THE WEEK.

Tony Blair may take "paternity leave" when his wife gives birth in May. Good thing he doesn't have an empire to run.

The New York Times spanked George W. Bush for not kowtowing to John McCain in a post-primaries interview. "Bush Rebuffs Bid to Embrace Views Pushed by McCain," ran the scandalized headline. Why Bush, who united his party against McCain's ideas, should now rush to adopt them was left unclear. In different circumstances, what the Times was urging Bush to do would be called a "flip-flop." Which, in any case, is probably the wrong way to woo McCain voters. They do not form a coherent bloc or "movement," and they consistently told pollsters that they were drawn to McCain's personal qualities, principally his willingness to stand up for his beliefs. Bush should stand up for his own, even if "straight talk" is suddenly less popular at the New York Times.

What Hillary Clinton wanted to do with health care in 1993, Al Gore is now proposing for the American system of elections-he wants to socialize it, bringing it under the heel of bureaucrats and government commissions. Gore's plan is a laughably obvious play for the fabled "McCain voters." It shares with McCain's proposals the premise that American politics suffers from too much politics, but takes this idea much closer to its logical conclusion. Gore proposes a $7 billion nonpartisan "Democracy Endowment"-run by presidential appointees approved by the Senate-that would be built with tax-deductible contributions, then divvied up among House and Senate candidates who agree to accept no other funding. The idea is to shield candidates from the influence of political parties, interest groups, and individual donors-in other words, from democratic pressure. This is the liberal regulatory state at its absolute worst.

But Gore does have a sense of humor, or at least some good joke writers. At the recent annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, Gore got off some good ones. Referring to his Washington, D.C., upbringing, he said, "I have to admit I feel a little out of my element here, but I suppose it's good for me to get out of Nashville every now and then." On his Buddhist-temple caper: "I remember...admiring the majestic burnt umber robes of the Buddhist monks and saying, 'Hmmmm. Earth tones.'" He mentioned the Gridiron Club's 115-year-old tradition as "one I invented" and said that McCain's "Luke Skywalker" was "loosely based on me." He admitted that his wife Tipper had cautioned him about exaggeration, "five billion times, literally." When he began speaking, he asked for an iced tea, downed the tumbler, and said, "I can't stay long." This guy may be livelier than he looks.

Humanitarianism has not heretofore been one of Patrick Buchanan's major considerations in foreign policy. Yet now he wants to lift the sanctions on Cuba and Iraq because of the suffering they cause. After a decade's evolution in his thinking, Buchanan has now arrived at a position of supporting free trade with our enemies and protectionism for our friends. This is no way to keep America First.

Liberal Republicans often claim that they must vote the way they do because otherwise they would lose their seats to Democrats. Often this is the case. But surprisingly often, these congressmen hold safely Republican seats. The districts of Sherwood Boehlert, Jim Greenwood, John Porter, Marge Roukema, and Fred Upton are not likely to go Democratic anytime soon. In such circumstances, conservatives have every reason to mount primary challenges to the incumbents. The Club for Growth-a new, free-market PAC started by investor Richard Gilder and NR's Dusty Rhodes-is therefore to be commended for backing a challenger to Roukema. The National Republican Campaign Committee has responded by sending more money to Roukema. But Republican donors do not send the NRCC money to fight conservatives. They want to elect Republicans-and if the Club succeeds, they might elect some real ones.

Patrick Dorismond, a 26-year-old security guard, was accidentally killed by New York City police in a fracas following a drug operation (Dorismond had no drugs on him). Mayor Giuliani announced that Dorismond had a history of scuffling and unsealed his juvenile record to prove it. A riot at Dorismond's funeral injured 23 cops, and New York is on edge. The ugly flareup hurts Giuliani's senatorial campaign, which depends on the support of free-floating liberals. More important, the situation reflects the double tragedy of Giuliani's mayoralty. He did one impossible thing by bringing crime rates down. (The number of deaths caused by police gunfire is down, too.) If he had achieved a second impossible thing-cutting the city's taxes and spending-there would be another topic in the conversation. If he knew when not to speak, the conversation might be less rancorous. John Adams ruefully said that George Washington had "the gift of silence." Giuliani has it even less than Adams. New York, city and state, will now suffer as a result.

