AND ANOTHER THING
The dolls, the Zipper, and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand
PAUL JOHNSON
Last week, he was entertaining a small Oriental president, putting him on a chair so that his feet did not reach the ground and tipping him $1.5 billion, parading the White House lawn with his arm round Hilary, patting poor children on the head and presenting his newly neutered dog, Buddy. This harmless chocolate-coloured labrador is either the victim of the fero- cious retired actress Doris Day and her dreaded Animal Welfare League, as dog- lovers think, or, as the opposing spin doc- tors claim, has been sacrificed as an expiat- ing offering for Mr Clinton's as yet unpunished lusts. A neutered president, however desirable morally, would be unac- ceptable constitutionally, for he remains Commander-in-Chief. So chopping the dog is the next best thing and is seen as a smart move. Washingtonians say that the Presi- dent has been heard whistling 'Buddy, Can You Spare A Ball?' and jokes are believed to work in Clinton's favour, even those which revolve around his allegedly mal- formed penis, which figured prominently in court papers published last week. He is now known as 'the Zipper', as opposed to Ronald Reagan, 'the Gipper'.
The fact that America's chief magistrate figures daily in the media as a trouserless antic in a fast-moving farce does not seem to matter much — yet. It is now clear that Clin- ton is a compulsive womaniser of exactly the Jack Kennedy type, treating women as sexu- al servitors (his passion for fellatio figures prominently in the hundreds of pages of tes- timony) rather than persons. That has got Hollywood, in a particularly sinful phase at present, warmly on his side, and it has trans- formed the anti-Clinton novel Primary Col- ors into a movie panegyric. The feminists have decided that Clinton's pro-abortion stand is more important to them than his philandering. They will swallow his molesta- tion of young women (one is only 21) so long as he continues to back the •right to kill unborn babies, which he was doing last week more vociferously than ever. However, each time a new doll points a finger at the Zipper, the feminists flinch.
Curiously enough, a lot of po-faced, mid- dle-aged women seem to be backing Clinton too, primarily, I suspect, because they can't stand the crowd of chattering flappers who are accusing him. Billy Graham, who likes to stay on the right side of whoever currently occupies the White House, says he 'forgives' Clinton. The pastors are keeping mum. When Oscar Wilde was brought to book in 1895, over 900 sermons denouncing him were preached in the United States over the next few months, the largest number in a single year ever directed against an individu- al, including the Devil. But there has been no pulpit fulmination against Clinton. That has been left to columnists such as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who last week described Clinton as Satan incarnate. If Clinton really is possessed by the Devil, she argued, that would explain 'why so many people around him end up dead, jailed, betrayed, shackled, exiled, subpoenaed, depressed, humiliated, broke, ruined and smeared. (And, in the case of poor Buddy, neutered.)' In fact the survival of Clinton and his high (though slipping) poll-ratings are due to quite separate forces, one political, the other economic. Clinton survives because the Republicans, who control both House and Senate and probably have it in their power to remove him, prefer a crippled Clinton in the White House to a new broom in the shape of Al Gore, whose views are more to the Left but who might turn out a winner. They want the President stuck in the mire until after the mid-term elections in Novem- ber, which they hope will confirm their grip on Congress — after that, they'll see.
Clinton's continuing popularity is due almost entirely, in my view, to the healthy state of the US economy. Most Americans are not much interested in politics, especially at the national level, when things are going well for them personally. Focusing on Washington, and its rascals, is a function of recession. At present, the vast majority of Americans are pulling in more money than ever before and are enjoying spending it. The performance of the economy is stun- ning. Ever since Ronald Reagan restored American self-confidence in the early Eighties, the economic sun has been shin- ing. I recall Reagan joking, 'I'm not too worried about the deficit. It's big enough to look after itself.' That is exactly what has happened. The deficit is disappearing as the US wealth-creating machine functions exactly as the classical economic textbooks say it ought when perfect competition pre- vails. America now has full employment, if anything over-employment, in a labour market where the total number of jobs is increasing fast. Productivity rises inex- orably. Individual investors and the funds are pouring cash into stocks and bonds. Inflation is zero, or even minus. Taxes are still high but they are falling (capital gains tax was halved last year). The amount of money being made in New York, for instance, is unprecedented, but there is nothing show-off about the boom. Indeed, New York's highly successful and greatly feared mayor, Rudi Giuliani, exudes an air of puritan circumspection and gives the cit- izens lectures on manners.
Ecologists may deplore the fact, but what really cheers up most Americans is low petrol prices. Last week the Lundberg Letter, which averages prices from 10,000 gas stations across America, reported that prices, when adjusted for inflation, are now lower than at any time since it began keep- ing records 40 years ago. It seems almost certain that Americans now enjoy the cheapest petrol in their history. In Atlanta, the boom town of the South, intense local competition cut the price last week to less than 80 cents a gallon. Using adjusted fig- ures, average petrol prices have fallen from $2.50 in 1920 to less than half that today. Most Americans can now fill their tanks for slightly over $10. There is a global oversup- ply of crude and new fields are still coming on stream. But the real reason for cheap US petrol is economic efficiency, which gets petrol to the consumer at the lowest possible price thanks to the smooth func- tioning of the market. We are at a golden juncture in the history of capitalism when the invisible hand is weaving its magic with astonishing assurance, and the biggest sin- gle beneficiary is the Zipper. So far.
Previous page
