant solution at the time, but it still bought many of the weapons the military relies on today. And by calming the various wolves of the status quo, extra dollars might actually make possible some incremental progress toward changing the military. The only other option is for Bush to continue to watch Don Rumsfeld slowly twist in the wind, which doesn't seem very conservative nor — one dares say — very compassionate.

Untrustworthy
The Democrats on Social Security reform.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor

or Social Security reformers, the good news is how quickly the public has moved forward. People have become more receptive to the idea of investing some of their Social Security payments themselves. Exit polls from the 2000 election found that 57 percent of voters supported that reform. The bear market has cut that support, but only a little. The bad news, though, is that reform is going to have to win the backing of a significant number of congressional Democrats to get enacted. And the Democrats — even their best and brightest — are moving backward.

Most liberals have never supported a free-market overhaul of Social Security. In the past, though, many of them were at least willing to concede that the program was ailing. Reining in entitlements was even something of a good-government liberal cause, especially as liberals worried that runaway spending for the elderly was crowding out other federal programs they wanted.

Then two things happened. First, liberals lost political power — and it became clear that much of their remaining power derived from the popularity of federal entitlements. President Clinton came back from the irrelevance to which the 1994 elections had seemingly consigned him by depicting Republicans as a threat to Medicare. Second, conservatives began to dominate the debate over how to solve Social Security's problems. As the prospect of a reform based on personal investment has drawn nearer, liberals have started digging in their heels.

The Democrats' resistance to reform, and the lengths to which their court economists will go to rationalize that resistance, was on exhibit in July, when President Bush's commission on Social Security released the draft of its preliminary report. Alan Blinder, a Clinton appointee to the Federal Reserve and an adviser to Al Gore last year, told the Washington Post that the report "tries to create a sense of crisis when there isn't a crisis." He added, "It is irresponsible to frighten people." Robert Matsui, a Democratic congressman from California, said that the commission should be disbanded.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman met his readers' expectations by being the shrillest of the report's critics: He called it "sheer, mean-spirited nonsense." Lest anyone miss his point — to judge from his repetitiveness, this appears to be a constant fear of Krugman'snext column called the report "biased, internally inconsistent and intellectually dishonest." Blinder joined three other heavyweight liberal economists — Henry Aaron, Alicia Munnell, and Peter Orszag — to issue a report of their own, which reached the same conclusions without Krugman's table-pounding.

One of the commission's conclusions exercised the liberals more than any other: the claim that the existence of a "Social Security Trust Fund" does nothing to improve the program's solvency. The issue may seem arcane, but it is in fact decisive, so bear with me for a minute. For about two decades, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security have brought in more revenues than the program spends on benefits. Until 1999, those excess funds were used to finance the rest of the federal budget. Now that the rest of the budget is in surplus as well, the excess revenues are used to pay down the federal debt. But however the money has been used — to spend on other programs or to pay off debt — the Treasury has always borrowed it from Social Security and, in return, credited the program with bonds. These Treasury bonds make up the Social Security Trust Fund.

Because the number of retirees keeps rising, it is projected that by 2016 the payroll tax will no longer bring in surplus revenues. By then, the trust fund should have accumulated bonds worth more than $3 trillion (in today's dollars). From then on, Social Security will have to draw on the trust fund to keep paying benefits. It will keep drawing on it until 2038, when the trust fund will finally run out.

So there's no problem until then, right? Wrong. What the president's commission points out is that the bonds are "not accumulated reserves of wealth but only promises that future taxpayers will be asked to redeem." It concludes, "The Trust Fund can neither delay the need for new resources by a day nor reduce the need by a dollar."

It is this point that leaves the liberals sputtering. The bonds in the trust fund are "legally backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government," note Henry Aaron & Co. "Social Security's bonds are just as 'real' as the Treasury bonds held by private investors. The fact that these bonds are 'paper' assets does not in any way reduce their value." It is "dangerous" to suggest otherwise. Krug man argues that nobody would deny that the trust fund held real assets if it were full of German bonds, and that it is therefore absurd to suggest that it doesn't because it holds American ones.

