Another leader at the Sunday night protest was John Sweeney, the socialist head of the AFL-CIO and a key financial force behind Al Gore’s “We’re Fighting For You Against Them” campaign. Many of Sweeney’s own union leaders are currently under indictment or in jail for illegally laundering nearly 1 million campaign dollars on behalf of the Clinton-Gore team. But this didn’t prevent Sweeney from mounting the ramparts of self-righteousness to denounce Loews as a “corporation without conscience.”

Sweeney was something of a moderate compared to another Gore fat cat, Gerald McEntee, who was also a speaker at the convention and a force behind the protest. McEntee is head of the government union AFCSME and a target of the money laundering investigation. He has become an increasingly familiar face as a prime-time ranter at the anti-globalization demonstrations in both Seattle and Washington, where he railed against putting “profits above people,” resurrecting an old Marxist slogan. A fresher slogan that echoed the same sentiments on the streets of both party conventions was: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, private property has got to go!”

The labor dispute at the Loews Santa Monica pitted immigrant workers from Mexico and the Philippines against the giant hotel chain. The strikers claim that Loews is a union-busting corporation that denies its workers representation and a “living wage.” In response, Loews put up $125,000 to place an initiative on the ballot that would forbid the City of Santa Monica from enacting a “living wage” law.

Why was Jackson in the hotel at all? For that matter, why was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — the chief fundraising entity for all Democratic senatorial campaigns — also headquartered at the Loews? Why didn’t they leave the moment they knew the dispute was brewing?

The answer is that while Al Gore is positioning himself as a champion “for the people and against the powerful,” Gore’s close friend, key funder and longtime “kitchen cabinet” member, Jonathan Tisch, is the CEO of the Loews Corporation.

In the last three years, Tisch has personally given Democrats $335,500 in soft money contributions. (Two Tisch-owned companies gave another $290,000 to the Republicans.) Tisch personally gives hard money contributions at $1,000 a shot exclusively to Democrat candidates with only one exception — a Republican who sits on a committee affecting the entertainment industry. (Jonathan’s brother Steve is a film mogul at Universal.) Among the Democrats Tisch funds are Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Charles Robb, Mary Landrieu, Christopher Dodd, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Charles Schumer, Tom Daschle, Byron Dorgan, Robert Torricelli, Barbara Mikulski, Charles Rangel, Eric Vitaliano, Nita Lowey, Jerry Nadler, Patrick Leahy, Robert Wexler, Bob Graham, Harry Reid, Shelley Berkley, Jonathan Miller, Mel Carnahan, Carolyn Maloney, John Tanner, Jon Corzine, Sam Farr, Thomas Carper and Robert Weygand.

Jonathan is not the only Tisch who gives to Democrats, moreover. The Tisch family’s political contributions fill up 25 pages of Federal Election Commission reports. In addition to Jonathan, there are Alice, Andrew, Bonnie, Daniel, James, Joan, Laura, Larry, Merryl, Robert, Steve, Tommy and Wilma Tisch. In addition to Jonathan’s Democrats, the siblings give to Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Sam Gejdenson, Fritz Hollings, Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden and Tom Harkin, among others. (Two or three Tisches also give to Republicans.) And to square their liberal circles, they give both to Emily’s List and the tobacco lobby.

The Loews Corporation is a $60 billion holding company controlled by the Tisch family, which owns (in addition to the hotels) CNA Insurance, which is Big Insurance heavily invested in the healthcare industry; Diamond Offshore Drilling, which is a company that supplies oil rigs to the offshore oil industry; and P. Lorillard & Sons, the tobacco giant that makes Kent cigarettes whose filters have contained heavy doses of asbestos, so that the company has had to settle several lawsuits of workers who died from exposure.

Of course Gore doesn’t need the Tisch family to score the contradictions. As protesters outside the convention will not let him forget, Occidental Petroleum made the Gore fortune and is presently engaged in drilling the rain forest burial grounds of the U’wa Indians with Gore’s blessing. Back in Tennessee, a zinc mine Gore acquired under sweetheart terms from Occidental Petroleum has been tagged three times by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting the Caney Fork River in the Cumberland Valley. “It takes somebody who is independent from Big Oil to take on Big Oil,” Gore said to the Washington Times back in June. Apparently it does.

