Kristol wrote about “Big Tim,” and said Tim enjoyed being a big shot. But he was just about the nicest big shot in Washington — decent and unpretentious, remarkably kind and thoughtful. Mr. Cohen wrote “In Praise of Being Cut Off,” and says content for platforms does not make a story. Today, you arrive anywhere and surf the Net. Being “always on” is being always off, to something. Mr. Krugman wrote about a “Fiscal Poison Pill.” He says he realized that the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration are, in effect, a fiscal poison pill aimed at future administrations. Here’s Kristol:
Before he was a journalist, Tim Russert, who died suddenly Friday, was a pol. In both incarnations, he was a pro’s pro. Throughout, he was an awfully good guy.
I met Tim in the summer of 1976 during Pat Moynihan’s primary election campaign for the Senate. Tim had just graduated from law school, and was dispatched by the Democratic boss of Buffalo, Joe Crangle, to see what was going on at Moynihan campaign headquarters in Manhattan.
Tim showed up one day, looked around, and took a few of us out for a beer. It took me about two minutes of conversation to realize that Tim was far savvier about politics — especially New York Democratic politics — than we at headquarters were, but he was polite and pretended to listen to our observations. In fact, as Tim told me later, he quickly concluded that most of us had no idea what we were doing — which was certainly the case.
Nonetheless, Moynihan was able to squeak by Bella Abzug in the primary — and, with Tim playing an increasingly important role in the campaign, he went on to win the general election easily.
Pat asked Tim to come to Washington as his press aide and counselor. Tim claimed to be worried that he wouldn’t be as good as the Ivy League hotshots Pat was assembling on his staff. Pat responded: “What they know, you can learn. What you know, they can’t learn.”
In fact, Tim already knew plenty, learned the rest in a flash, and quickly became Moynihan’s top aide. He went from there to Mario Cuomo’s staff, where Tim’s already elevated reputation among political insiders soared to new heights. When Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign ran into difficulties, The New Yorker reported that Hart beseeched his aides, “Get me a Russert!”
That year, Hart lost to Walter Mondale, and politics lost Tim to journalism. He joined NBC, where his manifold talents led to another fast rise. He took over “Meet the Press” in 1991, and made it the most important interview show on TV.
Tim was now a big shot, and he rather enjoyed being a big shot. But he was just about the nicest big shot in Washington — decent and unpretentious, remarkably kind and genuinely thoughtful. In a city consumed by relationships and networking, Tim was known for his friendships and generosity. He became widely admired because his everyday behavior — with respect to staff, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers — was so routinely admirable.
Tim was serious about serious things, but he wasn’t solemn.
Early in Moynihan’s first term, the senator placed a call to an upstate county chairman. The guy answered the phone, and Pat started to talk to him about some issue of the day.
“Tim — I don’t have time for this,” the politician interrupted the startled senator. “What … what … this is Senator Moynihan!” — Pat tried to explain. “Oh, [expletive] Tim, I’ve had enough of this [expletive],” said the local, hanging up on the esteemed solon.
This is how Pat Moynihan discovered that his press aide was accustomed to entertaining both his own staff in D.C. and politicians and friends around the country with hilarious, impromptu performances featuring dead-on mimicry of Moynihan’s distinctive speaking style.
I last heard Russert do his Moynihan imitation about a year ago. We were having lunch, and for some reason got to discussing Pat’s almost-Russert-career-ending phone call. Tim launched into a boisterous imitation of his beloved mentor. I cracked up, heads turned, and a few people at neighboring tables even joined in the laughter.
Now Tim is gone, at age 58 — at a moment when he had everything to live for, professionally and personally. But thanks to his book, “Big Russ & Me,” he had lived to see his father, whom he revered, recognized as an embodiment of the hard work, patriotism and decency of the greatest generation. Tim was happy that he had encouraged others to recognize our debt to that generation, and to their own fathers. As Tim said to Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” “Jay, as I’ve gone around the country, people line up to get their book signed, they’ll say, ‘Make it out to Big Mike, Big Fred, Big Tom, Big Al’ … There’s a lot of big guys out there. There really are.”
