Tax Chat and Tina Talk
            

            Issue 1 is tax cuts. Issue 2 is the presidential campaign. Issue 3 is
Hillary and Rudy.

            There's very little consensus on what the tax debate holds. For example, on
NBC's Meet the Press , Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., says it
would be best to just forget cutting taxes and go home. Then Senator Phil
Gramm, R-Texas, says he would just as soon wait on a tax cut until George W.
becomes president. And on ABC's This Week , George Will says even a
$700 billion cut is too small, while Bill Kristol says that the GOP really
ought to scuttle tax cuts, pay off the national debt, and hike military
spending.

            Most pundits agree that the fate of a tax cut this year will not be known
until after a summer recess. For now, both parties are digging in rather than
compromising. The pundits fall into two camps. Those who argue that Clinton
will compromise--i.e., sign a tax cut greater than the $300 billion ceiling he
now demands--point to several signs, such as (a) Al Gore's release of a modest
tax cut proposal this week, (b) Clinton's desire to make a deal with the GOP on
entitlement reform, and (c) the eagerness of some Senate Democrats to be seen
as tax-cutters before election time (Bob Novak, of CNN's Capitol Gang ;
Susan Page and Tucker Carlson, of CNN's Late Edition ; and Paul Gigot,
of PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer ).

            Pundits predicting a stalemate point out that (a) in an off-year Clinton
won't be as eager to compromise as he was on welfare in 1996, and (b) House
Democrats think a stalemate will work against the GOP during next year's
congressional elections ( Capitol Gang's Al Hunt; NewsHour's
Mark Shields; Late Edition's Steve Roberts; and This

               Week's George Stephanopoulos).

            On the campaign front, pundits continue to express pity for the bumbling
Gore and awe at the seemingly invincible George W. Some programs replay a Lamar
Alexander ad now running in Iowa which indirectly attacks Bush for his runaway
fund-raising. Most pundits--such as Kristol, Gigot, and Shields--think the ad
is ineffective because George W. raised all his money from under-$1,000
contributions and seemingly without improper influence. The opinion mafia
agrees that the remaining mainstream candidates in the GOP race--Alexander,
Quayle, and Dole--are in free-fall and must win big in next month's Iowa straw
poll.

            On Meet the Press , Bill Bradley says that race will be the focus of
his campaign. Later that morning, on Late Edition , Page and Roberts
agree that the race issue is a non-starter, while Carlson says it will pull
Gore to the left, preventing him from having a "Sister Souljah moment." On
The McLaughlin 
               Group , the panelists make fun of Gore and
agree that his campaign is still faltering.

            The pundits feast on Hillary Clinton's revealing interview in Tina Brown's
forthcoming magazine, Talk . Hillary says President Clinton's affair
with Monica Lewinsky stemmed from an "abusive" home environment and that his
mistakes don't negate his other accomplishments. This Week even opens
its show with a special roundtable just on Hillary. (To her credit, Cokie
Roberts does mention that ABC is owned by the same parent company as
Talk .) Kristol, a Cheshire grin on his face, calls Hillary's remarks
"the epitome of modern liberal psychobabble," a sentiment shared by Will. Most
pundits--including Stephanopoulos and Page--think it will hurt her Senate
chances. Meanwhile, the commentariat is divided over Rudy Giuliani's
tongue-in-cheek campaign trip to Arkansas (Page and McLaughlin's Mort
Zuckerman approve, Hunt and McLaughlin's Huffington disapprove).

            
               John McLaughlin, Child of the '60s
After inveighing against the raping and pillaging at Woodstock '99 (a video
segment of concert-goers is captioned "250,000 Attendees & Hopped-Up
Psychos"), John McLaughlin finds himself waxing nostalgic for the hippies of
yesteryear: "At the first Woodstock there was [also] heavy rain, there were
[also] people standing around [under a hot sun], there were long lines for
food, but they were respectable."

            
               Winners and Losers
When Capitol 
               Gang's Bob Novak notes that even Democratic
Senator Bob Toricelli voted for the GOP's tax cut, Margaret Carlson calls
Toricelli a rich-coddling Democratic poseur--"the senator [of] Goldman Sachs."
"His constituency is partly you, Bob," she says. Novak responds: "The winners
of society, I hope."

            
               The Last Word
"It works out to about 5 cents per lie."
--Arianna Huffington, on Judge Susan Webber Wright's $90,000 fine of Bill
Clinton