All this might matter less if Gore hadn’t chosen to define himself as a populist crusader leading the fight against big oil, big insurance and big tobacco. “They’re for the powerful and we’re for the people,” he said in his nomination acceptance speech. “We need to give the medical decisions back to the doctors, and take them away from … the insurance companies.

“Behind the flashing [Bush] video is an agenda of rising gas prices and smog-filled skies that is of Big Oil, by Big Oil and for Big Oil.”

One never knows, however. All this hooey might make sense to a campaign finance reformer who has flouted the existing campaign finance laws, taken foreign donations from Buddhist nuns and is currently raising record dollar amounts in soft money for his own “populist” run.

But how different is the phony leader from the foot soldiers assembled in the Staples Center to anoint him? At the Los Angeles charade, speaker after speaker touted the Democrat gathering as a convention of the people that showed the “real face of America.” This was a not-so-subtle dimarche to the Republican “show convention,” which they claimed was a purely “cosmetic” effort to pretend that Republicans were inclusive and cared about America’s minority communities.

“Let’s be honest about, this,” lied Joe Lieberman. “We may be near Hollywood tonight, but not since Tom Hanks won an Oscar has there been that much acting in Philadelphia.” In other words, when Republicans are inclusive it is just to hide their white sheets while they are in front of the cameras. So the principled Lieberman has now joined the ranks of the racial McCarthyites.

In fact, the Democrats in Los Angeles were themselves not who they claim to be. A New York Times survey of those attending showed that the delegates were well to the left of the American people, and even the Democratic Party itself. Thus 86 percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention, including Gore, oppose vouchers that would let the poor rescue their children from failing schools and send them to private school like Al Gore Jr. But only 54 percent of voting Democrats agree. Meanwhile the general voting public is split on the issue 47 to 46 percent. At the same time, 60 percent of African-Americans, across class lines, support vouchers.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Democratic delegates were also far wealthier than most of the people (57 percent had incomes over $75,000) and far more of them are members of unions (31 percent). They were also more African-American (by 80 percent) and more Native American (by 30 percent) than the general population. (Who knows how many of them were Armenian, Russian, Arab, Jewish, Polish, or take your pick of any non-politically correct category, since our left-wing media can’t be bothered to ask about such “over-represented” groups.)

This ethnic distortion is explained by the fact that the political mentality of the Democratic Party is now so rooted in the discredited past that it has a rigid racial and gender quota system for delegates. How rigid? A black female delegate from Mississippi was denied a seat because the quota for women had already been exceeded. As if to underscore the unseemly irony of liberals’ 180 degree about-face on civil rights since the 1960s, the woman in question had been one of the original Mississippi Freedom Party delegates who, in a legendary moment of the civil rights struggle, were denied seats at the 1964 Democratic Convention simply because they were black.

The Democratic Party is now a party of the last century (or perhaps even the previous one) — a party of racial quotas and racial preferences, of class warfare and impossible socialist dreams. As Jesse Jackson said, on the second convention night, it’s not just about race or gender; it’s about “redistributionism.”

On the final night the leader himself mounted the podium, mentioned Bill Clinton just once and then rejected the entire Clinton legacy — the good along with the bad. Goodbye to the New Democrats, triangulation and a party willing to embrace Republican programs in order to preside over a boom that old-fashioned Democrats would have called “a Decade of Greed,” the way they did the Reagan boom of the ’80s.

The sum total of Gore’s Big Speech, in fact, was that McGovern-Mondale liberalism is back, class warfare is back, Big Government is back, and no article of leftist faith — racial quotas, unlimited abortions, support for bankrupt government school monopolies — will go unchampioned. This, in a new century that is looking backward on the ruins of the socialist schemes of the last. This, to an America, half of whose citizens are invested in the stock market and expect one day to be in the brackets that Gore wants to tax even more. This, to a people that is weary of division and partisan warfare and that wants to elect a party that will govern its prosperity and keep the profits flowing. Gore called the speech he wrote “A New Journey.” A better title would have been “Back to the Future.”