Dick Gephardt gave a speech attempting to present the Democrats as the party of the New Economy. The speech marked real progress on the Democrats' part. Gephardt announced his support for extending the ban on Internet sales taxes until 2003 and came out for a permanent ban on taxes on Internet access and transmission. But the Democrats are not reliable friends of high technology. Gephardt's speech said nothing about promoting free trade or restraining the trial lawyers. Democrats in the Senate continue to block a bill making it easier to make contracts online. Techies may favor the subsidies Democrats propose to bridge the supposed "digital divide" between rich and poor; but in time they will learn that with subsidies come regulations. Republicans can still make the case that they are better on high-tech issues-and they had better make it.

Speaker Denny Hastert's announcement that he was appointing a Catholic priest as House chaplain stunned his Democratic tormentors, who had hoped to keep their phony charge of anti-Catholic bigotry in the GOP alive through the election year. In an indignant speech on the House floor, Hastert refuted that "cynical and destructive" accusation and blamed Democrats for withholding their support from the Presbyterian nominee for the post, causing the minister to withdraw his name from consideration. Hastert promptly introduced Fr. Daniel Coughlin of Chicago, who was immediately sworn in as the first Catholic chaplain of the House. While rejecting the charge that GOP bias caused a Catholic candidate to be passed over for the chaplaincy last December, Hastert conceded that such animus does exist-in Hollywood, among radical gay- rights activists and feminists, and in the "arts community." These groups are contemptuous and hostile to Catholic traditions and mores, and they are members of the Democratic base. Would the Democrats rather level a false charge against their political enemies than condemn the routine insults and attacks leveled against the Catholic Church by their friends? Is the Pope Catholic?

When the Stone Age tribespeople of Micronesia first saw planes landing and their cargoes being unloaded, they deduced that white people must have some powerful magic to lure such wondrous creatures down from the sky. They set about building mock-ups of airfields, with mud runways and control towers made of sticks and grass, in the hope of directing some of the heavenly cargo to themselves. These "cargo cults" still flourish in remote areas of Papua New Guinea. And also in the United States: for the current U.S. census is being promoted more or less frankly as a cargo cult. Federal funds are allocated to states and districts according to census returns, we are told in the covering letter that comes with our census forms. In other words: Fill out this form and the government will give you stuff! Never mind about that boring old self-sufficiency ethic so admired by Tocqueville ("In America the people do not wait for the nobility or the government to do something for them; they do it themselves"). Never mind about working hard to make your community prosperous, or joining civic associations to make it safe and well educated. Just fill out the form and the cargo will come.

Filegate has finally been laid to rest by independent counsel Robert Ray. It had achieved a mythical status on the right as the non-sex- related scandal that would bring President Clinton to justice, if the facts were ever unearthed. Now, four years later, they have been, at least to Ray's satisfaction. FBI files are extremely sensitive-Charles Colson went to jail for mishandling one in Watergate-so it was understandable that Filegate would provoke outrage, especially given the initially conflicting administration explanations and Louis Freeh's complaint that the FBI had been "victimized." But by May 1998 Byron York could report in The American Spectator that there would be no Filegate indictments because the scandal did not reach above those Keystone Kop cretins Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca. Which perhaps provides a lesson for how to regard the latest scandal, the missing White House e-mails: If the corruption and dishonesty of the Clinton administration is never to be underestimated, neither is its incompetence.

The good news is that the Supreme Court decided that the FDA does not have the authority to regulate or ban tobacco. For decades, it was the settled understanding of the law, accepted by the FDA itself, that no such jurisdiction existed. Congress rejected bills to give the FDA that jurisdiction and instead enacted tobacco regulations that sidestepped the agency. The bad news, then, is that the Court made its decision by one vote. Four justices-Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens-were willing to grant the FDA this power even if Congress had not conferred it, essentially because it seemed really important for the FDA to have it. If their view had prevailed, the judicial and executive branches would have colluded in a major power grab from Congress. Other executive agencies, such as the FCC and OSHA, would have had even wider discretion than they have already to decide the limits of their power. The case was much too close a call-and with Al Gore criticizing by name the justices who voted correctly and constitutionally, it should serve as a cautionary note to anyone who thinks this year's election doesn't matter.

In January, Congress learned that the surplus was $26 billion larger than expected. It took 60 days for the extra money to be spent. The just-passed House budget for 2001 runs to $1.8 trillion. It includes $600 billion in discretionary spending, a 4.1 percent increase over 2000. Support came almost exclusively from Republicans-the Democrats wanted even more spending. Unfortunately, Senate Appropriations chairman Ted Stevens is closer to the Democrats than to his fellow Republicans in his instincts on spending: He wants an additional $15 billion. Meanwhile, Congress hasn't given up on spending more money for the current fiscal year. If Congress passes a supplement to the 2000 budget, discretionary spending will have gone up 10 percent over 1999. This extra spending is for "natural disasters and other emergencies," including a new FDA facility in Los Angeles, assistance for lobster fishermen, and money for NASA. The case for a tax cut-to give Congress less money to play with-has never looked stronger.

