Wanniski's last word By Gregory Fossedal Copyright © United Press International September 2, 2005 Link to this story at The Washington Times, others: here. NEWARK, NJ -- Jude Wanniski sat down at his desk on August 29 and began typing a memorandum on Iraq. A colleague says that the article was critical of U.S. Mideast policy, as Wanniski was, and would have quoted sources skeptical of estimates of the extent of mass killing in Iraq during the old regime. Wanniski was also working on some notes to a source and himself so he could continue working on the piece at home -- ending, journalistically, with, "What do you think?" He had composed an email posing some questions about Iraq to Ehsan Ahrari, a leading Middle East and global ideopolitical analyst. Somewhere in the middle of these controversial correspondences, Wanniski slumped over and passed away. That magnificent brain went silent; a great heart stopped beating. His hands stopped moving. As it turns out, Wanniski's likely last words were thus, and characteristically, about current and future history, and a very important question at that. "2. The debate now beginning to shape up," he wrote, "is around the idea that a) Our presence in Iraq is feeding the insurgency, and our departure would more quickly lead to Iraqis working out a consensus that would be national and secular instead of federal and sectarian, or b) Our presence is necessary for as long as it takes to pacify Iraq. You come down on the (b) side. Yes [...]" There is something almost comforting about Jude Wanniski passing on in such a manner. The Greeks liked to begin their dramas, like Homer's Odyssey, "in medias res," in the middle of things. Wanniski ended that way. Jude's last words came from his fingers, and his last words were a Wanniskian, "Yes [...]" In this, there is poetry. Present at the creation Jude Wanniski is best known as the Thomas Paine (but, as an activist, with a dash of John Adams too) of America's revival of classical, or "supply-side," economics. He popularized the ideas of Art Laffer and Robert Mundell in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, leading to the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, and spawning two generations of intellectual followers and political disciples. In reporting their ideas, of course, he often wound up partaking in and leading in their formulation as well. In the formation of the "Laffer Curve" and discussion of tax rates, Jude was at least a kind of contributing co-author. In attributing the Great Crash of 1929 to the Smoot-Hawley tariff, he was the prime mover. He promoted discussion of the gold standard, along with Lewis Lehrman, John Mueller, Laffer, and Jack Kemp. Jude was, likewise, a central player. In encouraging me and many others -- such as Jeffrey Bell, Ronald Reagan, and Tony Dolan -- to think and write about the global democratic revolution, he was an intellectual Godfather and a personal mentor. Some recent reports cite Wanniski as author of the term, "supply-side." This may be so. Jude always insisted to me that the actual phrase was coined by Herb Stein, who derisively discussed the "supply-side fiscalists." Wanniski, characteristically, cheerfully adopted that which he liked from the phrase. In much the same way, when he was helping me prepare once for a meeting with Ronald Reagan, to discuss defenses against nuclear missiles, Jude talked terminological turkey. "Tell him terms like 'magic shield' and 'Star Wars' are good," Jude said. "And don't trash Gorby -- he needs to explain that Star Wars is good for all of us. It's the key to disarmament. I don't have to tell you that," he continued. "But that's the point you need to make to the Gipper if you get the chance." In this, Wanniski showed not only his political acumen, but his insights into Reagan's personality, mine, and the way history is made. Reagan's 1976 Republican convention speech, which former aide Martin Anderson rightly suggests is the key to understanding Reagan's mind and motivation, was a rhapsodic drive down the California coast discussing the awful consequences of nuclear war and the moral imperative to avoid them. Who knows? Perhaps all these ideas filtered into the great 1986 summit in Iceland in which positive-sum Reagan at once showed Mr. Gorbachev he was willing to contemplate complete nuclear disarmament -- but firmly unwilling to scuttle a U.S. (and Soviet) shield that would give each side confidence in getting there from here. The way Wanniski worked Like Thomas Paine, Jude was passionate, brilliant, and a leader. Like co-revolutionist John Adams, he was, at times, abrasive -- or, to be more exact, he cared so much about ideas and truth that he didn't exercise a professional politician's care for relationships. Richard Nixon's observations in his book "Leaders" come to mind. It isn't that the leader doesn't care