■ “We’re now covering the Speaker, not the President,” New Republic’s Fred Barnes said of media in general, two nights before Newt Gingrich addressed the nation on four networks (CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CBS). Another overturned decades-old D.C. thought-pattern is expectation of sluggish congressional pace. House met for 487 hours, compared to usual 123—had 279 votes v. usual 64. Says Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on McLaughlin Group: “I think that in many ways Newt Gingrich is the Ronald Reagan of congressional politics. He showed that the system can work.” . . . Other media types less impressed. After tax cuts passed in House, TV’s Parson Grim, Bill Moyers, made remarkable claim: “The 1981 tax cuts were followed by the biggest economic downturn of the century.” Continuing his rewrite of Eighties, NBC’s “balanced and fair” commentator also warned: “Ronald Reagan promised spending cuts that never happened and the deficit went right though the ceiling.” (Congress refused RR $200 to $300 billion in budget cuts as Democratic leaders cited Moyers’s TV specials protesting cuts.) . . . Biggest impact of 100 Days is rightward shift of public debate. Rep. Christopher Cox (R., Calif.) notes: “Even when we’re losing the debate we’re debating our issues.” More evidence: Majority Leader Bob Dole, no supply-sider in Eighties, announced Jack Kemp would head his and Gingrich’s new tax-cut commission. And Sen. Richard Lugar (Ind.), a competitor with Dole for ’96 GOP nomination, called for abolishing IRS and replacing income tax with sales levy. . . . Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is forlorn about impact of 100 Days: “The Democrats are the party of Washington . . . the party of bureaucrats . . . the party of the special interests . . . the pro-tax party.”
■ Will cable TV pick up where PBS left off? Arts & Entertainment (A&E) network’s Biography of J. Edgar Hoover features cartoonish handling of Cold War. In script that might have been written by one of Hollywood 10, A&E implies that trials of U.S. traitors Alger Hiss and Ethel Rosenberg were just part of giant Hoover conspiracy to create bogus “Red Menace” and keep himself in power. A&E has, meanwhile, produced study of Jimmy Carter about which ex-Prez said after screening: “Ninety per cent of it I enjoyed.”
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