The Week.

--"The era of big government is over," he lied.

--Our analysis of the meaning of the New Hampshire primary appears below, the salient question being the need for Sen. McCain to identify himself with embattled conservative policies. At this moment a subsidiary point should be made, however regretfully. It is that it's time for Steve Forbes to pull out. Nobody has fought more valiantly than he to press his insights in the public square. But he has not lit the fires in absence of which he becomes merely a distracting figure on the stage. Even as Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes should withdraw, and may need to do so if only because the bill collectors are hovering by, so should Steve Forbes withdraw, even if his credit continues good. His devotion to his principles is such as to require that he go the further step of withdrawing, lest he diminish his cause by an obtrusive advancement of it in a theater in which attention will be paid only to other players.

--Does George W. smirk? This is not as light a problem as it seems: Mannerisms can make powerful, and sometimes revealing, first impressions on voters. The governor is at a delicate symbolic moment. He does smirk, with a bantam's cocky clowning. He also grins, with a refreshing lack of pretension. He must find some way to steer the voters' perceptions toward the latter trait. Meanwhile, what do we call Al Gore's frozen-eyed, gaffed-fish look? The Gaze? The Stare? The Death Ray?

--In his State of the Union address, President Clinton announced that "next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic growth in our entire history." Just six sentences later, he explained that things looked much bleaker in the dark days before Clinton, when "our nation was gripped by economic distress, social decline, political gridlock." But hold on. This boom can set a record for longevity only if it started in 1991-a full year before Clinton ran against "the worst economy in fifty years"-as in fact it did. Oh, well. This president never has been much good at getting his story straight.

--The Supreme Court upheld both the principle of regulating contributions to individual candidates set forth in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, and the specific $1,000 cap (inflation is not a factor, said the justices, who continue to pull down their 1976 salaries-just kidding). The Court was coy about whether it might later approve limits on expenditures (i.e., soft money). On the one hand, the majority opinion didn't actually say the Court would. On the other, there was enough wheel-spinning in the concurring opinions to encourage zealous lawyers to try again. So the Court has its preferred situation: the prospect of endless litigation, with infinite slicing of the legal salami. In his majority opinion, Justice Souter had the cheek to say that "the cynical assumption that large donors call the tune could jeopardize the willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance." A greater stumbling block to voters' willingness, surely, is that, with the courts in overdrive since the 1950s, there is less democratic governance to take part in.

--Bill Bradley, we have learned, was admitted to Princeton with an SAT verbal score of 485. We knew he was a zealous supporter of affirmative action; we didn't know he was a poster child for it.

--Hillary Clinton had some emergency political fence-mending to do, after appearing at a Martin Luther King Day rally hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton, at which a Sharptonesque clergyman held forth on his employment history with Jewish bosses. So she attacked her likely Senate opponent, Rudy Giuliani, for appearing at a banquet with Joerg Haider, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, who has praised Hitler and the Waffen SS. Clearly these were parallel events, since to Mrs. Clinton racial demagogy in New York City and Austria take place in equally foreign lands.

--New York City-which is still, after all, New York City-spent nine months recruiting welfare recipients to take jobs as telephone psychics. This was part of its welfare-to-work program. What happened? The press chuckled; experienced, professional psychics expressed outrage; the city cancelled the arrangement. Just as we would have foretold.

--The world's richest man, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is so incredibly wealthy that it would take Bill Clinton nearly four minutes to squander his entire fortune.

--When Sen. Jesse Helms addressed the U.N. Security Council, at the invitation of Ambassador and temporary Council President Richard Holbrooke, he told them that the Reagan Doctrine had done more for democracy in the world than the U.N. had. Sen. Joseph Biden jumped to set the record straight, criticizing Helms for "nostalgia" and saying of the Reagan Doctrine, "Thank God it's dead." Any other anti-imperial doctrines whose death Biden wants to thank God for? The Four Freedoms? The Monroe Doctrine? The American Revolution? And they call Helms the peckerwood.