These people are all smart, but their argument is stupid. If you've loaned money to someone else, you can look forward to getting that money back (with interest) to pay for something. If you've loaned money to yourself, you can't. Is that really so hard to understand? The commission isn't questioning that the government will repay the bonds; it's pointing out that repaying the bonds will require the government to raise taxes, cut spending, or both. It doesn't matter if the trust fund has $3 trillion in bonds or $300 trillion — paying for Social Security is going to start being a problem in 2016.

In tandem with their argument about the bonds, the liberal economists make a second point that is not ridiculous. Their reasoning: The trust fund represents years of surplus revenues from Social Security. Those revenues reduced the budget deficit for years, and now they are reducing the federal debt. Thus they have been adding to national saving, which contributes to economic growth, which in turn makes it easier to pay for future Social Security benefits.

This argument has the merit of not pretending that the bonds will somehow pay themselves back after 2016. (It just skates by the question of how to pay for them.) But it has several weaknesses. There is, for one thing, substantial dispute over how much deficits hurt the economy or debt repayment helps it. Stronger economic growth, in addition, does not make it much easier to pay for Social Security. As the commission report explains, the program's benefit levels are tied to wages. The stronger economic growth is, the higher wages, and therefore benefits, are.

In addition, whether excess payroll-tax revenues have really improved the federal government's finances is highly questionable. It is at least as plausible to think that for most of the last two decades, the influx of these revenues to Washington simply led Congress to spend more. Only in the last couple of years has a political taboo against "raiding the Social Security surplus" made it impossible to spend the extra money. If the Social Security surplus was spent from 1983 to 1999, in no sense do most of the bonds in the trust fund represent increased national saving. (The four liberal economists' report raises this possibility only to dismiss it.)

What's suspicious about the Democratic intellectuals' attack on Social Security reform is that everyone involved in it used to show greater understanding of the issues. In January 1999, Henry Aaron testified before the Senate Budget Committee that the trust fund "may have failed in adding to national saving, if [it] caused government to run larger deficits or smaller surpluses on the rest of its activities." (If so, he added, this was the fault of "unwise fiscal policy outside Social Security" rather than of the trust fund — a point that gets us nowhere.)

Peter Orszag said, in testimony before a House subcommittee last year, that the trust fund may not have increased saving — at least until the advent in 1999 of the "lockbox" to protect the Social Security surplus. In 1984, Alicia Munnell co-wrote an article for the New England Economic Review citing "the improbability that Social Security surpluses will increase national saving" in arguing that the surplus should be reduced. The authors wrote that their "best guess [was] that the scheduled buildup of assets in the Social Security trust funds over the next 35 years would be used to offset deficits elsewhere in the federal budget and thus would contribute little to overall saving and capital accumulation."

Krugman, too, has made an about-face. In 1988 he was careful to mention that Social Security surpluses would help finance the program's future only if they were "not offset by deficits in the remainder of the federal budget." Now he doesn't even acknowledge the possibility that this may have happened.

It's not just liberal economists who have forgotten what they used to know. Robert Matsui, the Democratic congressman, has led the charge on the Hill against the commission. In July, he said: "This report falsely asserts that the Social Security system will be unable to meet its obligations because the assets held by the Trust Fund are 'not real.' To the contrary, the Government bonds held by Social Security are as real and valuable as the Treasury bonds held by millions of private investors." These comments, of course, follow the economists' current analysis.

In 1990, however, Matsui and Democratic senator Bob Graham wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times that described the trust fund in terms more slighting than anything the commission has said: "Bluntly put, the federal government is spending more than $1 billion a week of the Social Security surplus as though it were general revenues. All that the Trust Fund gets for these expenditures are chits from the U.S. Treasury." The fund was merely "a vault full of Treasury Department IOUs."

Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were clear-eyed in the past, too. In 1996, journalist Robert Novak grilled Daschle about the trust fund and got him to admit that "there is no such fund per se." In 1990, Gephardt said that by 2015 or so taxes would have to be increased to pay off the bonds in the trust fund. Now, Gephardt is accusing the commission of trying to "scare people" by questioning the value of the trust fund.

Better to scare people, perhaps, than to lull them into false complacency. By treating the trust fund as a way of paying for Social Security's obligations after 2016, the gang of four economists is able to say that the program's remaining shortfall is only 1.86 percent of wages that are subject to taxation. The clear implication: Raise payroll taxes by less than 2 percent, and the problem disappears for at least 75 years. But that implication, as we have seen, is false: It ignores the need to raise enough money to pay off more than $3 trillion worth of bonds.

