'Corruption, Plunder, and Waste': The ethical case against big government.

The length of our election cycle gives Americans the unenviable luxury of exhausting every conceivable precedent in analyzing a presidential campaign. Commentators have already looked at the election of 2000 through a dizzying variety of historical prisms. Some have pointed out similarities to the election of 1896, when McKinley bested Bryan; others have looked at it from the vantage point of Bush pere's campaign against Dukakis in 1988, JFK's 1960 campaign, even Martin Van Buren's 1836 race. And yet it may be that the most powerful historical precedent upon which George W. Bush can draw in the closing weeks of his campaign is one of the Republic's oldest: He can use a polemical weapon that men like Thomas Jefferson brought to perfection more than two centuries ago.

Bush needs to make a twofold case in the final days of the campaign: first, that those who are currently wielding executive power in Washington have been corrupted by it, and second, that their moral shortcomings-now being dismissed by many as scarcely relevant character flaws-will end up confronting Americans with a costly pocketbook issue down the road. By revising the language of Jefferson and applying it to America today, Bush can accomplish what was always going to be a difficult task: demonstrating that the character issue has practical consequences. So far, Bush hasn't found a convincing way to demonstrate that his moral critique of the Clinton-Gore years is of a piece with his economic critique. Jefferson can help him explain why the two messages can't be separated-especially where taxes are concerned.

Part of the reason Bush's tax-cut talk has faltered in recent weeks is that he has allowed people to focus on the glory of the "cut" and not on the evils of the "tax." In a prosperous time many of those with superfluous cash on hand will be indifferent to the appeal of the cut, may even pique themselves a little on their ability to resist its temptation. By updating the 18th-century maxim that moral degeneracy in politics is ultimately reflected in misguided fiscal policy, Bush can refocus people's eyes on the problem of excessive taxation itself, and show why a failing of political character-what the Founders called corruption-matters when it comes to the tax code.

The patriots who made the American Revolution believed that the ministerial factions that dominated 18th-century Westminster amounted to a "court party," one that governed at the expense of Britain and her colonies as a whole. Crown ministers like Walpole, Townshend, and North had grown lazy and fat, their opponents argued, through oppressive tax policies, and they had conspired against the public good by subsidizing "placemen"-timeservers and bureaucrats-who in return gave the ministers crucial political support. Lord Bolingbroke, an opposition leader, argued that policies implemented after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had enabled ministers to create a "fund for corruption," one that allowed ministerial apparatchiks-known as "jobbers"-to didistribute "places and pensions" in exchange for votes. The taxes that subsidized these sinecures in turn worked "to impoverish the people; to render them as submissive and as abject as the subjects, the boors, or the slaves, in some foreign countries, and to beggar them out of their sturdiness."

American patriots adopted these arguments when they themselves came to protest British tax policy in the 1760s and 1770s. Like Bolingbroke, the Americans viewed the crown ministers and their agents as "little merchants of human flesh," reprobates who stole "from the public to replenish the royal coffers, to glut the ministers, to feed some of their hungry creatures, and to bribe a parliament besides." After the Revolution, Americans, particularly Democrats, continued to be suspicious of the corrupting effects of executive power: Think of Jefferson's attacks on the Federalists, for example, or Jackson's attacks on the Whigs. More recently, however, Republicans have used the rhetoric of corruption and court-party malversation to greatest effect: Think of Reagan's crusade against big government in 1980. Bureaucrats and teachers' unions, in the Republican view, have become the modern equivalent of 18th-century placemen; in exchange for tax dollars, pensions, and-in the case of teachers' unions-a monopoly on public education, the new placemen reliably deliver Democratic votes on election day.

The rhetoric of court-party corruption has its dangers, especially where it tempts those who use it to believe in the possibility of a Republic of Virtue, and to exaggerate the beneficence of a government decently ordered and properly cleansed. But the rhetoric has this strength: It enables a candidate to combine moral outrage against corruption (scandals and bribes) with economic outrage against the irresponsible patterns of taxation to which corruption so often leads. The current administration has shrunk from meaningful tax relief in part because it fears deficits, but in part, too, because an embrace of such relief would send the wrong message to legions of placemen. Such relief would signal the faithful that the president and vice president were no longer committed to a policy of diverting ever-larger sums of public money towards public-sector parasites. And so the administration remains committed to the policy. The Founders would have considered this willingness to use public revenue to further partisan ends a prima facie example of executive corruption.

It is true, of course, that wherever there is politics there is pork. Every party strives to reward its friends. But there is this difference between Republicans and Democrats: The GOP knows that the practice of pork-barrel politics is a vicious one, and tries to control the damage by limiting the amount of money Washington has to misspend. The Democratic leadership, however, insists that the vice is really a virtue. This lack of self-knowledge, or failure of contrition, is the principal cause of Democratic overreaching, the canker to its rose. When Thomas Jefferson said that he hoped that "our general government" could "be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants," he did so because he knew that a larger establishment, governed in the manner of a European court, would inevitably "invite the public agents to corruption, plunder and waste." Jefferson's successors in the Democratic party are less conscious of their duty to restrain the government's insatiable appetites. Al Gore shows no sign of wishing to enlighten them.