about people, feelings, or others -- far from it. The leader, though, is making history, and feels, if anything, a certain lonely obligation to make things right. He cares about all of humanity, about making the world a better place for many and for all. In this, a good leader most closely touches, or let us say is touched by, God. Jude was a leader, and an intellectual leader at that. His mannerisms and manner always seemed like that of a cat to me -- fine, balanced, somewhat aloof. But if a cat, he was a cheshire cat, a patient teacher, soft-voiced, calmly smiling. Perhaps the greatest tribute to him in recent days has been the outpouring not from those who were close to him in recent years, but from those who had been removed -- in some cases, by a quasi-papal bull from Wanniski declaring that on this point or that, someone in the movement had strayed from supply-side doctrine. "Jude, generous?," Jeff Bell -- "He was so generous, I'd hardly know where to start." (Note that Bell himself clashed many times with his mentor, on issues from the proper details for arranging a gold standard, to the moral basis and nature of democracy and populism.) Jude was, indeed, fanatically involved in Bell's 1978 campaign for the U.S. Senate. In defeating incumbent Clifford Case in the GOP primary on the same day Proposition 13 passed in California, Bell helped convince Ronald Reagan, and Reagan's Karl Rove (John Sears), to discard the old Republican emphasis on root-canal economics in favor of the hopeful message of tax-rate cuts and growth. Wanniski got himself fired at the Journal for handing out Bell campaign literature at a New Jersey train stop. He was determined to secure former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon as Bell's finance chairman. He pleaded with Bob Bartley, editor of the Journal, to give him Simon's private number so Jude could make a direct call. Bartley, wanting to help but concerned about his friend's mental stability, agreed on the condition that Jude see a psychiatrist. Jude made the bargain and kept it. Jude's own book, "The Way the World Works," appeared in 1978 and was, hands down, the prime intellectual cause of the supply-side economic (and, Wanniski emphasized, political) model that spawned the Reagan Revolution. But one of the most important early reviews mis-reported the title as "How the World Works." Its sales figures, accordingly, never matched that of later derivative works such as George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty." This hardly mattered to Wanniski. When Gilder's book appeared, Jude aggressively pressed top aides to Ronald Reagan to have the president pass copies of the book out at a cabinet meeting, saying, "this is our policy." Reagan did it, the event was reported, and Gilder's book surged to the top of the best-seller lists. Jude pressed Jack Kemp to circulate a book of mine, "The Democratic Imperative," to his colleagues in the Bush Cabinet in 1989. Kemp did it. In 1988, frustrated by the Kemp campaign's lack of emphasis on the gold standard in its macro message -- no major media buys on the subject -- Wanniski threw himself into an effort to at least salvage the themes of hard-money and soft-power foreign policy for the country's political future. Kemp had already run weakly in Iowa and New Hampshire, and was written off politically, but he had not dropped out of the race. Jude furiously raised money, and, frankly, browbeat Kemp and his staff, to sponsor a series of newspaper and radio ads in targeted South Carolina media markets. Kemp ran the play. He lost South Carolina, and withdrew from the race a few days later. But in the major towns and cities where the ads ran, Kemp's performance was strong, nearly double that in the rest of the state. All that remains for some future Republican (or Democrat, cc: Hillary Clinton, Mike Gravel) to take up Wanniski's "good shepherd" themes of America leading the world towards a monetary and political standard. Gold and democracy. In a word, populism: The belief, as Bill Buckley once put it, that it is better to be ruled by 100 people chosen at random from the Boston telephone book, and the standards they set, than by the Harvard University faculty, or the well-meaning but corruptible caprice of any elite body. Jude is from Jupiter As a mensch, Wanniski could seem -- nay, be -- insensitive. Several years ago, he took a call from me, asking for his thoughts on a project of mine. "Please don't call me or send me any emails, Gregory. I'm just too busy to interact with you." A few months later, someone working for me contacted a staffer at Wanniski's firm, Polyconomics, to see (indirectly, given Jude's injunction) if he would like to comment for a piece on great tax cuts of the 20th Century. "Jude said, yes, please have him call right away." In the conversation that followed, Jude waxed