Party Hardy - For Now, Anyway
The great story is prosperity. It is here, and with a vengeance. There is so much money washing around the country that people have to get out of bed at dawn on Saturdays to get it all spent before the week is out.
Treat yourself to an old-fashioned Saturday sleep-in and you won’t have enough time to spend it all before next week’s bundle starts rolling in.
Washington journalists, trained to concentrate on politics, keep saying that news has ended. Nonsense. Political news may have ended, but the economic news is thunderous.
Later it will have a thunderous effect on politics, but that inevitability seems far-fetched right now, like summer heat lightning seen on a distant horizon. Meanwhile we are wallowing in a gorgeous, juicy economic boom.
Millionaires are multiplying like flies.
Farmland is being paved over with thousands of miles of new streets running through thousands of new housing developments.
Woodlands are being chopped down for “industrial parks.”
Suburbs are sprouting gigantic new malls and, for buyers so hot to consume that they can’t take the extra 10 minutes needed to reach the big malls for all-out spending, strip malls proliferate along the highways.
Retail shopping warehouses packed with consumer goods are rising wherever a farmer is willing to sell his cornfield and become a millionaire ex-farmer. Hardware, stationery, groceries, toys, computers, electronic playthings - name it and there will be a warehouse selling it 15 miles beyond the inner city.
This fat, rich America sprawls over such a far-flung landscape that it is accessible only to motorists. And what a show of car wealth you see maneuvering on vast retail parking lots. German Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, Audis. Japan’s luxurious Infiniti and Lexus. Gaudy, gas-guzzling Range Rovers.
Stock markets - everybody knows about the stock markets. Zingo! Bingo! Shazam and Wow! Lord, how the money rolls in!
One effect of the boom is to immunize President Clinton against his enemies. And this is one president certain to be remembered, as Richard Nixon is, for his enemies.
How hard it must be, how unfair it must seem to those who detest Clinton, how unjust that his popularity remains high despite every effort to cut him down to size.
Paula Jones, Whitewater, Dick Morris with his polls and prostitute, Asian money finagling, Clinton’s lack of perceptible political beliefs, the swarm of independent investigators harassing his administration - nothing shakes the public’s contentment with this presidency, if the popularity polls are correct, as polls nowadays usually are, alas.
The public’s attitude appears to be “First things first.” The first thing now is the big money. The public seems indisposed to trade the joys of the fattened wallet for the sour pleasures of humiliating another president.
When Joseph P. Kennedy, founder of the famous political clan, was asked how he managed to get safely out of the market with a fortune before the 1929 crash, he said, “Only a fool holds out for top dollar.” Today’s Americans may think that only a fool would create a political crisis when times are this good.
Now, somebody will note that not everyone is raking in the money. True, but here Clinton has the best of all possible worlds. Those making the biggest bucks are upper-brackets people, Republican by nature yet not apt to let political affiliation deprive them of constantly expanding income.
Those left out of the barbecue are the bottom-brackets crowd; to wit, people who vote Democratic no matter how miserably they are rewarded, and people who don’t vote at all.
This wretched bunch is being told to shape up or ship out, as the Clinton government withdraws from the old Democratic tradition of looking charitably on life’s losers.
Laissez-faire is triumphant. Economic Darwinism is in the air. A magnificent, unleashed capitalism - freed of all social or moral restraints - will be good for life’s losers in the long run. One of these days. Such is the philosophy of the boom-boom age.
Later, we shall see. xxxx