Casta is not alone in fleeing France, where the system is so complex, top-heavy and overburdened that it is almost impossible to manifest entrepreneurial spirit on any practical level without risking personal bankruptcy. From classic businessmen to film personalities like Alain Delon, the slow draining of French capital and talent into England has been going on for decades. Unfortunately for Casta, this leggy, busty, handsomely remunerated top model carries a heavy civic burden toward her compatriots as the new Marianne, and her departure to the shores of an ancient enemy is seen as the ultimate betrayal.

Casta has been backpedaling lately, suggesting that she is buying an apartment in London because she works — and has a boyfriend — in the city. But should Casta’s whereabouts be so high on the French national agenda? Shouldn’t this curvaceous well-heeled young woman have the right to spend her money as she sees fit? Many in her ranks believe so, including Brigitte Bardot. Another buxom blond ex-Marianne, Bardot made it very clear that if she could leave France for England she would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

In the end, the political hand-wringing over the Casta affair is overwhelmingly about taxes — a clear sign that despite all prevailing myths to the contrary, one of the most important things in France (perhaps, but only perhaps, after sex) is money.

Forbes may be feeling a little smug these days, but he’s earned it. In one night, the longshot candidate for president managed to debunk nearly a year of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom that had all but declared his candidacy dead on arrival. Washington insiders thought there was no way someone so stiff and awkward on the stump could give the photogenic, good-ol’-boy-establishment-Republican candidate from Texas a run for his money. But in Iowa, Forbes did just that.

His show of strength — 30 percent to Bush’s 41 percent — clearly agitated the Texas governor’s supporters on Capitol Hill, who were quick to mobilize their defenses. The day after the caucus, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott took aim at Forbes, saying that even far-right radio host Alan Keyes had a better resume for the presidency.

However brief Forbes’ Iowa surge may be, his second place finish gave his campaign a much-needed boost and forced many of his detractors to stand up and take notice. Regardless of his performance in New Hampshire, Forbes could slow the Bush juggernaut in the months to come, not as a chief rival for the nomination, but possibly as chief distraction. With his personal war chest, Forbes will be able to sling arrows long after any other candidates have given up and gone home.

For a while, it didn’t look like Forbes could build any momentum at all. Since announcing he would run last year last year, reporters have scrutinized Forbes’ looks, his wealth and his stilted personality as much as his policy positions. They’ve obsessed about Forbes’ face peels, straightened hair, nervous tics and even how often he blinks his eyes (once every 15 seconds, according to the Washington Post).

But for the considerable number of conservatives who seethe at the mere mention of Bill Clinton‘s affability and slick spin control, Forbes’ clumsiness, made-for-radio looks and laconic style are his biggest assets.

The closest Forbes comes to sharing his life story on the stump is when he evokes the name of his grandfather, B.C. Forbes. Life for the Forbes family, according to the tale, wasn’t always full of yacht parties, executive suites and trips to a family-owned island in Fiji. Before the Great Depression, his Scottish immigrant grandfather almost had to sell the fabled, but then-struggling business magazine he had built from the ground up to the predatory hands of William Randolph Hearst. But B.C. managed to corral his resources and save the family magazine for future generations.

It’s your classic bootstrap story, but it still provides some insight into the family’s self-made riches and Forbes’ capitalist philosophy on life. As a child, Malcolm “Steve” Forbes Jr. had to contend with a flamboyant father and his exaggerated lifestyle. High-flying Malcolm Sr. had a jet he dubbed the Capitalist Tool and was known for his lavish parties and frequent jet-setting trips to his French chateau and Moroccan castle. Malcolm waded into New Jersey politics with the same bravado, running unsuccessfully for governor of New Jersey twice.