Having labored to make the current system look more sustainable than it is, the gang of four goes on to stack the deck against personal accounts as a component of a solution. They estimate, incredibly, that allowing people to invest 2 percent of their wages would "divert" so much money from Social Security that young people would get 50 percent lower benefits. (Okay, class: Raise your hand if you think President Bush is going to propose a 50 percent cut in benefits.) It takes two statistical maneuvers to yield this daunting figure. First, they refuse to count the personal accounts as part of the benefits — a refusal that makes the reduction look at least 30 points greater than it should.

Second, they don't stop at estimating the cuts in benefits from the old system that would be required to make room for personal accounts. They add in all the cuts it would take to completely eliminate Social Security's pre-existing funding shortfall. The current program's funding problem, in other words, is attributed to the proposed reform of it. They're using a double standard. A hypothetical reform plan has to pass the most stringent of tests. But the gang of four argues at length that the unreformed Social Security system should be evaluated not on the basis of the benefits it can pay for, but of the benefits it has promised.

What was that Paul Krugman said about intellectual dishonesty?

Bush to a ‘Tee’
The president’s most heartfelt values initiative.

By Byron York, NR White House correspondent

t the first White House tee-ball game, played on the South Lawn in May, a seven-year-old batter stepped to the tee, took a big cut, missed the ball, stepped back, took another swing, and sent a hard line drive to right field. It looked like a sure hit, until a young outfielder snagged it with a quick jab of his glove. With that, George W. Bush, sitting in the bleachers along the first-base line, jumped to his feet. "What a catch!" the president yelled, laughing and applauding and appearing more excited than some of the parents around him, many of whom remained in their seats.

It was a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm from a man who seemed delighted to be watching baseball in his backyard — even tee ball, played by kids eight and under with no pitchers and no keeping score. But tee-ball games (three so far, with another scheduled for September) are more than just entertainment for former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush. That was clear before the first game even began, when the president delivered a brief, off-the-cuff homily to the players and parents.

"I also want to thank . . . coaches all across America," Bush said as he paced around the infield, "who help young men and women understand the importance of teamwork and playin' by the rules, and help young men and women understand that baseball is a fabulous sport." Bush thanked the parents "who love their children every single day and love 'em so much that they're willin' to go out and watch 'em play Little League baseball." Dropping every g in sight, Bush continued: "There's nothin' better than knowin' that America is full of lovin' moms and dads who are at the ballparks every day as the summer unfolds." Finally, Bush turned to the teams and led the players in reciting the Little League pledge: "I trust in God. I love my country and will respect its laws. I will play fair and strive to win. But win or lose, I will always do my best."

It was simple and heartfelt and . . . corny, in a way not often heard in official Washington. And Bush seemed to love it; during the game he appeared as engaged and happy as at any time during his six months in the White House. For Bush, tee ball is not only a way to nurture a game he loves — he often frets that not enough kids are playing Little League ball — but a way to do precisely what some of his liberal critics feared he would do: promote a return to 1950s values in America. Much more than his upcoming values initiative called "Communities of Character" — a grab bag of politically popular mini-programs devoted to topics like good citizenship and teenage sexual abstinence — Bush's South Lawn gatherings are the real thing. If you want to see the real Bush values agenda at work, watch him at the tee-ball games.

Little League in Midland
Bush is the first president to have played Little League baseball. To say he loved it would be an understatement; last year, when Oprah Winfrey asked him to name his fondest childhood memory, Bush answered simply, "Little League baseball in Midland." His mother and father were both boosters; in the 1980s, Little League named its parents-of-the-year prize the George and Barbara Bush Award. During the 2000 presidential campaign, sensing that they might soon have an alumnus in the White House, Little League officials did some research and found the four original rosters for George W. Bush's teams from 1955 through 1958. They're now on display on the league's website.

After the election was decided, league officials sent Bush adviser Karen Hughes a package of information about Little League. The material stressed the old-fashioned values of the league pledge and suggested that there might be projects that Little League and the White House could do together. "We said if there's anything Little League can do for the White House, just let us know," says league official Lance Van Auken.