Wanniskianly about Kemp-Roth, the Middle East, and religion. He selected the lesser-known tax cut on capital gains, promoted by Trent Lott and signed by Bill Clinton, as his personal favorite. "It's the most under-rated," he said, "and I think it's going to help bring on a great boom in technology -- the next leap forward in the American empire. "Buy some internet stocks," he advised, just as the Nasdaq prepared to explode. (In 2000, nervous about the Fed's tightening and the failure of the Gore campaign to run on the Clinton economic boom, he advised clients to sell.) He also praised the welfare reform passed by Newt Gingrich and Bill (and Hillary) Clinton. "That's a tax cut on the flip side," he averred, improving incentives to work by removing part of the government transfer-payment wedge between employers and people. Then: "Gregory, you haven't been staying in touch," he chided. That was Jude. Was Wanniski from Venus, or Mars? Neither, it seems to me. Wanniski was from Jupiter, but very much on earth. He had a distant, global-historical perspective, but he then took that perspective and was a daily activist in getting men and women to make the world better. "It's more than the economy, stupid" One aspect of Wanniski's thought that's most likely to be misunderstood -- indeed, missed altogether -- was his political model. Among economists, he was unusually interested in democracy and its advance and perspective. Few thinkers since Alexis de Tocqueville have had Wanniski's passion both for economic opportunity, but also, for political equality and human initiative. (The late Warren Brookes, one of his favorite journalists, also comes to mind.) "Bill Buckley once told me he loved my book except for the political chapter," Jude said. "I told him, and I always felt, that the political model was the best part, and far more important even than the economics. "It's very hard for someone like Buckley, someone so smart, so smart, to be a populist in his bones. I tried to explain it to him in terms of his own magnificent brain. Any one cell in that brain is probably brilliant; he's a brilliant man. But the whole brain is much smarter than that cell." Of course, Jude's vision of democracy was that the people are unerringly smart -- "the people are always right," he often said. Here, even someone like Buckley, the author of that magnificent comment about telephone books, might demur. His brain is smarter than any cell, but it's not infallible. One can believe, with Tocqueville and Churchill, that the people are smarter than any conceivable alternative, without believing that even the people can never act in error. Indeed, though Wanniski may not have known it, his political model may be the inspiration for more than one 2008 political campaign. A man he felt great affection for, Mike Gravel, the former Alaska Senator, is reportedly contemplating a race based on the theme, "All Americans are smarter than any American." If it comes about, one has the feeling that Jude will find some way to serve as an advisor. Agitating in peace Jude Wanniski is in a better place, but he has left those of us in the world without his equal. There is no replacement. There cannot be. Somehow, though, one feels Jude would be the first to say, there must be a successor. Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Jim Glassman -- call your office. The world, symbolized in his firm's corporate logo of a globe with industrial-gear teeth around it, will still work without Wanniski. The gears are already starting to turn, from New Orleans to Mobile. But it will be a duller, less colorful place. The traditional petition when a human soul passes into eternity is, "may he rest in peace." Jude, we already miss you. And we certainly hope you are at peace and in peace. And yet, when one contemplates heaven, the terms that come to mind are words like joy, love, activity -- the relentless electric-energetic interaction of eternal souls with the eternal mind. No, Jude, somehow, I can't picture you resting. I hope instead that you are enjoying the never-ending life, with St. Peter and Robert Bartley and with Christ, and all the other supply-siders in heaven. Jude, I love you, and because I love you, I can only say: May you agitate in peace. (Gregory Fossedal, foss@upi.com, is an advisor to international investors on global markets and ideopolitical risk and a senior fellow at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. His clients may hold long and short positions in many of the investment securities and opportunities mentioned in his reports. Investors should perform their own due diligence and consult their own professional advisor before buying or selling any securities. Mr. Fossedal's opinions are entirely his own, and are not necessarily those of his clients, AdTI, or UPI. Furthermore, they are subject to change without notice.)