When a private college distributes the proceeds from student fees to liberal groups, conservatives are inclined to protest but not to go to court. Should the response change when a public university is involved? The Supreme Court unanimously said no. The Court was correct to reject the notion that the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee came into play: Nobody forces anyone to go to the University of Wisconsin. But the protesting students were right, as well: Universities should not take students' money and give it to groups that almost all lean left- or, for that matter, to professors who almost all lean left. The political tendentiousness of the academy is not a problem that the courts can solve.

Congress voted unanimously to let senior citizens keep working without its costing them Social Security benefits. Marginal tax rates for the elderly, in other words, are coming down. Rightly so: In a graying population, it makes no sense to discourage work among the elderly. The historical context is also worth noting. Democrats had opposed this reform for years, and Clinton actually raised taxes on seniors. The congressional action is a testament to the continuing political power of tax cuts.

Physicians blithely hand out potent mood-altering drugs like Ritalin, Luvox, and Prozac to children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, formerly known as persistent naughtiness. Many of these drugs were not developed for pediatric use, and their labels do not even specify a children's dose. Now Hillary Clinton, in her capacity as public-health busybody, has embarked on a campaign to reduce the prescribing of these drugs to children. Some obvious things need to be said. 1) Everything Hillary Clinton does in her waking hours is directed toward boosting her Senate campaign. 2) Government cash awards to low-income parents with ADD-diagnosed children, which have had the full support of this administration, have surely not helped to reduce the numbers thus diagnosed. 3) The alternatives to medication are lengthy behavioral-therapy programs at home and school, unlikely to prove popular with time-starved parents and clock-watching unionized teachers. Yet having said these things, we are bound to confess, through gritted teeth, that for once we agree with Mrs. Clinton. There is a problem here, and it needs to be addressed.

Bilingual education often leaves kids illiterate in two languages and fluent in none. Activists in Arizona and Colorado are now working to follow California's lead by passing initiatives to ban it. We wish them well.

In the minds of Chinese people, the modern history of China is marked off by "incidents," each of which is remembered by the digits of the month and day on which it occurred. The newest milestone may be "Three One Eight": the presidential election in Taiwan on March 18 this year, when, for the first time in Chinese history, a Chinese head of state was removed by popular vote. Much attention has been paid to the fact that Chen Shui-bian's victorious Democratic Progressive party contains pro-independence factions; also to the threats from the great dragon coiled on the other side of the Formosa Strait. But the people of Taiwan are entitled, as Churchill told his own countrymen on V-E Day, to a period of jubilation. The historic nature of Chen's victory can be measured by the fact that the official name of the place he is president of is still "The Republic of China," an entity that had been ruled by the Nationalist party continuously since October 10, 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek assumed the presidency in Nanking. No significant number of Chinese people has ever been ruled by any political party other than the Nationalists and the Communists-not until Three One Eight.

If China behaved internationally like, say, Switzerland, approving permanent normal trade relations with it would be a no-brainer. But Beijing provides weapons of mass destruction to rogue and enemy states; pursues naval and political hegemony over the South China Sea; bullies Taiwan; seeks nuclear and other American secrets that can be used only for hostile military purposes; tries to obliterate non-Han populations in Tibet and Xinjiang; and represses religious freedom for everyone from the Catholic Church to the Falun Gong. On the other hand, keeping trade barriers against China-and keeping their trade barriers against us as well-would not ameliorate any of these problems, and could make some of them worse. At least a partial answer is at hand in the form of the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act. The bill is not a complete response to the litany of Chinese threats to American interests, but it does draw a clear line on what is at present the most sensitive issue- not just for the Taiwanese, but for other nations in East Asia that are carefully observing Washington's posture here. Congress should link approval of permanent normal trade relations to the Taiwan bill. Beijing should be under no illusions that it can push around the entire American body politic as it does the Clinton administration.