If Steve Forbes disagreed with his father’s lifestyle, he’s never said so publicly. His brother once famously noted that “Steve didn’t experience adolescent rebellion.” But in many ways, the relatively modest way Forbes leads his life reads like a complete rejection of his father’s excesses. He still, for example, drives a Ford station wagon; he’s been known to frequent the fast food chain, Friendly’s, and the home he shares with his wife Sabina and teenage daughters is worth a paltry $3 million — about the same amount Forbes paid for the famous television spot last May that showed him looking presidential in regal surroundings modeled after the Oval Office.

Forbes attended Princeton University during the late 1960s and he served in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. While others joined Princeton’s Vietnam protest movement, Forbes found an alternative outlet for his political sensibilities: Business Today, a conservative magazine he created. He later went on to take over the reigns of Forbes magazine, the family’s crown jewel. Forbes magazine is said to have a market value of $1 billion, and Forbes himself is said to be valued at as much as $440 million.

During the ’90s, the candidate sought to parlay his family fortune and position as editor in chief of Forbes into a political launch pad — and he has had considerable success doing so. During his first White House run in 1996, he entered the race late and spent $37 million promoting his single-issue flat tax campaign, with as much as $400 a vote poured into Iowa alone.

“It didn’t matter what the question was, the answer was the flat tax,” says a former top administrator of the Christian Coalition. Understandably, Christian conservatives were leery of a candidate who had once called Pat Robertson a “toothy flake” and the Christian Coalition a myopic organization that “didn’t speak for most Christians.” In 1996, the then-economic conservative decried a total ban on abortion as “a waste of time.”

“I am white, a Protestant, an Ivy Leaguer, rich, business-oriented, without practical political experience,” he flatly acknowledged in 1996. “It couldn’t be worse, but at least I’d like to be free to fall down on my own arse without any help from conservatives.”

Four years later, in the 2000 election, Forbes is reaching out to social conservatives with a vengeance — at times, he even sounds downright Pentecostal. “The first order of compassion is protecting the unborn,” he regularly states, and in the last two years he has hired away several Christian Coalition field directors to work on his campaign.

Forbes started courting conservatives of all stripes early. In 1997, he created a nonprofit organization, Americans for Hope, Growth and Opportunity and a matching political action committee which became one of the most prolific issues advertisers in the country. The group produced and aired radio and television ads advocating for a flat tax, arguing to downsize the federal government, criticizing the Chemical Weapons Convention, offering support for a missile defense system, calling for the establishment of medical savings accounts, decrying medicinal marijuana legalization and calling for a ban on “partial-birth abortions.”

The ads have hit the airwaves in 20 states, including the crucial primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Arizona. AHGO has also sent out a flurry of e-mails and faxes to conservative activists and legislators around the country. After Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union, it funded a one-minute response ad starring Forbes.

Setting up a PAC as a prelude to a run for president is a time-honored tradition. Many candidates create PACs in order to jump start their presidential runs as early as possible. But Forbes’ move was controversial because he circumvented federal disclosure and fund-raising laws by registering AHGO with the New Jersey Secretary of State instead of the FEC. Estimates of the dollars the group has raked in since 1997 vary widely — with some reporting amounts between $4 and $10 million.

But Forbes hasn’t just whipped out his wallet every time he wanted to score points with conservatives. He has also toured the country and met with the top leaders of conservative organizations. “Consequently, what conservatives may have called pandering if someone else did it, they haven’t called pandering,” states David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union. “It’s [Forbes'] ability really in a retail sense to meet and convince them that he’s sincere that’s allowed him to make so many inroads.”

So far, Forbes has lined up the support of the more notable conservative leaders and solid majority of the rank and file too. Most recently his continuous pro-life message has earned him the endorsement of Phyllis Schlafly, the grand dame of the anti-abortion movement who also well known for her late-1970s efforts to kill the Equal Rights Amendment.

But until now, the conservative support shared by Alan Keyes and, to a lesser extent, Gary Bauer, has prevented Forbes from posing a more serious threat to Bush.

“I think if there was one conservative campaign this could be a real race,” says Morton Blackwell, a president of the conservative Leadership Institute and life-long GOP activist. “But because so many conservatives are split for a variety of reasons, it’s going to be tough.”

