8/31/00 3:25 p.m.
Senate Chatter
Republicans are privately saying the best they can hope for is a wash in the Senate.

By NR's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

olks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee are privately saying that a good outcome for the GOP in November will mean losing no seats. Gains are considered unlikely, and an overall loss of one or two seats is expected.

Tossup races include Delaware, Missouri, New York, and Washington — and perhaps Michigan (although Spencer Abraham appears to be improving his odds) and Minnesota (where Rod Grams is the beneficiary of a late Democratic primary). Of these six seats, only New York's is now held by a Democrat.

Political Readiness Update
Two days ago, we wondered aloud why Colin Powell had not weighed in on the defense-preparedness debate, while noting that John McCain's convalescence might keep him from participating. Yesterday both men spoke up in reaction to a speech on the subject by Dick Cheney. McCain said that "[a]nyone who dismisses our serious readiness problems, our problems with morale and personnel retention, and our serious deficiencies in everything from spare parts to training as non-existent or overstated is either willfully uninformed or untruthful." Powell said that "[r]eadiness has declined, investment has declined, maintenance has declined."

That's a good start. If Powell wants to have an impact on this debate, however, he'll need to do more than provide quotes for reporters; he'll need to make speeches that get on the nightly news.

Factoid of the Day
Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey makes a neat point in the Wall Street Journal today, correcting Al Gore's convention-speech charge that Bush's tax cut would save the average family only 62 cents a week — a charge that the Gore campaign was forced to correct a day later. (Why, by the way, hasn't the press harped on this as much as it has on Bush's much more ambiguous and less important mistake in referring to two divisions of the army as unready? Never mind.) Lindsey points out that for an "average American family" — one with two kids, presumably two employed parents, and "right in the middle of the income distribution" — Bush's tax cut is worth $1,600 a year. That works out to 80 cents an hour. "By contrast, the entire increase in the real wages of the average American production worker over the past eight years has been just 47 cents an hour."