I remember talking to Dave Bonior, my counterpart in the Democrats, and we proposed coming up with a special committee, where we could put each party’s crazies, and let them drive each other nuts. I would propose one of our homophobe Creationists, and he would propose one of his Communist eco-freaks. It became a running joke for us.
My biggest task was to keep the pressure on the Clinton Administration. To the extent that I had any form of national reputation as anything other than the billionaire murderer who had bought a House seat, it was as a serious deficit hawk. (I also had a reputation as a neo-isolationist, but that was a whole different story!) Now, in 1998, by all forecasts we would actually turn a surplus! The default Democratic response to this unnatural occurrence would be to spend more money, to bring us back into the much more natural deficit state. As a deficit hawk in a position of leadership, I had to keep the Republican Congress riled up, keep the pressure on, and not allow any backtracking.
This wasn’t hard to do. It simply involved unrelenting public pressure on the Administration. All the ‘business’ Republicans, as opposed to the ideological and social conservatives, took every conceivable opportunity with the press and the various talk shows to push the benefits of deficit reduction, and now, the surplus. In particular, we were pushing the need to maintain a surplus for the foreseeable future, in order to pay down the debt. In this we were aided, ironically enough, by Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Greenspan was, in my modest opinion as one of the richest men in America (and not just because I knew a lot of future history), incredibly overrated as a financial genius. He had recently started claiming that budget surpluses were bad, that paying off our national debt would lower the value and trading status of our national debt instruments like Treasury bills and Treasury bonds, and would otherwise lead to the end of Western Civilization and life on this planet as we knew it. By now I had enough reputation on the subject to be able to go on the Sunday morning talk shows and argue the opposite.
I used the same technique I had used in the House bank scandal and the House Post Office scandal. While others had argued about various outrages, I reduced it to a level that the most average viewer could understand. Now I pushed, “How hard can it be? Average Americans dream of the day they can pay off the mortgage. Average Americans hold mortgage burning parties, and half of them invite the bankers they got the mortgage from! Being debt free is every person’s dream; why shouldn’t it be this nation’s?”
Inasmuch as the only responses to this extremely plain spoken and practical question were highly technical high finance explanations that required doctorates in economics to understand, public opinion was on our side. I knew that in the future, at least in my original timeline, the problem would be solved in a totally different way. The Republican Party, in thrall to the no-tax coalition of Grover Norquist and the billionaire elite donors to the party, drastically reduced taxes, especially on the rich, and put us back into deficit. This was totally separate from the fact that we managed to blunder our way into two separate wars, without any coherent plans to pay for either. The Presidency of Bush 43 put us trillions in debt!
Grover wasn’t a major factor in my calculations at the moment. He couldn’t threaten me with having donors withdraw campaign contributions from me. He was still in the process of forming his unholy alliance with the Tea Party, which really didn’t exist yet. He could threaten me with trying to find candidates to run against me in a primary, which was a distinct possibility. Primary battles generally play to the hard core party base and not the much larger electorate found in the general election. In addition, primaries have lower turnouts than general elections. Combine the two and the hard core conservative base can overthrow an incumbent, but then lose in the general election to a more moderate candidate from the opposing party.
While it wasn’t having a credible effect on me, at least at the moment, I could see that it easily could affect some of my colleagues. I told Marty to give it some thought and then to pass along to the American Renaissance Institute the benefits of supporting other deficit hawk candidates and incumbents.
One big problem for me that spring turned out to be the disaster at Columbine. In April a pair of Goth crazies decided to shoot up their high school in Colorado. As the author of the Defending the Second Amendment Act I found myself at the center of the firestorm over gun control. It was a no-win position to be in. It faded after a few weeks, as all of these things do, usually because something else dreadful takes everybody’s attention. What a God-awful situation!
By mid-spring it was obvious that Charlie really wanted to join the Marines. He was participating eagerly in Sergeant Rodriguez’ prep workouts, and his grades seemed sufficient to escape Hereford High. We relented by mid-semester when the sergeant showed us the paperwork that he was going to run through as Robert NMI Buckman, and we signed. I then told Charlie that if he tried to weasel out of graduation, he was going to be sent to Parris Island in pieces. Even Marilyn got into the act with, “I didn’t go through ten hours of labor all on my own not to see you graduate!” combined with vigorous finger wagging.
“She gets scary at times,” he whispered to me later.
“Tell me about it!” I whispered back.
Charlie graduated, and then he and a bunch of his buddies drove down to Ocean City for a week. He had asked if he could fly them to Hougomont, and I laughed that one away! No way did I need to start an international incident and war when those twits decided to moon somebody I might actually know, like the Prime Minister! We simply managed to rent a house for the week, and made them all cough up some cash, and then sent a couple of drivers to keep them out of trouble. I reminded Charlie that a prison record would keep him out of the Marines.
On the plus side, nobody ended up needing bail money, and no angry fathers of young women chased down Hereford High’s football team. On the down side, I don’t think the rental agent was overly amused by the number of empty beer bottles left in the place. It was with a sigh of relief that we turned Charlie over to Sergeant Rodriguez in August.
Later that fall, we were faced with a tragedy. Dum-Dum had been moping around ever since Charlie had left for the Marines. She was his dog. He had picked her from the litter, he had named her (after a fashion), and he had taken good care of her. She had mostly slept in his room, usually on his bed. Once he left for Parris Island Dum-Dum had been disconsolate, going back and forth between his empty bedroom and ours. The first week of October, she started having accidents in the kitchen and family room.
I had a bad feeling about this. We had gotten her in late 1982, when Charlie was a little over one. Now he was seventeen, and Dum-Dum was sixteen. In dog years that was just way beyond old. Marilyn took her to the vet, who kept her overnight to run a few tests. We got a call the next day; Dum-Dum wouldn’t be coming home. She was suffering from kidney failure, and probably cancer. Marilyn called me about it, but neither of us wanted to drag out the old girl’s pain. We had her put to sleep.
Holly and Molly wanted to know why we couldn’t get a transplant or something, and Marilyn had to explain that it would be cruel to drag out Dum-Dum’s pain and suffering. Marilyn and the girls cried their eyes out that night, and I can’t say I was in any better shape. The twins wanted to get a new dog right away, but we decided to wait a bit. I told them we could do something next year.