But with his deep reserves, Forbes is the only social conservative who can stay in the race as long as he’d like to. And for now, he shows no signs of giving up.

McCain’s plan would cut taxes by $240 billion over five years, partly paid for with projected budget surpluses, and partly by $150 billion from closing corporate tax loopholes and shelters. The McCain plan also sets aside some $700 billion to protect Social Security. The proposal is roughly half the size of Bush’s five-year, $483 billion tax-cut plan.

Bush advisor Larry Lindsey ripped the McCain plan using the same critique the Arizona senator has levied against Bush’s proposal — that it only benefits the wealthy. “Sen. McCain basically is providing tax relief only for families who make above $60,000. [A family] needs an income of more than $88,000 to get the full tax cut that Sen. McCain is proposing. The very top 10 percent or so of taxpaying families — 71 percent of all taxpayers [will not benefit] from the McCain plan,” Lindsey said.

The Bush team’s shift to rapid response mode underscores two key points: That Bush views McCain as his only real rival, and that he wants to put the dagger in him as early as possible. Last month, Bush threw a similar counter-punch when McCain appeared with Democrat Bill Bradley to tout campaign-finance reform.

Bush has already been successful making tax cuts a central issue of the Republican presidential campaign, switching his focus from education this summer. Perhaps this is the real genius of the Bush campaign. Not only are tax cuts more of a red-meat issue to Republican primary voters, Bush is also tuning the American political ear to tax cuts in hopes of succeeding where Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich have both failed.

“Gov. Bush welcomes a focus on tax cuts and tax issues. He thinks the issue of tax and spend is a centerpiece of this race. More money that is sent to Washington, the more money the government will have to spend. Tax money does not belong to the politicians, it belongs to the people who made it,” said Bush spokesman Ari Fleisher.

Fleisher was armed with a response when asked about the failed Republican proposal last fall, which closely mirrored Bush’s current proposal. “That’s why we need a Republican president,” he said. “The problem with the Republican tax-cutting plan is that the president didn’t sign it.”

But the oddity goes beyond the fact that McCain is sounding Clintonian in calling for a smaller tax cut, targeted to the middle class and less generous to the rich. Another surprise is that normally, in a GOP presidential primary, it’s the front-runner who offers the more modest tax cut proposal, while the challenger tries to shake things up with the root-and-branch tax cutting plan. Steve Forbes tried that against Bob Dole in 1996; and Pat Buchanan bludgeoned then-President George Bush with the tax issue in 1992.

Not this time. George W. Bush has been on record for more than a month with a five-year, $483 billion tax cut plan — a proposal which is actually very similar to the one congressional Republicans failed to enact last year. Not only will Bush’s tax cut be bigger than McCain’s, it will also be more heavily weighted toward reductions for high-income earners.

Last week McCain played up the merits of his soon-to-be-released plan by attacking Bush for giving tax breaks to wealthy people who don’t need them, while failing to shore up Social Security or pay down the debt. “Sixty percent of (Bush’s) tax cut goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans,” McCain said. “That’s not the kind of tax relief that I think America needs.”

When the Bush campaign heard those words, they thought they saw blood in the water — McCain’s. Not only because the Arizona senator seemed to be ceding Bush the tax-cutting mantle, but just as importantly because McCain’s criticisms sounded very similar to those that Democrats routinely hurl at Republican tax cut plans — not usually a winning strategy in a Republican primary. McCain apparently sensed that vulnerability and conspicuously avoided that “tax cuts for the wealthy” line of criticism when he took Bush on in South Carolina.

Bush and McCain actually agree on a host of changes, like eliminating the so-called marriage penalty and scaling back the inheritance tax. But the key difference is in how each candidate deals with marginal income tax rates. Most significantly, McCain’s plan would not lower the 39.6 percent tax bracket now applied to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans — the centerpiece of Clinton’s 1993 budget bill — while Bush’s would. Rather than decreasing the highest marginal tax rates, McCain’s increases the amount of money you can make and still be in the lowest, 15 percent tax bracket. In other words, McCain lowers taxes for middle-income taxpayers.

