A Job for Racicot
It’s not RNC chairman.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
December 3, 2001 3:45 p.m.

arc Racicot, the former governor of Montana, is said to be the White House's favored candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee. Gov. Racicot would probably do just fine in that position; he was tough and effective during the Florida recount wrangling of last November and December.

But Racicot could do more good for his party as a candidate for Senate. Democrat Max Baucus is up for re-election next year, and Racicot would be heavily favored to beat him if he ran. The race could determine whether Tom Daschle stays on as majority leader and Pat Leahy as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The party chairman's job is to help increase the number of Republican officeholders by, for example, talking people like Racicot into running. Racicot should eliminate the middleman. Congressional Republicans may need operational support, but what they really need are reinforcements.

Sebastian Mallaby's Not-So-Sensible Idea
Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby rises to the defense of a "sensible" government program that Left and Right are ganging up on: aid to compensate workers laid off because of trade. Such aid might defuse opposition to free trade and thus help President Bush win authority to negotiate trade agreements. But labor unions are against it because they don't want to help the president's trade agenda, and so are reflexively anti-government conservatives.

But Mallaby doesn't make the policy case for his pet program and actually undermines the political argument for it. The obvious policy objections are pretty simple: Why should the government compensate workers who lose their job because of trade, and not workers who lose their job because of domestic competition? And how is the government to determine which layoffs are a result of trade liberalization rather than of, say, a poor corporate strategy?

A few billion dollars in extra federal spending would be worth it in order to make progress toward cutting taxes on international trade. But how will the aid do that? Mallaby's argument is that it will reduce antagonism toward trade. But the major constituency that opposes trade-organized labor-has already made it clear that it doesn't care for the aid program. So what does it buy?

Daschle's Persecution Complex
On Meet the Press yesterday, Tom Daschle was asked about the House Democrats' new ad campaign, the one that talks about the "Bush recession." Daschle dodged the question, saying, not unreasonably, that he had not seen the ads and thus would not comment. But the first words out of his mouth were these: "Well, of course, the Republicans have been running attack ads for some time against many Democrats including Mr. Gephardt and myself, so that's not uncommon." The Republican campaign committees are protesting that in fact, they haven't been running any ads about Daschle or Gephardt.

The biggest race coming up in Daschle's home state of South Dakota is the re-election campaign of his fellow Senate Democrat, Tim Johnson. The Republican in that race, John Thune, has run ads saying that he can work with President Bush and Daschle-which is about as far from an attack on Daschle as you can get.

Idiocy Watch
"The war started out very masculine-the hijackers were men, the mullahs and bin Laden were men, Rumsfeld, Cheney (and where is Lynne Cheney now that we would like to hear from her?), Powell, Bush, and the generals were all men. In spite of Condoleezza Rice, the war could have remained an entirely masculine enterprise, all about men pursuing and catching men, all about being manly and making the necessary sacrifices and fighting to the death and having no doubts and ridiculing dissent (and the most hated dissenters, mild and reasonable though their dissent has been, have been women). And then the Afghan women took off their burkas. That was when I put my doubts away, for the time being." — Jane Smiley, "Women's Crusade," The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2. The clincher is in the bio line: "Jane Smiley is the author, most recently, of 'Horse Heaven' and is now working on a novel about the Reagan years."