Molly Ivins March 20

SAN FRANCISCO — A complete stranger stopped me on the street the other day. He said he used to work on Capitol Hill, and he thinks what is happening there is that the Republicans are making this big stink about some kind of Chinese-Democratic money connection because they know the big money in the future will be Asian, see? And they want to fix it so Asian money going to Democrats in the future will be politically suspect, see, because they know otherwise the Democrats could make up for the big-money edge the Republicans always have, and the Republicans could never win again, see?

You may wonder why I am bothering to report a conversation with a source of unknown reliability encountered at a Versateller on Castro Street, but I have been reading the Washington press closely and the Versateller guy's theory sounds just as thoroughly researched as anything else I've read lately. So, I just thought I'd throw it out there as though it might true — plop, a great big juicy conspiracy theory with no evidence or attribution — because it's clearly the In Thing for those in the press corps to do these days. I want to be just like Bill Safire when I grow up.

According to a March 19 headline in The New York Times, "U.S. Says Mental Impairment Might Be a Bar to Citizenship." I doubt that, and as evidence, I offer the Washington press corps.

Meanwhile, in case anyone is still interested in the real world and how it's going, I heard an interesting story from Don Bartlett, half of the famous investigative team of Bartlett-and-Steele. Bartlett was in lower Manhattan not long ago, moling through some archive near Wall Street, and he emerges at 5 p.m. to try to catch a cab. At last, he spots an empty cab and waves frantically, but the guy goes flying by. But then the cabbie brakes, pulls over and waits for Bartlett.

"How come you stopped?" inquires Bartlett.

"Because you don't look like a stockbroker." (Bartlett, being an investigative reporter, naturally has that I-can't-get-my-socks-to-match fashion statement.)

"So what's wrong with stockbrokers?" he asks.

"Two things. I come down here this time of day, I always get stockbrokers," says the cabbie.

"Two or three of them together, and it's not that they always act like I'm invisible. It's that they always talk about how much money they made that day. And then they talk about how hard they worked.

"I been drivin' this cab 20 years, I got three kids, after I finish my eight hours in the cab, I go to my other job and do eight hours there. I don't like to hear stockbrokers talk about how hard they work."

Class differences in America are hard to write about. The country is run by people who haven't had to take a bus, let alone at 1 a.m., for at least 20 years — if ever. Consequently, they're completely clueless about the bus-taking populace. In other words, they're clueless about the one-half of Americans who live on less than the median income of $30,800 a year, according to the Federal Reserve.

Shall I ever forget the glorious Sunday morning on David Brinkley's chat show when all the usual suspects agreed that the average middle-class family makes $80,000 a year? Of course, one of the oddities of American life is that families that do make $80,000 a year consider themselves to be perfectly average, middle-class Americans.

When populists are being tacky, we always bring up people like Mikey Eisner of the Walt Disney Co. (I work for Mr. Eisner and call him Mikey because I like to think of my employers affectionately.) The company just gave Mikey $196 million worth of stock options. Pointing out this sort of thing causes conservatives to humph about how we populists foment "class warfare." However, it wasn't us populists who decided to pay Mikey another $196 million, so I say that's spinach, and I say to hell with it.

After the "class warfare" charge comes the dreaded "redistributionist" accusation — as in, "You people (that's us people who have noticed that Mikey got another $196 million worth of stock options) believe in redistributionist politics; you want to redistribute wealth in this country." I don't know that I do, actually. If we could take a lot of money from rich people and give it to a lot of poor people, it might not be a bad thing, but it would probably be better just to pay poor people more to start with.

My problem with redistribution of wealth comes with the policies that take money from poor people and redistribute it upward to rich people. Personally, I think that's the kind of thing that causes class warfare.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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