Washington Post Pays George Will To Write Fantasies: “Bell Might Be Hot On Booker’s Heels”

Jeff Bell and fan club

Disclosure: None of us at DWT are fans of Wall Street whore Cory Booker. That said, we’re probably more grounded in reality than delusional Villager George Will. The last time New Jersey elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate was 1972 when very liberal Republican Clifford Case, first elected in 1954, was reelected to his 4th term. A right-wing anti-tax nut, Jeffrey Bell, beat him in the 1978 Republican primary. Bell was then trounced in the general election by Democrat Bill Bradley and no Republican has ever been elected to the Senate from New Jersey again.

After Democrat Harrison Williams was caught— on camera— taking bribes in the Abscam sting he resigned and Bell ran again. He was defeated in the primary by a liberal Republican, Millicent Fenwick (who then lost to Frank Lautenberg in the general). This year, Bell moved back too New Jersey, rented a house and ran in a crowded primary. Fellow anti-tax nuts Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow and Bill Kristol backed him and he managed to attract 29% of the Republican primary vote— enough to win. Of the 8 publicly available polls, only two show him breaking 40%, all the other show him in the 20s and 30s. The Stockton Polling Institute poll from September shows him losing to Cory Booker 49-36%.

Incumbent U.S. Sen. Cory Booker leads Republican challenger Jeff Bell by 13 percentage points in U.S. Senate race, according to a poll of likely New Jersey voters released today by the Stockton Polling Institute.

Booker, 45, a Democrat, is ahead 49 percent to 36 percent when voters who lean toward one candidate or the other are included. Twelve percent are undecided, while 3 percent express other choices or decline to answer.

…Voters have a generally positive view of Booker, the former mayor of Newark. Fifty-eight percent have favorable opinions of him, and 23 percent have unfavorable opinions. Only 10 percent are unfamiliar with Booker, and 9 percent are unsure.

Bell remains unknown to 37 percent of the electorate. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view of him and 21 percent have an unfavorable view. Ten percent are unsure.

George Will sees hope for the lunatic fringe in all this… back to the Reagan glory days. Remember, New Jersey was one of the few states where Obama actually increased his win margin from 2008 (57%) to 2012 (58%). Also worth keeping in mind, as of the June 30 FEC filing deadline, Cory Booker had already spent $12,628,134 and was sitting on $3,489,139 cash-on-hand— and raising more money hand over fist. Bell, meanwhile, had raised $197,815 ($65,000 of which was a loan from himself). New Jersey is one of the most expensive media markets in America. But Will is still hopeful. Booker’s only 13 points ahead… nothing. If only Republicans hadn’t aster so much money in Mississippi they could win New Jersey. Yes, Will is a crackpot and has always been a crackpot.

If Republican groups had given Bell the money they spent dragging Sen. Thad Cochran to re-nomination in Mississippi, Bell might be hot on Booker’s heels. He could still get there with a modest infusion of campaign contributions: Several polls have shown Booker’s support below 50 percent.

Because Bell speaks incessantly about the dangers of fiat money and the wisdom of the gold standard, some people dismiss him as a one-issue candidate whose issue is an anachronism. He calls this “chronological snobbery”: The gold standard is a bad idea because it is an old idea and because the economics profession opposes it. Besides, his supposed single issue (actually, he has many) is the declining value of money, which affects everything.

His audiences, he says, are not just disgusted by today’s feeble economy, they are puzzled by it. So he explains that Wall Street “has been having a party” paid for by near-zero interest rates, which have had their intended effect of driving liquidity into stocks in search of higher yields, a bonanza for the 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of the directly owned stocks. This “wealth effect” is supposed to prompt spending and investing that will trickle down to the 90 percent. Meanwhile, near-zero interest rates punish savers.

Bell wants to alert the nation before the government again has to pay 4 percent interest on its borrowing, thereby adding, he estimates, $400 billion to the deficit. He is running because “something substantive ought to be offered before the 2016 cycle.”

Booker, who is ignoring Bell, just as Case did, has a better résumé (Stanford, Oxford, Yale Law School) than reputation. His liberalism is as conventional as his eccentricity is disturbing. He is a fabulist (he has been called “the Garden State’s Mother Goose”) given to asserting as facts various self-aggrandizing figments of his imagination (e.g., T-Bone, a nonexistent Newark drug dealer, with whom Booker has had, he says, instructive interactions). Worst of all, Booker is perfectly suited to today’s Senate. Flitting like a waterbug on the surface of things, he seizes fleeting headlines as excuses for wielding the federal government in opportunistic grandstanding. His crusade du jour would increase taxes on professional sports leagues in order to spend $100 million on domestic violence prevention.

A senator is 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of America’s government, so senatorial elections rarely alter the nation’s trajectory. Here, however, is why this one matters:

Cory Bookers are many, predictable and fungible; Jeff Bells are few, idiosyncratic and invaluable because they look at familiar things in unfamiliar ways, and leaven politics with new agendas, such as restoring the Federal Reserve’s single mandate to preserve the currency as a store of value. New Jersey has not rejected an incumbent senator in a general election since 1942. Next month, it should begin doing so, at least every 72 years.

Jersey Politics