Slab-fisted bigwigs among House Democrats preached hell and damnation in the fortnight before the House ethics committee released its damaging report on Jim Wright. Earlier on, Wright champion Rep. Charles Wilson (Tex.), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, was predicting that only about “24 yellow-belly turncoat Democrats” would vote against the Speaker. “Jim will be fine,” he said. “The sun is going to shine on everyone but [Rep. Chester] Atkins and [Rep. Bernard] Dwyer,” the two Democratic ethics-committee members who, it had been leaked, would vote with the Republicans on the Wright indictment. . . . Fellow Texan Jack Brooks, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, dismissed allegations about Wright’s business methods. You would have thought, Brooks said of the Speaker, that “he had shot four nuns in a church.” . . . But when the report was released, and all but two Democrats on the ethics committee were found to have joined the Republicans on three important allegations, the Democrats pulled back. . . . Washington Post quoted one unidentified Democratic congressman: “[The report is] damaging as hell. … In this institution we fly or die by public perceptions.” . . . And public perceptions are hurting. Late-April Washington Post poll showed 46 per cent of those questioned think Wright “probably has committed serious violations” (only 16 per cent think he hasn’t); 77 per cent think he should step down if House finds him guilty. But, in stinging indictment of Congress, 56 per cent felt Wright was “about as ethical as other members of Congress,” and, sad news for GOP, only 37 per cent identified him as a Democrat. . . . Democratic Reps. Peter Kostmayer (Pa.) and David Nagle (Iowa) both found charges on the book deal “troublesome” and “damaging.” . . . From opposite end of the spectrum, Donald Devine of Ronald Reagan’s grassroots lobby, Citizens for America, disagreed on the importance of books/condos/limos in the affair. “I say let Mr. Wright peddle some books and drive a nice car if he will stop bankrupting banks and busting the budget with $200-billion favors for his Savings & Loan friends.”
A hundred days into new Administration, Vice President Dan Quayle is emerging as leading advocate of SDI in Bush White House. Speech Quayle gave to Navy League in Washington endorsing the SDI “brilliant pebbles” strategy was cleared by NSC but is said to have annoyed NSC Advisor Brent Scowcroft, a longtime skeptic on SDL . . . New York Times Washington reporter Maureen Dowd, in think-piece on Quayle, says he adds a “touch of cayenne to the Administration’s bland caution.” Quayle himself comments that a VP has very little “wiggle space.” . . . Quayle is doing considerably better than man who derided him so unmercifully last year. Latest Boston Globe poll shows Michael Dukakis with 19 per cent approval rating in Massachusetts. . . . Fred Brown of National Black Republican Council ever so happy his group withdrew from New Orleans national black convention last week after organizers advised them Louis Farrakhan, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael would after all attend. In well-applauded speech to the convention, Farrakhan charged the U.S. Government with spreading AIDS in Central America and with trying to decimate black and Hispanic Americans by spreading crack and cocaine in ghettos. He called for “reparations” for all black Americans descended from slaves, and for formation of “mineral rich” country in Africa to which black American prisoners could be sent. How was this received? Commented former Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana: “Minister Farrakhan finished the meeting in a way . . . that will cause all of us to leave here renewed, recharged, determined to end the problems of racism.” . . . Recent ABC-Washington Post poll shows Bush with astonishing 62 per cent approval rating among black Americans.
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