Leader (Possibly) of the Self-Revising Forces
One day in December 1992, House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich privately confided to a group of admirers--scribbling the words onto a piece of easel paper for emphasis--that his "primary mission" in life was to serve, among other things, as the "Definer of Civilization." Today, of course, a dozen years of civilization later, Mr. Gingrich is long retired from public office, and the news market for his once-patented hubris hiccups is not what it used to be. So the daily papers are sadly silent on the question: We simply do not know whether the man still fancies himself the "Definer of Civilization." Perhaps that responsibility, too, has since devolved upon Speaker Hastert.
"Definer of Entitlement Benefit Cuts," however, appears to be another matter altogether. This mission Gingrich clearly means to keep for himself. Which only makes sense; it was always one of his favorites.
During the titanic Contract with America budget battles of 1995-96, you will recall, it was Newt Gingrich--more often and more loudly than anyone else in American politics--who demanded terminological precision in public debate about the federal government's entitlement accounts. The Republican congressional caucus was proposing to restrict the growth of Medicare expenditures to 6.5 percent a year. President Clinton and his Democratic allies on the Hill were repeatedly denouncing that proposal as an actual "cut" in Medicare spending. Media types were too often adopting the latter usage as their own. And Gingrich was quite lathered up about the whole thing.
"We have had a shameful performance by the elite media," the Definer told a Republican women's conference in May 1996, to take but one of many, many examples. "To the best of my knowledge, not a single White House reporter has ever stopped the president and said, 'Mr. President, how can you say the word cut when it's a $2,500-per-year increase?' Not a single Washington White House reporter has said, 'Mr. President, isn't it just wrong to mislead 85-year-old people?'" That the president could stoop so low, Gingrich had elsewhere remarked, proved "how totally, morally bankrupt the modern Democratic party is."
Which brings us--totally, morally bankrupt-wise--back to the present, where a different political struggle over a long-term entitlement is just getting underway. Nowadays, as Fred Barnes reported in our December 20 issue, a Republican president is likely to propose a Social Security reform involving optional private investment accounts coupled with some sort of reduction in the rate of growth of future benefits. And Democrats, fixing on the slower rate of growth of future Social Security benefits, are already beginning to attack the plan as a devastating "cut" of Grandma's living expenses.
And Newt Gingrich, again, is quite lathered up about the whole thing. Except that this time, oddly enough, he seems to be reading President Clinton's old lines, rather than his own. "I can't imagine how you can sell a benefit cut in a partisan environment," he told the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, warning the White House that Republicans might lose control of Congress if they attempt to slow the growth of Social Security spending. 'Cause lookit, as Gingrich explained in a letter to the editor we ourselves had published not long before: There are just a couple of "basic facts" worth considering about Social Security politics. And the first one is: "A big cut in benefits is a big cut in benefits."
Funny. Never used to be.
The Old Dying Babies Gambit
More ammo for Newt Gingrich, if he wants it: According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, "some of the steps the government is now taking or talking about--like cutting back further on entitlements"--would only serve to "aggravate" an existing "situation" that ought to be "simply unacceptable" in the modern United States. Mr. Kristof neglects to specify which current or prospective entitlement cuts he has in mind. And he is only slightly more specific about the general problem he believes those cuts would make worse, citing "a pattern of recent statistics dribbling out of the federal government suggesting that for those on the bottom in America, life in our new Gilded Age is getting crueler."
To his credit, however, Kristof's January 12 op-ed piece does manage to address one extremely specific example of the aforementioned ominous "pattern," a set of numbers he says were "buried in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" which, unfortunately, "didn't get much attention." Believe it or not, "here's a wrenching fact," Kristof tells us: "If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year. . . . Babies are less likely to survive in America, with a health care system that we think is the best in the world, than in impoverished and autocratic Cuba."
Which would, indeed, be a "wrenching fact" if--at least the way Kristof implies--it were any kind of fact at all.
It's not, though. First off, the CDC document at issue, Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2002, isn't recent; it was published on February 11 of last year. Second, the infant mortality figures Kristof is belatedly wrenching himself over weren't "buried" in that report, and it strikes The Scrapbook as particularly embarrassing for a New York Times columnist to now complain that the numbers "didn't get much attention" when they came out. This, because the Times's own Anahad O'Connor published a reasonably long story about the Deaths data the very next day. And, more embarrassing still, O'Connor's Times report: (1) very clearly identified the phenomenon that Kristof contends has been ignored ("U.S. Infant Mortality Rate Rises Slightly"); (2) very intelligently summarized CDC's conclusions about what's likely to have caused the change; and (3) thereby made it all but impossible for any intelligent human being to conclude, as Nicholas Kristof nevertheless has, that healthy American newborns are dying like flies because Republicans in Congress are stingy.
Nope, as Anahad O'Connor explained almost exactly a year ago, the CDC is inclined to attribute a slight recent uptick in American infant mortality to the increasing number of "high-risk pregnancies and births" produced by, among other things, "fertility treatments that have led to higher rates of multiple births" and "complications, including low-birth-weight babies" and "premature infants." And far from being associated with "poverty" in the "new Gilded Age," these riskier, more vulnerable deliveries appear, if anything, to be a consequence of affluence. Low-birth-weight natality, O'Connor pointed out, "climbed three times as fast in suburbs as they did in cities in the 1990s."
Bottom line: The United States now has a "higher infant mortality rate" than Cuba because in the United States doctors typically make heroic and phenomenally expensive efforts to deliver and save babies that are routinely miscarried or targeted for selective abortion in much of the rest of the world.
Maybe Nick Kristof should try being the Definer of Civilization instead. That job's open.
This, They'll Correct, Though
An editor's note from the January 6 edition of the New York Times: "An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers."
Sounds like this Batman character might come in handy up on West 43rd Street.