Tim also lived to enjoy the college graduation last month of his son, Luke, of whom he was very proud. To celebrate the occasion, Tim, his wife, Maureen, and Luke visited Rome. They attended the Wednesday audience with Pope Benedict XVI, then had lunch with Cardinal John Patrick Foley, who had baptized Luke. As the lunch ended, Tim asked the cardinal to bless them.
In high spirits, Tim headed back to Washington to prepare for his Sunday show. It was not to be. On Friday, Tim’s heart gave way. He died too young. But he lived more than a full life — a life overflowing with achievements, and friendships, and love, and joy.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
About a quarter-century ago, I was in West Beirut at the Commodore Hotel, once described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. You lined up to use the telex. There was a war on in a divided city. There was also plenty of Black Label.
It was hard to get in, harder to get out. The airport was closed. You sailed from Cyprus to Jounieh, a village north of Beirut. The ship couldn’t dock there so you transferred at sea to small fishing boats that took you ashore. Jumping from one to the other across a yard of heaving water caused some women to scream or balk.
We were comfortable enough at the Commodore. You got used to the shelling. Some Beirut kids, it was said, could not sleep without the sounds of war because that was all they had known.
It was good to be cut off. As a journalist, that’s what you wanted to be: cut off, except for that telex line.
I became a journalist because I wanted to tell stories. To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.
Beirut gave you time. Most of war is sitting around. I watched kids on the sidewalks, facades of buildings blown away behind them, constructing elaborate castles of cigarette cartons, flimsy creations that defied shelling as the spirit defies measurement.
At the Central Bank, I met a young woman. I was waiting. There was a lot of that. Her name was Sana. Later she took me to her family’s shuttered apartment. All but she had fled to Europe. There were heavy drapes over the ornate furniture and the airless, opulent rooms spoke of a rich life eclipsed.
I felt like a trespasser on family secrets, gazing at formal portraits. But perhaps we story tellers are trespassers. There is something indecent about what we do, plunderers of others’ lives. The faster we move on, the more indecent it is. I’ve been the unseemly chronicler of too many tears.
That abandoned apartment taught me something essential about Beirut’s cosmopolitan soul, a truth deeper than all the labels of the war’s militias, Christian, Shia, Druse and the rest. Sana taught me about the defiance of loss. The universal in the particular is all we can aspire to.
It helps to be cut off, to have nowhere to go, nowhere but your story, and no excuse for not telling it. I would gaze at the blank sky and think of kids that smiled at me. Gulls swooped.
One day, I went to southern Beirut to get a press pass from the Shia Hezbollah militia. A bearded guy with an automatic rifle and a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini behind him took an interest in my name. He explained how an Israeli spy called Cohen had been hanged in the public square in Damascus.
“And you,” he asked, “are a journalist?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
He looked me in the eye, took out a press pass, signed it, stamped it, and wished me well.
You never know. It’s worth trying to get the feel of the world in your fingertips. A story has a feel, a scent, a tingle. It may lie around the next corner, beyond a silence or in a glance.
I worry about stories dying, replaced by stuff. Content for platforms does not a story make. Today, you arrive anywhere and surf the Net. Being “always on” is being always off, to something.
A dozen years later I was cut off again, in Sarajevo. The war had driven people mad. They burned books to heat stoves to cook the rabbits they raised in cages in their bedrooms. Always the smash of a shell, the flat boom of rending and fracture in that narrow valley, took my breath away. What followed was exhaustion.
You want to get out, of course, away from the prison of your story, not knowing how you will miss what’s revealed at the dangerous edge of things.
When I left Beirut, I sailed out from Jounieh with Terry Anderson, then an Associated Press correspondent. We chatted, happy to be out. A U.S. chopper swooped over the stern, close enough to see the pilot’s thumbs-up sign.