--"If once you have paid him the Dane-geld," wrote Kipling in one of his most famous verses, "You never get rid of the Dane." British prime minister Tony Blair is in the process of learning this painful lesson under instruction from the IRA. In the recent past, he has conceded whatever its leaders have wanted: release of more than 200 convicted murderers from prison; the dismantling of the front-line defense force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary; a new governing body for Northern Ireland, including representatives of Sinn Fein/IRA; seats in the Westminster parliament for men who refuse to take the oath of loyalty. No matter how high the IRA has set the Dane-geld, Blair has proved eager to pay. A new era had arrived, he promised, as he saw in the IRA attitude wonderful evidence of a "historic, seismic shift." All the IRA had to do in return was decommission their weapons-not even all their guns and Semtex, either, but just enough to save Blair's face. Disarmament was to begin on February 1. But now, claims the IRA, with the triumphant air of successful cheats and liars, to hand over a single bullet would be surrender. Though Blair's instinct is to appease the terrorists further, there is nothing more in the kitty to offer. A seismic shift can be dangerous.

--Germans were far from pleased when Helmut Kohl as chancellor ordered them to give up the Deutsche mark, the symbol of their postwar revival. Deprived of an election or a referendum on the issue, they had to accept Kohl's word that they were doing the right thing, as good Europeans. And now they discover that Kohl's word was not to be trusted. Certain details are as yet unknown, but the man had clearly been bought by several dubious characters, to the tune of millions of dollars. Admitting that he took funds illegally, and then laundered them, Kohl refuses as a matter of "honor" to reveal who the donors were, or for what purposes the monies were provided. It appears, though, that the principal godfather was Francois Mitterrand, striking a deal whereby France would help Kohl to win reelection, and Germany would surrender its currency on terms that suited France. Kohl's Christian Democratic party has collapsed, and it may even implode irrecoverably from the corruption, as equivalent parties elsewhere in Europe have done. A swarm of sycophants is emerging to claim that bribes of this type are quite in order, stemming from "reasons of state" rather than shameless personal advancement. It seems that Kohl may have some years in a prison cell to reflect that a European union and a currency secretly purchased are not worth having, and nothing to do with honor.

--The European Union announced that if Joerg Haider's Freedom Party entered the Austrian government, it would sever all but the most technical diplomatic contacts with Austria. Haider has a coy way of trolling for Nazi-ish votes. But he has also profited from disgust with the Socialists and the People's party, two haggard, corrupt forces. All over western Europe, establishment parties are reeling from scandal and post-Cold War lack of mission. Kohl's travails in Germany are only the latest example. Italy's political landscape has been remade. Mitterrand's Socialists in France stole fortunes, and harbored literal fascists who happened to be Mitterrand's chums. Belgium's political insiders protected a pedophile mass-murderer. Finally, Haider and other loose-cannon outsiders have a wedge issue: runaway immigration. Because the mainstream right-of-center parties will not address it in any responsible way, it is falling to turbulent spirits. The EU's efforts to make denial the policy of a bumptious superstate will only make the problem worse.

--Western democracy is not for Russia, the bright young president Vladimir Putin says. People may be destitute all over the country, but he has authorized a 57 percent increase in military spending. On the anniversary of Lenin's creation of the secret police, he praised the work it did right down to his own days in the KGB. In case anybody is still off-message, he has just concluded a power-sharing arrangement with the Communist party in the newly elected parliament. Together, Putin's Unity party and the Communists have an assured working majority. The speaker is a Communist, and the standing committees have been packed with Communists. As in proper one-party states, the executive and legislative have come together, a process for which there is a smooth euphemism: "consolidating power." Putin likes to repeat that Soviet dictatorship is a thing of the past. Awarding himself all sorts of democratic credentials, he just happens to have sidelined all the democrats in the parliament, and is leaning on their friends in the media. The skills he displays in the use of old-style methods count for a great deal more than his daily protestations of good will.

