Even before the bombs began falling Sunday, it had become cliche to note that "everything had changed" -- that our political priorities in particular had been forever re-ordered by the attacks of Sept. 11. What's remarkable to those of us who follow every yip and yap of political debate, however, is how much remains the same.
Consider the case of poor Terry Everett. For nearly a decade now, the Republican Congressman from Alabama's peanut-farming country has loyally slopped the folks back home with subsidies and price supports, never attracting unwanted publicity and -- this is crucial -- keeping peanut prices artificially high.
And then suddenly, without warning, he becomes a figure of fun on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
It all began last Tuesday, when The Washington Post quoted a letter Everett sent to colleagues promoting the Farm Security Act in general and peanut subsidies in particular. Everett's letter opens with a dramatic headline: "US farm policy -- it's about security."
How so? "America's abundance of safe and affordable food and fiber," Everett wrote, "should never be taken for granted." "Keep America strong," he went on, "Support the bipartisan Farm Security Act." Even by congressional standards, Everett's letter veered toward self-parody, conflating our efforts to fight terrorism with our urgent need to subsidize peanut farmers and bulk up on dietary fiber. The next day the Journal editorialists had a high time mocking him.
Which was amusing enough till your eye wandered from the editorial to the column next to it -- a plea, by supply-side swami Arthur Laffer for a cut in the capital-gains tax as a response to terrorism. It wasn't quite as silly as Everett's letter. But close.
Referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, Laffer wrote that "by far the most dramatic damage done to America was in the stock market." I hate to quibble, but isn't the annihilation of two 100-plus-story buildings and the instantaneous murder of nearly 6,000 people even more dramatic than a drop in the Dow? Never mind. Laffer is an economist. Terrorism makes him think of tax rates
To return to normalcy, Laffer wrote, the nation requires "an immediate cut in the federal capital-gains tax rate to 10 percent from 20 percent. Second best would be to allow dividends to be tax deductible to businesses." Yes, Osama, you may break our bodies, you may bring down our buildings, but you will never deter us from our mission to abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax.
Terrorism's effect on the political class -- that unsightly scrum of publicists, special pleaders and politicians, along with the commentators who nip around their ankles -- has been rather more ambiguous. Where most people see unutterable devastation, these folks see a chance to enact, once and for all, their favorite policies.
The tastelessness afflicts Democrats and Republicans in equal measure. On National Public Radio the other night, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a longtime opponent of the welfare reform of 1996, proposed reversing important elements of the reform as a "wartime measure."
Another liberal columnist, Matt Miller, announced that the attacks had made it painfully clear that we must pass national health insurance.
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, for his part, is busy resurrecting a pet piece of legislation against money laundering. When he promoted it as a blow against drug traffickers, the bill sank. After Sept. 11, it was suddenly reborn as an anti-terrorism measure, and its chances of passage are much improved.
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