OKAY, what alien force came to earth and replaced Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Charlie Rangel with eerily similar doubles? The alien pods who stood in the White House Rose Garden yesterday next to President George W. Bush sure looked and sounded like New York state’s three leading Democrats.
But the real Schumer, the real Hillary and the real Rangel must have been held captive on the mothership while the alien pods described and praised the new plan for the reconstruction of lower Manhattan.
For surely New York’s two senators and its senior House member would never go along with a plan as conservative, as Republican, as this one!
The $5.5 billion economic stimulus plan for lower Manhattan announced yesterday cuts business taxes and offers extensive tax credits.
It includes tax abatements and deferrals for those businesses who buy lots of office equipment and renovate existing office space.
And enormous effort has gone into “protecting the city and contractors from potentially crippling lawsuits,” according to a summary released by Sen. Schumer’s office.
Yes, you read that right. Tort reform, business deregulation and tax cuts are the major elements in a plan supported by Sens. Schumer and Clinton and House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Rangel. Such a development seems just as science-fictional as the notion that aliens kidnapped, duplicated and replaced them.
Perhaps we can discern from this astounding turn of affairs a new ideological rule of thumb to accompany such venerable ideological rules as “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality” and “a neoliberal is a liberal who’s been mugged by a neoconservative.”
The new rule: “When liberals need something fixed in a hurry, they become conservatives.”
Sept. 11 has rewritten all kinds of rules. One immutable rule of American politics in the past 30 years: Presidents ignore New York. Republicans Ford, Reagan and Bush the Elder ignored it because the state is so liberal (though Reagan did win New York in 1984).
Bill Clinton took New York entirely for granted, in part because he knew he had the state’s voters in his pocket. Clinton felt so secure in his popularity that he actually tried to precipitate a fiscal crisis in Medicaid funding, changing the rules in a way that cost New York hundreds of millions of dollars – just to stick it to then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato.
George W. Bush has changed all that. The Republican who lost the state by 30 points to Al Gore has now fulfilled his pledge to provide $20 billion, actually somewhat more than $20 billion for Manhattan’s reconstruction.
Will his commitment and generosity be met with favor at the polls in two years?
The pod people at the podium in the Rose Garden yesterday gave his team ample footage for a cross-party commercial campaign.
Schumer recalled their meeting just after 9/11: “There were tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘New York needs help?’ I nodded, and without hesitation, without even flinching, he said, ‘You’ve got it. Today, the president is making good on that pledge, in full and then some.’ “
For her part, Hillary Clinton recalled a notorious newspaper headline about a previous Republican president and then suggested it should be amended today to read: “Bush to NY: Help is on the way.”
Those remarks broadcast statewide for months, together with an effective reconstruction effort, would make a Bush victory in New York state actually thinkable in 2004.
Perhaps that, too, seems like science fiction. But consider: That was Hillary Rodham Clinton praising George W. Bush to the skies.
(Or was it?)
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