Tuesday, May 22, 2001 1:23 P.M. EDT

The Great Greatness Debate
Remember "national greatness conservatism"? The Weekly Standard's William Kristol and David Brooks put the idea forward in a 1997 article in The Wall Street Journal, in which they issued a rather vague call to arms--"it would be silly to try to lay out some sort of 10-point program for American greatness"--that mostly entailed a rejection of the libertarian, antigovernment strain of conservatism. "Free government--limited but energetic--is not the enemy," they wrote. "It can be used, in the spirit of Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt, to enhance competition and opportunity." Their examples, though, turned out to be pretty standard conservative proposals:

Today this means policies that would bust the great public trusts of our time--the education, health and Social Security monopolies. It means welfare programs that demand personal responsibility. It means education policies that promote high standards, challenge our best talents and promote scientific and national progress. It means taking seriously questions of public morality, while recognizing the limitations of legal sanctions. For example, in lieu of a consensus to outlaw abortion, it might mean a campaign to reduce the number of abortions year by year, via adoption and in other ways.

Now, In a New Republic piece that is generating a lot of buzz, Franklin Foer looks at how national-greatness conservatism has evolved in the years since:

Kristol and Brooks have come a long way in the past three years. These days they champion campaign finance reform and environmental protection. They oppose the Bush administration's proposed repeal of the estate tax because, as Brooks puts it, "We should be concerned with the widening income gap." They attack corporate power with Naderesque ferocity. No one can accuse them of being mere libertarians in Bull Moose garb anymore. National-greatness conservatism, to the surprise of many, has come to mean something. It's a real ideology now. It's just not a conservative one.

What happened, Foer argues, is that Kristol and Brooks, along with Marshall Wittmann, who runs the greatness site conservativereform.org, embraced the presidential candidacy of John McCain--a man who personifies the patriotism for which they yearn--and ended up following his lead on policy questions too. Where does that leave them now? Writes Foer:

In Brooks's view, the national-greatness conservatives should become a Republican version of the New Democrats--a movement to reform the party from within. But New Democrats took over the party in the early '90s, after it had lost dismally for more than a decade. The GOP, by contrast, controls the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most of the nation's governors' mansions; most Republicans don't see the need to blow it up and start again. That's why Wittmann is considering a more radical route: the creation of an entirely new political party.

Wittmann's site even features a Web log written under the moniker "The Bull Moose." Foer provides the greatness boys with a useful refresher on history, noting that the actual Bull Moose Party, under whose banner Teddy Roosevelt ran for president in 1912, produced a two-term Democratic president.

National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg has a thoughtful criticism of the national-greatness camp, complaining that while the movement has its virtues, it's been transformed into a cult of McCain. "When you hitch your wagon to a man on a white horse, it's very difficult to steer," Goldberg says, complaining that on Wittmann's site, "you will find lots of interesting things, some of them worthwhile and conservative, but you won't find a 'new' conservatism. You will find a Santeria shrine that uses Republican saints like Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln as substitutes for the real deity, John McCain."

An editorial by Brooks in this week's Weekly Standard takes a friendlier stance toward Bush. It says the "fall-back cliché" of Democrats and the press "is that Bush and his team are tools of corporate America." Counters Brooks: "Well, there may still be a few pink diaper babies who cling to the Woody Guthrie worldview that pits rapacious and polluting corporations against the common man, but most people have a more complex view of the world." Wittmann may not be one of them, though: Conservativereform.org claims that "monied special interests wield their influence over Washington to thwart change at every twist and turn."

For a libertarian response to the original Kristol-Brooks essay, check out this 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Virginia Postrel and James Glassman.

Sensitive to the Enemy
The new Disney film "Pearl Harbor" will be released in specially edited versions in Japan and Germany in a craven attempt to avoid offending citizens of the former Axis powers, the Sun, a British tabloid, reports. The newspaper quotes a Disney source: "We've tried very hard not to portray the Japanese in a very bad light. They are a huge market and accounted for 20 per cent of profits for Titanic." Reuters reports Japanese-Americans are protesting the U.S. version of the film--opening Friday--complaining that the movie could stir "anti-Asian sentiment." Seems to us the Japanese should have thought of that on Dec. 6, 1941.

Power to China
"The United States may be facing a national energy crisis--one that will be punctuated by blackouts in California and probably many other states this summer--but across the Pacific Ocean in Shanghai, the Jiangnan Shipyards will be running at full power building warships for the communist Chinese regime, thanks to funding provided by the U.S. government," Human Events reports, detailing funding from the Export-Import Bank of the United States that has helped two U.S. corporations--Westinghouse Electric and Bechtel Power--aid China in building the Qinshan nuclear power plant near Shanghai. The loans, approved by President Clinton, amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fuzzy Math at Census Bureau
Confused by dueling census reports, "one saying that the nuclear family was recovering, the other announcing that the nuclear family is tanking"? John Leo sorts through the statistics and says the Census Bureau is "arranging numbers that make the percentage of traditional families seem smaller." An April Census report claimed the proportion of American children living with their married biological parents had jumped to 56% in 1996 from 51% in 1991. Leo explains:

The rise was imaginary. It was based on the peculiar way the census people keep family statistics: a mom and dad living with their biological children don't count as traditional if another person lives in the household, a boarder perhaps, or a relative. With the economic boom, many grandparents who were staying with a married son or daughter found they could afford their own housing.