--Sam Tanenhaus, the Vanity Fair writer who is author of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, and working on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr., took a look at a third NR editor in an article for New York Press. "James Burnham wrote a column for National Review in which he fantasized, always in the rhetoric of high logic, about World War III. It was pure bunk. But it was taken very seriously. No one thought to ask Burnham whether he was ready to abandon his comfortable digs in Connecticut for the jungles of Korea or Vietnam." Burnham did not "fantasize" about World War III; he observed that we were in it (it was more commonly called the Cold War). He was not taken seriously enough, having been exiled from polite circles for attacking containment from the right in the early Fifties. It is true that no one asked him to fight in the Korean or Vietnam War; being born in 1905 made him an unlikely draft pick. Perhaps when Daniel Kelly's first-rate biography of James Burnham finds a publisher, someone will send a copy to Tanenhaus's comfortable digs at Conde Nast.

--Salon ran a piece by Dan Savage, a gay sex columnist, who infiltrated Gary Bauer's Iowa campaign and tried to give him his bad case of the flu by licking office doorknobs and handing him a chewed pen. This is what is known as displacement. For 20 years, gay men have been giving themselves a disease a lot worse than the flu by the promiscuous intermingling of tongues and other things. One gay wretch split off his self-hatred and projected it onto Bauer. Typical of the gay subculture; typical of Salon.

--The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which administers Monticello, announced that there was a "strong likelihood" that Jefferson fathered at least one, and perhaps all, of Sally Hemings's children. The decision tracks DNA tests of Jefferson and Hemings descendants whose results were released in 1998. More important than the intimate record is the outside story: Jefferson's evasions and despair on the slavery question in the last 30 years of his life (Washington and Franklin freed all their slaves; Jefferson freed only the Hemingses). But more important than that sad endgame are the words of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's rebuke to Jefferson's practice. "All honor," as Lincoln wrote, "to the man who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times "

--In a promotion, the Zimbabwe Banking Corporation held a drawing among its account holders for a prize of $3,000. Drumroll, please. And the lucky winner is-Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe.

--For almost 30 years, Craig Claiborne was chief food writer of the New York Times, and his influence was savory indeed. Along with Julia Child and a couple of others, he showed America a horizon beyond pot roast and potatoes, and did so in marvelous style. He died last month, having come a long way from his native Mississippi Delta. This was a rich and significant life.

--Mrs. MacArthur used to attend all the right-wing anti-Communist celebrations, beginning just after the General (it was always "the General" from her lips) died in l964. She was small and thin and gorgeous-turned-pretty in her late sixties. In manner she was soft of speech, courtly, and generous in her brief comments to visiting dignitaries. In the '80s she would arrive in a wheelchair, accompanied by an aide; and, always, the little genteel reminiscences about the General, and the sweet southern smile, and the early leavetaking, back to-back to the suite, the General's suite, at the Waldorf-Astoria. When President Truman dismissed MacArthur in 1951, the returning commander of the U.N. forces in Korea was greeted with a frenzied adulation. He had not been back in America, not since commanding the Pacific war, and serving as emperor of the defeated Japan, which he had brought out of its humiliated shambles into democratic prosperity. The then-owner of the Waldorf- Astoria, a widow, exuberantly advised the General and Mrs. MacArthur that they could have their spacious suite at cost-"for as long as you want it." In late January, Jean MacArthur died, 48 years after first availing herself of the Waldorf's hospitality. She was a lovely lady, and is reunited, at last, with the General. -WFB

The Race Begins

John McCain won a broad, deep victory in New Hampshire. He racked up sizable pluralities among men and women, among young and old, among the religious and the irreligious. His win is best understood in personal, rather than ideological, terms. Mischievous commentators will rush to say that Republicans have, by supporting McCain, rejected tax cuts and the campaign-finance system. But the exit polls suggest that public-policy issues played only a marginal role in either the Republican or the Democratic race. Among those Republicans most concerned about taxes, 65 percent actually voted for the bold tax-cutters, George W. Bush and Steve Forbes. Fewer Republicans listed campaign finance as an important issue than listed world affairs, a traditional snooze.