Have you ever noticed the neat little bows the vice president makes when he acknowledges the cheers of the crowd? Al Gore is a courtier. Richard Nixon would envy his ease in a Georgetown salon; Castiglione himself might be impressed. Gore, like many of those who have spent their lives in the anterooms and audience chambers of a court, is reported to be an easy and graceful figure in private life. A correspondent for one of the Paris dailies told me of the relaxed and natural way in which the vice president discussed wines with him aboard Air Force Two; the reporter regretted that Gore's staff demanded the conversation be kept off the record. Gore appears stiff and awkward only in public settings-on the hustings-where his polished manners do not help him. But he doubtless got on superbly with his former patron, Armand Hammer, another connoisseur of court life, a charmer, tres serviable, one of those professional equerries who was equally at home with the great figures of Washington, London, and Moscow. The vice president serves his current master with the same politesse with which he flattered (and was flattered by) Hammer: "One of our greatest presidents" is the tribute of a courtier to his king. Gore's verbal agility is that of a man who has spent much of his life in the corridors of power; his urbane and nonchalant attitude towards the truth has aroused skepticism even among journalists familiar with the philosophical sophistication of the graduate schools, where students learn that there are no facts, only interpretations.

"A man of parts and knowledge, who acquires the easy and noble manners of a court, is the most perfect" of beings. So 18th-century Lord Chesterfield declared in a letter to his son. Dr. Johnson gave a different estimate of the courtly ideal Chesterfield celebrated: The diplomat's letters, he said, taught "the morals of a whore" and "the manners of a dancing master." When Charles Dickens came to sketch milord's character in Barnaby Rudge-Chesterfield goes by the name of Mr. Chester in that novel-he had plain old Mr. Haredale confront the courtier in words that George Bush would do well to remember in his face-offs with the vice president:

I have come here at your desire, holding myself bound to meet you, when and where you would. I have not come to bandy pleasant speeches, or hollow professions. You are a smooth man of the world, sir, and at such play have me at a disadvantage. The very last man on this earth with whom I would enter the lists to combat with gentle compliments and masked faces, is Mr. Chester, I do assure you. I am not his match at such weapons, and have reason to believe that few men are.

Part of the courtier's problem, in the eyes of Americans bred up to resent the dazzle of a court party, is that his words are morally bankrupt. His language is too artful ("no controlling legal authority") when it is not manifestly false (inventing the Internet). A preference for plain speaking runs deep in the American character. Mark Twain makes us laugh at the pretentious language of the pseudo Duke of Bridgewater in Huckleberry Finn; the reader of the novel learns to prefer the awkward and ungrammatical prose of Huck. "We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all," Huck says. "Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't." Bush, whose conversation is closer to Huck's than it is, say, to Adlai Stevenson's, provokes sneers among the reporters; but in some parts of the country his language-hardly less clumsy than Huckleberry's-may seem merely honest.

The courtier's deeper problem, according to Jefferson, is that power has corrupted his judgment. Court life, Jefferson said, enervated the mind of his friend John Adams. "Mr. Adams had originally been a republican," Jefferson wrote, "but the glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission to England," blinded him. By resurrecting Jefferson's critique of court-driven corruption, Bush may yet find a way to show how the deals and decisions his opponent has made to stay in power have left him incapable of taking on the status quo in Washington. The problem goes deeper than the scandals and fundraising improprieties that are synonymous with the administration in which the vice president serves. It goes beyond the administration's bully-boy tactics, its use of Joel Klein's Antitrust Division and Andrew Cuomo's Department of Housing and Urban Development in ways that represent a reversion to pre-Watergate standards of executive conduct. The cancer has eaten away at Gore's policymaking fiber. The president and vice president strive to reward their placemen (the teachers' unions, the trial lawyers, the Hollywood characters who serve as the jongleurs of Clinton's court) even as they go beyond their predecessors and opponents with proposals to turn the tax code into a compilation of poll-driven tax credits aimed at swing voters. Such targeted cuts do nothing to relieve the overall tax burden, a burden which has only grown heavier during the Clinton-Gore years.

By challenging the vice president on what economist Robert Samuelson has called the demagoguery of his prescription-drug plan, by emphasizing the vice president's cynical refusal to work for either entitlement reform or school reform-two of today's more pressing challenges-Bush may yet succeed in painting a credible picture of a politician too deeply enmeshed in the tangled fibers of federal largesse to effect the changes America needs. Not only is Gore unwilling to try to fix problems that must inevitably drag the country down ten or twenty years from now if they remain unsolved (e.g., Social Security); in the interest of maintaining power, the vice president proposes the creation of new entitlements that will ineluctably commit the nation to economically harmful levels of taxation in the years to come.

Time is running out. Bush must move quickly to explain to Americans why the rot in the capital is likely to prove costly to them in the future.