As it turned out, there was. In late March, Van Auken got a call from the White House saying the president wanted to hold games on the lawn. White House officials asked Van Auken and Little League to handle most of the details: picking the teams, rounding up volunteers to provide equipment, and designing uniforms — both teams are called the South Lawn Sluggers. Tee ball was chosen not only because of the appeal of young kids but be cause it would not be possible to play real baseball on the White House lawn; nobody wanted to worry about hot foul balls flying all over the place.

Bush announced the games on March 30, when he hosted a White House reception for members of baseball's Hall of Fame. The gathering was an occasion for Bush to wax lyrical, at least for him, about the game. "Everyone who loves baseball can remember the first time he saw the inside of a real major-league park with real big-league players," Bush said, describing the first game he ever saw, at the Polo Grounds in the 1950s. "It stays with you forever: the greenness of the grass, the sight of major leaguers in uniform, the sound of a big-league swing meeting a big-league pitch.

"In a small way, maybe we can help to preserve the best of baseball right here in the house that Washington built," Bush continued. "After we moved in, I pointed out to a great baseball fan, the First Lady, that we've got a pretty good-sized backyard here. And maybe with the help of some of [the] groundskeepers, we could play ball on the South Lawn. . . . So for the next four seasons, we're going to invite kids here from the area to play tee ball on the South Lawn of the White House."

In May, two days before the first game, Bush discussed his hopes for tee ball when he hosted a White House reception for the World Series champion New York Yankees. Telling the players that the games would be "a chance . . . to celebrate the great sport of baseball," Bush then gave the world a hint about the game's place in the presidential worldview. "Yankee Stadium is hallowed grounds," Bush told the team. "So is the White House."

A Fifties Guy
When Bush first announced the tee-ball games, he met with a certain amount of derision from the talking-head corps. "It's obviously a public-relations stunt," political scientist and pundit Larry Sabato told the Los Angeles Times. "Bush used to say that he will restore honor and integrity to the White House. Now he should amend that and say he's restoring honor, integrity, and the 1950s to the White House."

Sabato was echoing a common liberal critique of Bush as a man determined to return America to the 1950s. Maureen Dowd has called him "Eisenhower with hair." Molly Ivins has called him "President Let's-Bring-Back-the-1950s." And dozens of other critics have suggested Bush wants to "turn back the clock" to an earlier era.

As silly as that commentary seems, the critics have a point — although it's one they might not want to acknowledge. When they talk about the 1950s, they conjure up a politically correct nightmare of racial injustice, sexual repression, and gender inequality. But Bush's 1950s is something else entirely. It's the Little League pledge (which was, indeed, written in the '50s by then — Little League president Peter McGovern). It's God, country, and fair play — things George W. Bush learned about in the first decade of his life. For Bush, Midland Little League was in the '50s. That first, magical visit to the Polo Grounds was in the '50s. And his most treasured baseball heroes played during that time. "I'm just a little biased toward those of you who played back in the '50s," Bush told the Hall of Famers in March. "It was my prime as a baseball-card collector . . ."

The invocation of '50s values also has a political usefulness for Bush. It's no accident that the tee-ball games are produced by the White House Office of Communications, which is responsible for helping shape Bush's message on a wide variety of topics. In this case, advertising the image of a president with take-me-out-to-the-ballpark values is a powerful part of Bush's campaign to differentiate himself from his predecessor. While Bush's supporters believe he returned honor and dignity to the Oval Office simply by moving in, the tee-ball program illustrates the extent to which, after more than six months in office, the Bush White House still wants to make sure everyone knows that George W. Bush is the opposite of Bill Clinton.

"It's clear that America thinks this is a president who's honest, who has dignity and character," explains an administration official. "They've had enough of the last eight years. Because of all the foolishness that was happening in the White House back then, tee ball is almost like a wave of fresh air. The picture was on the front page of every major paper — Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post. The point is, tee ball isn't the reason people like him, but it's initiatives like this . . . that show the wholesomeness factor and will allow him to be one of the more successful presidents.

Communities of Character
Eddie Garretson hit it off with George W. Bush right away. A northern Virginia construction manager, Garretson is a coach in what is called the "Challenger Little League," a special Little League program for disabled kids, and his team took part in a White House tee-ball game in July. "A more sincere person, I don't think I've ever met," says Garretson, who, like Bush, was a catcher in Little League years ago. "We talked about the past, about what it was like catching back then, about our flannel uniforms, which were hot as the dickens."