A month later, the census came out with another report claiming the number of nuclear families is shrinking. Leo notes that enemies of the traditional family have a history of playing games with numbers to maximize the number of "nontraditional" ones: "One trick to get the percentage down was to count the family as nontraditional if mom had any job at all in the workforce, even just a couple of hours a week. Empty-nesters and newlyweds were nontraditional, too."

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne parses the Census's marriage-and-family stats even further: "Between 1990 and 1996, there was a continuing decline in the proportion of households with children headed by couples. But there has been no decline since then. In fact, between 1999 and 2000, there was a modest--though perhaps statistically insignificant--increase in the proportion of households with children headed by two parents." Dionne notes further that "the big declines in the proportion of households made up of married couples with kids had already occurred by 1990. The decline in the past 10 years is quite modest." Mickey Kaus, the nation's most vigorous champion of welfare reform, suggests that the traditional family's recent modest comeback is a partial result of the 1996 reform bill that Dionne "shrilly opposed."

Congress is considering "mandatory programs to promote marriage among the poor," the Boston Globe reports. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector proposes what amounts to a taxpayer-funded dowry; states, under his plan, would "offer women at high risk of out-of-wedlock childbirth $5,000 if they get married, with $1,000 payouts coming in each of the next five years if the women remain married," the Globe reports.

The Brock Publicity Machine
Last week we noted that former journalist David Brock, recently seen on Capitol Hill testifying against Solicitor General-designate Ted Olson, has a self-interested reason to seek the spotlight now: His book, a supposed exposé of the right called "Blinded by the Right," is scheduled for publication in November. Now Inside.com reports Random House is considering moving up the publication date to take advantage of Brock's second 15 minutes of fame. "In Blinded By the Right," Doug Pepper, a senior editor of Random House's Crown imprint, tells Inside.com, Brock "shows the machinations of 'the vast right-wing conspiracy,' and how he came to terms with himself politically, as a journalist, and a gay man." Inside.com adds that "Brock talks about Olson and his wife, Barbara, in the book, Pepper says. 'They were friends of his. He hung out with them.' "

Clinton sycophant Joe Conason argues that The American Spectator's Arkansas Project, the subject of the Olson-Brock dispute, "wasn't journalism," and therefore wasn't protected by the First Amendment. We had no idea Conason had (to borrow a phrase from the New York Times editorial page) such a constricted view of constitutional rights. After all, as the New York Post notes, what Larry Flynt does, for which he claims the protection of the First Amendment, is scarcely journalism.

Tucker Carlson, writing in New York magazine, offers another rejoinder: The Arkansas Project--which by most accounts didn't include Brock's reporting--simply wasn't effective journalism:

[Spectator editor] Bob Tyrrell was never at the center of a powerful conspiracy. He was a buffoon. The Arkansas Project never came close to bringing down the president. The "investigation" didn't even produce a credible magazine story. Indeed, the Arkansas Project--wasteful, misguided, and credibility-sapping--is one of the main reasons The American Spectator no longer exists in recognizable form. It's now a business magazine. The Arkansas Project didn't destroy Clinton. It destroyed The American Spectator.

Other Clinton news: The U.S. Supreme Court has turned down an appeal of Whitewater figure David Hale's conviction on state charges of lying to Arkansas regulators. The Washington Post reports that the House impeachment managers are thriving. Two of them--Rep. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and ex-Rep. Charles Canady of Florida--have jobs in the Bush administration, and ex-Rep. James Rogan of California may be next. And the New York Daily News reports that "Monica Lewinsky wants prosecutors to return the little blue dress that drove Bill Clinton wild--and nearly out of office."

Zero-Tolerance Watch
An 18-year-old high school senior spent nine hours in jail yesterday, charged with felony possession of a weapon on school property--because a sheriff's deputy found a kitchen knife in her car. "The knife, which has a 5-inch blade, was wedged under the front passenger seat, a remnant of moving over the weekend," reports the Fort Myers News-Press. Lindsay Brown, a National Merit Scholar, has also been hit with a five-day suspension from Estero High School (motto: "Your future begins here").

You Don't Say
"Most people all over the country do what people elsewhere do. They get up in the morning, go to work, struggle to survive and sometimes do well." For this penetrating insight we can thank San Francisco Chronicle columnist Harley Sorensen, who describes himself as "a longtime journalist and iconoclast."

(Thanks to Tomas Carrasquillo and Jim Wickenhiser. If you have a tip for Best of the Web Today, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)