McCain appeals to voters because of his character, not his positions. He is seen as someone who is willing to stand up for his beliefs-the same judgment that fueled Pat Buchanan's New Hampshire win in 1996-and who has strong values. He is seen as a fighter, as Bush and Forbes are not. In addition, McCain artfully fuses voters' patriotic sentiments with their disgust at Clinton. In an issue-free environment, these strengths may be enough to propel McCain to the nomination.

If, that is, he heeds the warnings hidden beneath the New Hampshire results. McCain's appeal to independents is matched by weakness among Republican core voters, who gave Bush a narrow margin. McCain fared much worse among conservatives than among liberals and moderates. Moreover, a majority of his backers express reservations about him. These results spell trouble for McCain in primaries where independents cannot vote (they were 42 percent of the voters in New Hampshire) and in, if he were the nominee, the November elections.

It would not be difficult for McCain to stop this hemorrhaging. In this campaign, he has gone out of his way to irritate conservatives-not just by constantly promoting campaign-finance regulations and trashing tax cuts, but, more important, by omission. McCain has no conservative issue of his own. Few Republicans would have more credibility than McCain in promoting missile defense or opposing women in combat. Repealing racial preferences would dovetail nicely with his emphasis on the bonds of patriotism; an attack on overweening judges would fit with his theme of restoring self-government. But so far, nothing of this sort has been heard from him. It is not too late for him to speak up.

If McCain does not take the lead on some conservative cause, he will leave an opening for a Bush comeback. Bush, for his part, would have to demonstrate some of McCain's willingness to fight. The Texas governor has seemed remarkably cavalier about the race: not watching the Democratic debates, keeping a light schedule in the closing days of the New Hampshire campaign, complaining about the disruption of his domestic routine. Bush's television ads on taxes were defensive, emphasizing that he would, like McCain, save money for Social Security and debt reduction, rather than emphasizing his approach over McCain's. Bush was coasting on his name, his money, his endorsements from party notables, and, above all, his inevitability.

Now that the aura of inevitability has been stripped from him, Bush can no longer run for the nomination as though he were a general-election candidate. His message of compassionate conservatism, especially in the face of McCain's sharp challenge, seems a collection of small-bore policies and maudlin platitudes about "touching hearts." Luckily, his platform contains the elements of a more bracing campaign theme. His support for tax cuts, school choice, free-market reform of Social Security, and tort reform should give him a claim to being a reformist outsider-one willing to take on special interests, such as lawyers and teachers' unions, that McCain doesn't touch.

Republican strategists are nervous about the possibility that the GOP primary race could drag on longer than the Democratic one. But neither leading Republican runs the risk of emerging from the race looking untrustworthy, as Al Gore does-perhaps because neither is untrustworthy, as Al Gore is. The question still to be settled is which man is best equipped to fight against him for the conservative cause.

State of Confusion

In his final State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed adding $126 billion to the budget (this according to the National Taxpayers Union). In an 89-minute speech, that works out to more than $1.6 billion per minute. Clinton was spending money at a faster clip than the government can print it-literally: The Bureau of Engraving says it can print only $1 billion a minute. Clinton clearly believes that the burgeoning surplus allows him to resurrect every spending proposal that got shot down in 1993.

So furiously was Clinton spending money that he had no time to impose logical or rhetorical order on his speech. He served up this gem toward the end of the ordeal: "Modern science has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught: The most important fact of life is our common humanity. Therefore, we should do more than just tolerate our diversity- we should honor it and celebrate it." "Therefore"? Truly, Clinton's speech was an army of cliches in search of a subsidy.