I didn’t go back. Anderson did and, the next year, was kidnapped by Hezbollah. For more than six years, he was held hostage.
My imagination failed me. I could not see his terrible confinement coming on that bright faraway day, any more than I could envisage our accelerated world, or the scant time it has left us for emptying the mind to imagine the stories that count.
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
A poison pill, in corporate jargon, is a financial arrangement designed to protect current management by crippling the company if someone else takes over.
As I read the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the presidential candidates’ tax proposals, I realized that the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration are, in effect, a fiscal poison pill aimed at future administrations.
True, the tax cuts won’t prevent a change in management — the Constitution sees to that. But they will make it hard for the next president to change the country’s direction.
Exhibit A of the poison pill in action is the sad case of John McCain, part of whose lingering image as a maverick rests on his early opposition to the Bush tax cuts, which he declared excessive and too tilted toward the rich.
Since then the budget surpluses of the Clinton years have given way to persistent deficits, and income inequality has risen to new heights, vindicating his opposition.
But instead of pointing this out, Mr. McCain now promises to make those tax cuts permanent — and proposes further cuts that are, if anything, tilted even more toward the wealthy. And how is the loss of revenue to be made up? Mr. McCain hasn’t offered a realistic answer.
You can explain though not excuse Mr. McCain’s behavior by his need to shore up relations with the Republican base, which suspects him of being a closet moderate. But he’s not the only one seemingly trapped by the Bush fiscal legacy.
Barack Obama’s tax plan is more responsible than Mr. McCain’s: relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center estimates, the Obama plan would raise revenue by $700 billion over the next decade, compared with a $600 billion loss for Mr. McCain.
The Obama plan is also far more progressive, sharply reducing after-tax incomes for the richest 1 percent of Americans while raising incomes for the bottom 80 percent.
But while $700 billion may sound like a lot of money, it’s probably not enough to pay for universal health care, which was supposed to be the overriding progressive priority in this election.
Why doesn’t Mr. Obama propose raising more money? Blame the Bush poison pill.
First of all, Mr. Obama — like, to be fair, his main rivals for the Democratic nomination — isn’t willing to challenge the Bush tax cuts as a whole. He only proposes rolling back tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year.
Second, Mr. Obama proposes giving back a substantial part of the revenue raised by this partial tax-cut rollback in the form of new tax cuts.
These tax cuts would mainly benefit lower- and-middle-income families, although this can’t be said of Mr. Obama’s plan to eliminate income taxes on seniors with incomes under $50,000: since most seniors already pay no income taxes, this would do nothing for those most in need. And one wonders why we should create the precedent of exempting particular demographic groups from taxes.
But the big question is, are these tax cuts, however appealing, a top priority? The most expensive proposal, under the title Making Work Pay, would give most workers $500 in tax credits, at a 10-year cost of more than $700 billion. Isn’t it more important that workers be assured of health care?
The problem, I believe, is that even Democrats have bought into the underlying premise of the Bush years — that the best thing you can do for American families, or at least the only thing that can win their votes, is to give them a tax break.
One more thing: on Friday Mr. Obama declared that he would “extend the promise” of Social Security by imposing a payroll-tax surcharge on people making more than $250,000 a year. The Tax Policy Center estimates that this would raise an additional $629 billion over the next decade.
But if the revenue from this tax hike really would be reserved for the Social Security trust fund, it wouldn’t be available for current initiatives. Again, one wonders about priorities. Whatever would-be privatizers may say, Social Security isn’t in crisis: the Congressional Budget Office says that the trust fund is good until 2046, and a number of analysts think that even this estimate is overly pessimistic. So is adding to the trust fund the best use a progressive can find for scarce additional revenue?
Anyway, back to my main theme: looking at the tax proposals of the two presidential candidates, it’s remarkable and disheartening to see how effective President Bush’s fiscal poison pill has been in restricting the terms of debate.
Progressives, in particular, have to hope that Mr. Obama will be more willing to challenge the Bush legacy in office than he has been in the campaign.