Other parents and coaches report the same sort of reception at the White House; so far, tee ball has been a very big hit. And it's still going on. In addition to having Bush visit the Little League World Series in August — a first for a sitting president — the White House plans one more South Lawn game for September, and then it's on to planning for next year. "These games will go on for four years, and hopefully eight," says an administration official. "It's a natural fit for the president."

It's a natural fit because everybody knows Bush loves baseball. What is likely to be a less natural fit is the upcoming "Communities of Character" campaign — which, in its political aspect, will be an attempt to increase Bush's popular support at a time when he will be engaged in knock-down, drag-out fights with Congress over the budget, patients' rights, and other contentious issues. The irony of a White House beginning a series of quintessentially Clintonian initiatives — even as it tries to stress the contrast between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — has not been lost on Bush's critics in both political parties. Beyond that, there are worries about whether Bush can pull it off. While Clinton — who used small-bore initiatives to help distract the public from the scandals that engulfed his presidency — had the salesmanship to push programs that meant little to him, Bush does not.

And that's what makes tee ball unique: It means a lot to George W. Bush. When he's using baseball to preach about values, Bush has a genuine passion that cannot be readily transferred to other topics. Sure, encouraging grandparents to use e-mail to correspond with their grandchildren — one of the Communities of Character initiatives — is a worthwhile idea. But if Bush wants to make a genuine statement about values — straight from his heart, as he might say — perhaps he should stick to tee ball.

Lust for Life
The most effective lobbyist in Washington.

By Kate O’Beirne, NR Washington editor

In the last week before Congress closed down for summer vacation, tensions were high. GOP leaders were facing high-stakes House votes on a patients' bill of rights and President Bush's energy bill; they had to pick their fights very carefully, because there was little margin for miscalculation. But they decided to bring up one particular contentious issue — cloning — and risk a humiliating defeat on it, based on a single lobbyist's assurance that they would win the crucial vote. A top GOP aide explains that only one outsider has earned that level of confidence. After the nerve-racking winning tally, the aide declared: "That settles it. Doug Johnson is the best lobbyist in town."

The supposed access and influence bought by big money — the stuff of nightmares among would-be campaign-finance reformers — pale by comparison with Johnson's clout. Since 1981, when he was named legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), Douglas Johnson has been building relationships, voting profiles, media files, and a level of influence that money can't buy. A former House staffer, who was used to lobbyists jostling each other to pick up her restaurant tabs, worked closely with Johnson for four years and laughingly recalls, "I don't think Doug ever bought me a cup of coffee."

On an unfashionable block in downtown Washington, in an office one blunt visitor describes as a "dump," Johnson directs the efforts of a couple of young assistants who spend the bulk of their time on the Hill, as well as the lobbying activities of his counterparts in the NRLC's state affiliates. The bookish father of four, including three adopted children, was labeled the "unlobbyist" by a capital veteran who "doubts that he even has an expense account." Lobbying is a lucrative business for Washington's top practitioners, but no one on the committee's staff makes six figures. While his well-heeled counterparts are enjoying leisurely lunches in the city's fanciest restaurants, Johnson is at his desk, sporting one of his signature short-sleeved shirts and the peculiar colored glasses he's taken to wearing over his regular glasses owing to a frustrating eye disorder. The "power lunch" is not a regular part of his schedule. Nancy Ruiz, a former lobbying aide, explains: "Doug used to say that he looked forward to the day when food pellets were invented so he could eliminate the bother of eating."

GOP leadership staff found Johnson at his desk, working multiple phone lines, when they called him at 1:30 P.M. on July 31. They had just learned that as many as 18 of their liberal members, recognizing that the pro-cloning bill they favored was going to be defeated, were threatening to vote against the leadership's rule governing the consideration of the alternative bills. Rules typically pass on strictly partisan votes, and being defeated on a rule usually amounts to a humiliating loss for House leaders; in this case, it would also block a vote on the cloning ban the GOP favored. "Can you get enough Democrats to pass the rule?" Johnson was asked. "Only if you hang up and let me try," was his (customarily curt) reply. Within the hour, Johnson reported that he thought he had lined up enough support for the rule, and the leadership went ahead with the vote, based on his estimate. Johnson's close relationships with sympathetic Dem ocratic members wound up producing more than twice as many Democratic supporters for the rule as Republican defectors (34 to 15). "We gambled everything on Doug's count," says a GOP aide. The House then passed a total ban on cloning, 265-162.