The initial Republican response was weak. Senators Susan Collins and Bill Frist were more intent on appearing inoffensive than on making the case for a conservative agenda. Collins even bragged that last year, "Republicans boosted education spending by 500 million dollars more than the president's budget, and we added funds for children with special needs." Republicans never get credit for that kind of one-upmanship, nor should they. House Speaker Denny Hastert kept talking about finding compromises with the president and explaining that "the devil's in the details."

By all means, Republicans should cooperate with the president when possible: on admitting China to the World Trade Organization; on enacting tax credits to help individuals purchase health care; and on establishing tax-advantaged Individual Development Accounts to finance health, education, and retirement expenses. On this last point in particular, Republicans have not shown much strategic imagination.

Neither has the Republican opposition done its job when Clinton is able to adopt its signature issues. Eliminating the national debt and reducing the marriage penalty were supposed to top the congressional agenda for the year. Clinton, unlike the Republicans, understands that debt reduction will not be a practical or political bar to all the new spending he wants. His marriage-penalty proposal, meanwhile, unfairly penalizes mothers who stay at home-just as George W. Bush's does.

Pace Speaker Hastert, the devil's in the direction Clinton wants to go. For too long, Republicans have shrunk from the task of making the case against his bad, though popular, ideas. It is past time to explain that putting still more students in remedial college classes is no substitute for fixing America's high schools, and that shrinking class sizes and connecting kids to the Internet will not do it either. Republicans should refuse to expand Head Start funding until the program shows some results. They should pound Clinton for proposing tax hikes on corporations (a proposal that Bill Bradley and John McCain have both picked up). They should point out that no matter how Draconian our child-support enforcement policies get, they will never compensate for the absence of fathers from their children's homes. That guns are routinely used for self-defense. That the notion that women get only 75 cents to a man's dollar is a myth.

Yet saying the right things about each issue will not be enough. What Clinton has done is to throw out so many issues that there are effectively none; to vitiate politics as an act of deliberation and choice. The reinvigoration of American politics will require a conservative agenda rooted in contemporary circumstances. These circumstances include an inadequate defense, and an administration that, judging from Clinton's speech, views the maintenance of the obsolete ABM Treaty and the creation of an anti-missile defense as equally important priorities; an illegitimacy rate that threatens republican institutions; a judiciary that has usurped too much power; widespread abortion; runaway middle-class entitlements; a tax burden that is far too high; and much more besides. The Republican party should, in short, treat its moral obligations more seriously than the advice of its anxious pollsters. The point, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, is not to defeat Clintonism but to transcend it.

Lost at Sea

The soul of socialism, red or national, has ever been attracted to crowds and campaigns: the hortatory slogans; the bused "spontaneous" demonstrators; the maximum leader, stepping from the control room to publicly direct the cheers that he has manufactured. In the case of Elian Gonzalez, the socialist stage machinery has a 6-year-old to play with.

The latest scene of the production involved the trip of Elian's grandmothers, Raquel Rodriguez and Mariela Quintana, to the United States to meet with friendly government officials, including attorney general Janet Reno, and with Elian himself. The event was marked, as all such are, by grotesque inversions of truth. A stone-faced Reno insisted that "the person who speaks for this child is his one surviving parent." But the reason Elian has only one surviving parent is that his other, with whom he lived, died in the effort to bring him to this country, and to freedom. The National Council of Churches flew the grandmothers to the United States. Thus they did the bidding of a country whose churches labor under the strictest political control, and where freedom of worship is a joke. Raquel Rodriguez defamed her dead daughter by saying that she had been "pushed" into fleeing by a man who "was violent and threatened her." But she was leaving an entire country run by a violent man who threatens anyone-black marketeer, Seventh Day Adventist, homosexual-who deviates from his party line.

The one moment of clean air and good sense in the spectacle came from Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, a 70-year-old Dominican nun and college president, described as a good friend of Janet Reno's. Her house was picked as neutral ground on which Elian and his grandmothers could briefly meet. She went into the encounter neutral, but came out of it with her mind made up. The grandmothers, she said, seemed to be under pressure. "The child has been in the torment of the seas and now he's been in the torment of political agendas. Somehow, we must find for him calm seas, at least for a while."