Vladimir Putin loves to praise the KGB, his good old school. He respects its bosses and, though almost a teetotaler, toasts them in private and in public, from the Bolshevik founding fathers down to Vladimir Kryuchkov, last of the KGB's Soviet diehards, whom he still proclaims "a very decent chap" and under whom he was himself a colonel. In the immediate post-Communist era, he did useful legwork for the St. Petersburg KGB as it disbanded to grow into the biggest mob in town. Probably the dirtiest of all the dirty deals cut in today's Russia was Boris Yeltsin's appointment of this secret-police apparatchik to be his successor, in return for total immunity in the future. Strapping on a pilot's helmet, Putin looked the action-man in a shiny MiG fighter on a mission over Chechnya, as though central casting had assigned him to play opposite James Bond. President Clinton urges Putin, who won Russia's March 26 election, to undertake "impartial and transparent investigations of reported human-rights violations." What, another of those impartial investigations in which Russians are such specialists? Sugar daddies in the IMF, the World Bank, and the Clinton administration can hardly wait to start fawning and writing checks. Mrs. Albright thinks Putin "uses all the right vocabulary." That's a huge relief, of course. But immigration services everywhere in the West are likely to be on overtime soon.

The heroic age of conservatism enjoyed a brief reprise on Long Island when Hofstra University held a conference on "The Thatcher Years-The Rebirth of Liberty?" attended by leading veterans of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and some of their critics. What emerged from the lively proceedings was that the Left's attempts to rewrite the 1980s as a decade of unproductive capitalist greed during which the Soviet Union spontaneously deconstructed are gradually failing. Even in academia, the conventional wisdom now concedes that Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War with a combination of a military buildup and ideological resistance; that Mrs. Thatcher instituted the long-term revival of the British economy; that the success of these conservative administrations forced the parties of the Left into a new moderation. In her address , Lady Thatcher warned of the danger to liberty posed by the spread of international economic regulation imposed by unaccountable U.N. bodies. Her remedy was greater cooperation between the democratic countries of the English-speaking world on the basis of shared cultural understandings, a joint tradition of common law, and free-market economics. After eight years of Clinton's purposeless multilateralism, might these be the new directions for a Republican foreign policy?

In "Little Gidding," his final quartet, T. S. Eliot wrote that we go to pilgrimage sites to be "where prayer has been valid." In this spirit Pope John Paul II, bent, old, but indomitable, went to what was once called the Holy Land-because it had been hallowed by the Lord's presence. He continued the Lord's work by visiting Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, and reflecting on the cruelties visited on the people who were the first carriers of God's message. He hoped his journey might be a means of lessening sectarian strife. Numerous Palestinian die-hards, and a few Israeli ones, rejected the opportunity. But a tireless and humble man continued in the efforts he will yet continue, until the Lord calls him home.

Following the Bob Jones University flap and the contretemps over the new House chaplain, our current election campaign increasingly resembles the 17th-century wars of religion. Now we have an outfit called Women Leaders Online-whose advisory committee includes Democratic representatives Nita Lowey, Louise Slaughter, and Carolyn Maloney, and former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro-joining the international campaign to downgrade the Vatican's observer status at the U.N. because of the Church's hostility to abortion. One can imagine Al Gore's feelings toward these pro-choice warriors-just when he thought he had the anti-anti-Catholic vote sewn up. If he is contemplating disciplinary action against them, we'd like to remind him that a key incident in those earlier wars was the Defenestration of Prague, and that the U.S. Capitol boasts many broad, high windows.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, ne H. Rap Brown, sometime black radical, has been arrested for shooting two Georgia cops who were trying to serve him a warrant-one of them fatally. Much comment ensued about what a surprise this was: Al-Amin/Brown is a Muslim cleric, living quietly in Atlanta, etc., etc. Come on: Every other thug and dictator likes music and dogs. That doesn't make them nice guys. In the Sixties, Brown said, "Violence is as American as cherry [sic] pie," and incited a riot in Maryland. Later he served five years for armed robbery. The warrant that sparked the murderous shooting was for impersonating a police officer while driving a stolen car. His lawyer says, absurdly, that "the system" framed him. No: A bad apple has ended up, once again, in the trash.

Morris Abram, who died at 81, had a career flipped by history. As a young Georgia lawyer, he stood firmly in the liberal wing of the Democratic party. He sued to overturn state primary rules that overrepresented rural counties in which blacks did not vote; he got Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail after one of his sit-in arrests. Kennedy and Johnson appointed him to this and that. But in the late Sixties, he began fighting former friends. Named president of Brandeis in 1968, he opposed a black-studies program because it would turn the school into "a university of superficialities"; worse, he sought to punish black students who took over a building. When Ronald Reagan named him to the Commission on Civil Rights, Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP said only a Klansman would be "more incompetent." The last Democratic presidential candidate Abram voted for was Jimmy Carter. Later in his life, he wrote that "liberalism for me means that" men "must be treated as equal citizens in the eyes of the law." Liberals rewrote the dictionary. R.I.P.