Johnson, 50, has been winning the respect of Washington's political class for 20 years. One lobbyist who used to be a Senate aide — and worked with Johnson at the time — marvels that on an issue as emotional as abortion, the pro-life lobbyist is able to avoid a common pitfall: "Doug won't kid himself into thinking that he has the votes. He carefully picks his battles, then goes off and gets the votes he needs." Ruiz says that she considered her attention to detail a particular strength, until she worked with Johnson in the early 1990s and saw a man devoted to a metaphysical standard of accuracy. Another former lobbying aide, Nancy Lataif, recalls Johnson as a "compulsive fact-checker" for whom the smallest mistake was a "cardinal sin."

Johnson's files overflow his cluttered office; a further, dazzling source of information is his own memory. Ruiz recalls that when confronted with a troublesome congressman, Johnson was able to quote a commitment made in that congressman's primary race two decades earlier. Another former aide explains that she didn't know what to make of President Clinton's announced intention to nominate Dr. Henry Foster as surgeon general. "I figured he was an obscure Tennessee physician, but Doug immediately headed to his files because he remembered seeing Fos ter's name on the letterhead of an un friendly organization."

Reporters who cover abortion issues have become accustomed to being held to Johnson's standard of accuracy. At a GOP orientation session for prospective candidates a few years ago, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly was explaining what politicians should do if they object to a news story, and departed from his notes to cite the prototype of effectiveness. The reporter explained that his fellow scribes approached the issue of abor tion with trepidation because they knew that within hours of a story appearing, they would be sent a "three-page memo, with documentation, and the promise of a follow-up phone call" from the relentless Doug Johnson.

In the last Congress, the National Right to Life Committee tracked 20 key pro-life votes in the House — including a ban on partial-birth abortions — and the committee's position prevailed on 17 of them. Before moving to the Washington headquarters, Johnson was briefly legislative director for the Texas Right to Life Committee, and he credits the grassroots troops for the successes on Capitol Hill; but state legislative directors are quick to return the credit. Pennsylvania's Mary Beliveau explains that for almost 20 years she has relied on timely and accurate information from Johnson, in e-mails, faxes, and round-the-clock phone calls; the members of Congress she works with have also come to rely on this material. Sue Armacost in Wisconsin agrees that Johnson's thorough explanations, including background scientific material when necessary, are indispensable. In recent years, the issue of campaign-finance reform has become one of the committee's top priorities, and Armacost explains that "Doug has educated us about why it's an issue for us and other citizens' groups."

The NRLC's opposition to campaign-finance-reform plans that would impose stringent new restrictions on citizens' groups has caused a bitter feud with one of their former allies — Sen. John McCain. With a prescience his associates have come to expect, Johnson anticipated both McCain's political rise early in 2000 and the threat McCain's campaign-finance ideas pose to the activities of grass roots political groups. In 1997, when the Straight Talk Express was barely in the design phase, the NRLC ran ads opposing the McCain-Feingold legislation in Arizona — and Iowa and New Hampshire. A furious McCain struck back, and by 2000 had taken to attributing the NRLC's opposition to its desire "to continue this huge business they've got going in Washington, D.C." Johnson told friends that the accusation had them "rolling around on our ragged carpeting" with laughter.

In last year's GOP primaries, there was an erosion of social conservatives' support for the previously reliable pro-life senator, owing to the doubts raised by Johnson, who also publicized an apparent reversal in McCain's longstanding opposition to Roe v. Wade.

Former Florida congressman Charles Canady says that getting to know Johnson and his wife, Carolyn, was one of the best parts of serving in Washington. Canady chaired the subcommittee responsible for the bill that banned partial-birth abortion, and credits Johnson with developing this issue that so successfully educated the public about abortion. Summing up why Johnson is so effective, Canady says: "He's totally honest."

A senior House Republican aide offers a proposal that might help the GOP prevail on other important causes, ones that lack an advocate with Johnson's skills: "Maybe we can clone him."

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