In an editorial today and in the lead story in its metro section, the New York Times sides with Rep. Rick Lazio in arguing that voters would be better off if the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO and the "National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League" weren't allowed to run any advertisements during the campaign between Mr. Lazio and Hillary Rodham Clinton for election to the U.S. Senate. Under the Times-Lazio principle, elections are better if there is less political speech. This may be in line with Nixon-era federal election laws, but it is totally at odds with what the Founders had in mind when they framed the First Amendment, with its provision that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Mr. Lazio and the Times can argue that what they are calling for at the moment is not a Congressional restriction but a voluntary agreement, but in fact both have endorsed proposals that would restrict issue advertising by independent groups. Such proposals, and even a voluntary "soft-money ban," go directly against the wisdom of the Founders, who realized that unrestricted speech was necessary for the functioning of a robust democracy, and in fact a sign of it. Mrs. Clinton is wrong to mouth approval of such measures in principle, and she is almost certainly motivated by reasons of her own political advantage in refusing to agree to them in practice. But if she persists in resisting a "soft-money ban," she will deserve praise for taking an action that results in allowing more voices to participate in the democratic process. Instead of such praise, the Times and Mr. Lazio are showering her with contempt. Mr. Lazio calls her "the queen of dirty money." The Times claims that "soft money" has "damaged and corrupted the political system." That's ridiculous. What the Times calls "soft money" and Mr. Lazio calls "dirty money" is merely the product of working men and women and environmentalists and abortion rights supporters banding together to make their views known on the eve of an election. What could be cleaner or more American than that? It's not "dirty money," it's speech. "Dirty money" would be an accurate term for a bribe, or for a political payoff. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about money being spent on television commercials that express opinions about issues and policy positions taken by candidates. The Times makes its views known every day in its editorial column, protected by the same First Amendment that should protect the rights of the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO and NARAL and, for that matter, the National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition and the Tobacco Institute and the Business Roundtable. The Times' news story today and its editorial don't even acknowledge the existence of this view, much less convincingly rebut it.
La Guardia Traffic: An editorial in today's New York Times titled "Gridlock at La Guardia," along with a news story in the metro section, calls for additional government regulation to prevent air-traffic delays at La Guardia Airport in New York. The news story quotes Rep. Nita Lowey as saying, "The airlines want to make money, but they have a responsibility to ensure customer satisfaction." We have a substantial reservoir of affection for Ms. Lowey, but she may have been reading the Times for too long. She has apparently succumbed to the newspaper's theory that making money and satisfying customers are two opposing forces, and that making money is something corporations do, while satisfying customers is something that government regulators do. Anyone who flies out of La Guardia knows to expect delays. The airlines even factor in time spent waiting on the ground when they tell you the scheduled arrival time of their flights. If, for some reason, a traveler abhors waiting on the ground, the traveler could take Amtrak or fly out of White Plains or Islip. But the idea that the passengers need the government to protect them from the delays that the money-hungry airlines are just aching to impose on them just goes against the way that successful companies behave in free markets. The editor of Smartertimes.com spent an hour and a half sitting in a plane delayed on a La Guardia runway the other day, and it was clear from the pilot's frequent apologies over the public address system that he couldn't have had a higher priority than customer satisfaction. The pilot's final announcement was something to the effect of, "If you look out the right side of the plane you'll get a pretty good view of Air Force Two right there. That's the reason we've been stuck here, and now that it's taking off we should be on our way in just a few minutes." In other words, if Ms. Lowey and the Times are so concerned about the flight delays at New York airports, they might ease off the airlines and take a tougher look at the effects of Air Hillary, Air Gore and Air Clinton on flight traffic patterns in the region.
Jews: The Times "Arts & Ideas" section today runs a silly article about American Jews that is so flawed that we don't have the time or the inclination to correct it fully here. The story builds to a whopper of a conclusion, in which a rabbi proposes that the Jewish community greet those Jews returning from meetings of Jews for Jesus by saying, "You've explored truth in many ways, some that really touched your soul. We'd love to learn from you about what you saw and heard." This is taken seriously by the Times, which fails to signal any understanding that Judaism and Christianity are separate religions, and that Judaism can't in any honest, self-consistent way describe a Jew's visit to a Jews for Jesus meeting as having anything to do with soul-touching truth.
Newsday in Washington: The Business section of the New York Times today contains an article about one of the Times' main competitors for national and international news, the Washington Post. The Times story includes the following sentence: "Mr. Graham's strategy of making the most of the newspaper's near-monopoly position in its region paid off for years; until three years ago, when it was supplanted by Newsday." This is absurd. Mr. Graham's strategy is still paying off, and Newsday, a Long Island, New York, newspaper, barely circulates in the Washington D.C. area. A reader who continues on can figure out that the Times has mistakenly put a semicolon where there should have been a period, and a period where there should have been a comma. The way the article should have read was, "Mr. Graham's strategy of making the most of the newspaper's near-monopoly position in its region paid off for years. Until three years ago, when it was supplanted by Newsday, the Post had the greatest household penetration of any large newspaper in the country."
Princeton's Bank Account: An article in the metro section of today's Times reports that Princeton University's president, Harold Shapiro, has announced his intention to step down. "Princeton now has more than $8 billion in the bank, four times what it had when Dr. Shapiro arrived." Princeton may well have an endowment of more than $8 billion, but we doubt that it is kept "in the bank," as the Times claims. Probably it is kept with a variety of money-management firms that invest it in private equity, stocks, bonds and other assets. Some of those money-management firms may be banks, but it's not as though a university handles an $8 billion endowment as though it were a child's passbook savings account.