McCain is clearly banking on the idea that, in prosperous times, the appetite for tax cuts is simply not as strong as it once was. McCain staffers say that they intend to fight not on the size of their tax cut but rather on how “responsible” it is — code for how much of the surplus it will leave for shoring up programs like Social Security and paying down the national debt.

Not that McCain has completely sworn off the anti-tax elixir. His campaign is now running ads in New Hampshire calling for a permanent ban on Internet taxes — something that Bush, like most governors, opposes. McCain is no newcomer to the idea of banning online taxation. But pushing the issue aggressively should allow him to open up a second front in the tax debate, one in which he can beat Bush hands down and nullify whatever advantage Bush gets for his broader plan.

McCain’s willingness to fight Bush on these grounds shows just how much the politics of taxes has changed in the 1990s. For most of the last 30 years, tax-cutting was the silver bullet of Republican electoral politics. Whatever else did or didn’t work, Republicans could always fall back on the magic of tax cuts, and the bigger the better. Democrats could never hope to compete in the realm of tax-cutting since steep tax cuts threatened to de-fund their prized government programs. Just as importantly, GOP tax cut proposals could be counted on to play to the public perception that the Democrats were the party of tax-and-spend profligacy.

But at some point in the 1990s the old tax politics simply lost its magic for the GOP. For all the Republicans’ success in the 1994 election, the authors of the GOP’s Contract with America were actually quite careful not to call for a rollback of President Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which raised taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Two years later, when Bob Dole tried to save his flagging presidential campaign with an across-the-board 15-percent tax cut, his efforts went nowhere.

The most telling sign of the decline of Republican tax politics came in 1999 when congressional Republicans, fresh from their impeachment debacle, tried to go back to basics with a $792 billion tax cut bill. Over the summer, senators and representatives fanned out to their districts to rouse public support for the proposal but, again, the groundswell of popular support simply never materialized. Tax cuts were actually rather low on the public’s list of priorities; education, Social Security and health care were much higher. The reason McCain’s gambit may work is that this basic attitude held even among Republicans.

The change has two roots. One is the country’s general prosperity: Most people are doing well enough that the prospect of tax cuts doesn’t have quite the allure that it did in more economically challenging times. But the deeper reason is the public’s renewed belief in the possibility of effective government action. Voters are still very cautious about large-scale efforts like enacting some form of universal health care. And pollsters still receive ambivalent or negative reactions when they ask generic questions about “government spending.” But ask about Social Security, Medicare and education and the answers start to sound very different.

McCain is also banking on the persistence of another strain of Republican economic policy thinking, one that gets less attention today. Before the Reagan era, Republicans were at least as keen on balanced budgets as they were about tax cuts. And in the Northeast, that strain of Republican fiscal conservatism still has many adherents.

Former New Hampshire Republican senator and McCain supporter Warren Rudman was famously concerned with balancing the budget during his tenure in the Senate. And even Lindsay Graham, a dyed-in-the-wool-conservative McCain supporter (who was also one of the House impeachment managers) seems comfortable supporting McCain’s stance. “It’s a smaller tax cut,” Graham recently told me, “but it’s paid for. I like that. It doesn’t rely on any illusory surpluses.”

One of the political successes of the Clinton administration is that it has allowed Democrats to capture the old Republican terrain of fiscal discipline.

And there’s one more thread to the story. The current GOP tax debate may have its greatest impact next November. Ever since Bush unveiled his tax cut plan late in 1999, Democratic strategists have been sharpening their electoral knives and waiting impatiently to pounce. Bush’s plan does avoid giving Democrats some of the fattest targets included in earlier tax cutting plans, such as steep cuts in the capital gains tax. But in its general outlines, it is much the same as the one that fizzled for congressional Republicans just last year. Holding to such a plan could leave Bush at a loss for words when Gore charges him with imperiling popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If Bush gets pushed further in the direction of touting just how big his tax cut proposal really is, Democrats will be jotting down everything he says, waiting to use it against him later this year.