Some editorial cartoons have joked, more or less good-humoredly, over the distractions and witlessness of American life, to which Elian is now exposed (video games, pro sports, etc.). But the socialist life he left is characterized by regular, orchestrated, society-wide storms. There is no escaping them, because your rulers, who are also your employers, who are also potentially your jailers, take strict attendance. Elian is now the center of a storm of his own; if he goes back, he will join the crowd scenes in all the future storms Castro chooses to summon up.

Champion of Champions

Don Budge belonged to an imperial succession of great American tennis players who grew up on the cement public courts of southern California: Ellsworth ("Elly") Vines, Budge, Jack ("Jake") Kramer, Richard ("Pancho") Gonzales. They all played the "big," or power, game. Kramer formulated it as "controlled power," employing an important adjective. He and Budge theorized about "controlled power" for us junior players at the West Side Tennis Club after the war. They despised mere "sluggers" and mere "hitters." Budge may have been the greatest of the great players named above.

But a caveat is needed. Such players, when they are dominant, seem to enter a phase when they are unbeatable. Theoretically, there is a limit to the things a tennis racket can do to a fuzzy sphere. The great players push close to this limit, the edge of the envelope; they enter the "Zone." This tends to moot arguments about comparative greatness.

Don Budge was the first player to win the "Grand Slam," a term from the popular country-club game of bridge, and applied by sportswriter Allison Danzig to Budge's 1938 feat of winning the Australian, French, All England, and American championships. That year, he was in the Zone. But Budge may have played his greatest match, maybe the greatest of all matches, on July 20, 1937, at Wimbledon. This was a Davis Cup match, pitting the United States against Germany, the red-haired Californian against the great and elegant Baron Gottfried von Cramm. If Budge had lost that match, the next year's Davis Cup contest would have been played in Berlin, becoming a Nazi political extravaganza. Indeed, Adolf Hitler phoned the Baron just before he walked out onto Centre Court with Budge.

The Baron, who despised the Nazis, was also for an afternoon in the Zone. Informed opinion holds that no other player in the world could have beaten either of them that day. Von Cramm went up 4-1 over Budge in the fifth set. Budge fought his way back to 7-6. The deciding game went through 18 points. On match point for Budge, von Cramm hit a sharp forehand crosscourt and ran to the net. Budge lunged, hit his forehand down the line, and fell to the grass. Lying there, he waited for the linesman's call. But first "I heard the cheers begin to swell. They were different cheers. The ball had landed miraculously in the corner." Knots of exhausted spectators remained in the darkening stands for hours after the players left the court.

Until the 1960s, tennis was intimately connected with the idea of the gentleman. Budge's contemporary, the near-great Ted Schroeder, summed it up: "What impressed me, and what distresses me now, is that Budge epitomized what we were all taught as tennis players, which is so lacking now. Look like a champ, act like a champ, try to play like a champ."

J. Donald Budge died at 84, of complications after an automobile accident and a long hospitalization.

-Jeffrey Hart

Notes & Asides

-- Dear Bill: Okay, you've had bigger honors but, I assure you, none more heartfelt!

Warmest regards,

Pat Sajak

Severna Park, Md.

Dear Pat: I like yours the best! Many, many thanks.

Cordially, Bill

--Dear Mr. Buckley: I would appreciate a response to this question: What is the definition of "not for profit," in contrast to "non-profit"? I think your answer would enlighten many of your readers, since I believe "not for profit" is a misleading term.

Respectfully,

William M. Fuchs, MD

Huntington, N.Y.

Dear Dr. Fuchs: Relying on whatever competence I have in language, I herewith opine that there is no difference. If the two terms have acquired a meaning under law, I don't know it. You should consult your friendly lawyer or, for that matter, why not your IRS agent? Cordially, -WFB