That’s lots of money. These days, Jackson seems to need it. According to top execs in the music industry, as well as sources inside Sony, Jackson has been squeezed for cash in recent months. It’s not just that it takes zillions to underwrite his lavish lifestyle and career, from his private Never-land ranch to his costly world tours. The star also faces a barrage of costly legal hassles, not least that infamous case of alleged child molestation he settled in 1994 for an estimated $10 million to $25 million. To meet his obligations Jackson has been borrowing heavily, using assets such as his ATV Music group (which includes his Beatles songs) as collateral, according to sources recently involved in the star’s business affairs.
Sony declined to comment on the reports, except to confirm it’s negotiating with Jackson. The entertainer, in Germany singing for a TV game show, couldn’t be reached, nor could his lawyer or business agent. Jackson’s hardly broke, even if he’s as strapped as music-industry execs claim; estimates of his wealth range as high as$200 million. Yet it takes more than mere wealth to sustain the Gloved One. Only his accountant knows for sure, but he spends a fortune running his 8,000-acre Neverland ranch in California, including an amusement park. He travels with an entourage that includes bodyguards and, often, a phalanx of extras. He’s dug deep into his pockets promoting his latest album, “HIStory.” Eight million have sold, Sony reports, the company expected lots more. Sony advanced Jackson at least $2 million for music videos supporting the marketing drive, according to insiders, but he spent at least $9 million more of his own.
There are other troubles, too. Jackson ran up huge bills on his 1993 world tour, aborted after the child-molestation scandal and news of his addiction to painkillers. One promoter, stuck for millions, sued Jackson for $20 million in a case apparently still pending. Not surprisingly, some music-industry executives speculate that Jackson’s cash squeeze explains his deal with Sony. The star paid about $45 million for the Beatles catalog in 1985. Those songs, along with some by Little Richard and others, may be worth as much as $200 million. Because Jackson’s holdings are far superior to Sony’s, music execs say, it doesn’t make sense for him to share ownership unless he really needs the money. If he turns out to need even more, the singer might turn to sister Janet. Her contract with Virgin Records ends soon, and last week agents began shopping around. Her minimum price: around $140 million. .
title: “What Me Worry " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Antonio Aquilina”
Last week Bush was back in town–only this time he clearly was in enemy territory. The U.N. General Assembly gave his stay-the-course speech on Iraq a cold reception. A tete-a-tete with French President Jacques Chirac turned frosty when Bush issued a blunt “I disagree with you” to Chirac’s assertion that Iraqis saw the U.S. presence as an “occupation.” The atmosphere was just as chilly elsewhere. The New York-based national media had long since turned hostile, for the most part; a big posse of Democratic presidential contenders was on its way to the city, there to spend hours of debate time blasting the president (when they weren’t attacking each other). Only in his last hours in New York could Bush feel at ease–at a closed-door meeting with corporate CEOs at the Waldorf. It was a mutual pep talk about the economy and, by extension, his re-election chances. He was “very comfortable with this group,” said an aide. Not surprising, said a participant. “He was among friends.”
This is the arc of the Bush presidency as the election season begins: from Prince of the City to Home Alone. As is his habit, Karl Rove, Bush’s meticulous political mastermind, has a carefully assembled, long-term ‘04 plan. In sum, it is: a state-of-the-art, precinct-by-precinct ground game to get out the base; a flag-waving defense of Bush’s “doctrine of pre-emption” and the Patriot Act; an equally stout defense of tax cuts, with the parallel dare to Democrats to “raise” taxes; finally, a depiction of Bush as a decent, resolute man of faith–a rock in parlous times.
As usual, Bush’s inner circle professes the kind of wildcatter’s bravado the president learned to admire in west Texas. If Bush’s lieutenants are to be believed, the Boss is serene, even fatalistic–convinced he made the right moral and strategic decision on the war, certain the economy will recover in time to save him from his father’s losing fate. “A sense of reality is setting in here,” said a Bush aide, “but no sense of panic.”
Maybe there should be. Diplomatically, militarily and politically, Bush now finds himself in an unaccustomed and uncomfortable position: a hostage to events he cannot control, depending on the kindness of strangers–from weapons inspectors to restive congressional Republicans to erstwhile foreign allies. Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats think they finally have found the man to beat him: retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who widened his lead among Democrats in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll. “We’ve always said that the election will be close,” said Bush-Cheney polltaker Matthew Dowd. But what seemed like a walk in the park for Bush only months ago (remember the landing on the Abraham Lincoln?) looks like another photo finish–if he’s lucky.
At this point, the president seems destined to be running through a political minefield. Despite the pep talk at the Waldorf (and the last quarter’s strong 3 percent growth rate), the economy, at this point, is a political liability. There is little chance that the stock market will return to the lofty position it held at the start of the Bush presidency. The federal budget, driven by recession, war and tax cuts, is plunging into the red. The latest government figures show a steady decline in real incomes and a steady rise in the number of Americans living in poverty.
And no matter how you pencil it, the employment number–perhaps the ultimate political indicator–remains bleak. Total hourly employment–people getting paychecks–has dropped from 111.6 million to 108.3 million. While self-employment is rising (by choice and necessity), it’s not rising fast enough to offset the growth in the labor force. As a result, the unemployment rate has risen from 4.2 percent to 6.1 percent. Bush told the CEOs that productivity is improving faster now than the economy is growing. The result: the dreaded “jobless recovery.” As the economy picks up steam, he said, job growth will follow. He had better hope that’s the case: as his dad learned to his dismay, voters’ views of the economy tend to get locked in place in the spring of an election year.
The foreign-policy terrain is hardly more congenial. Despite Bush’s (and Colin Powell’s) pleas, putative allies remain unwilling to send more troops or much money to aid the U.S.-led effort in Iraq. Without a U.N. mandate or the world’s embrace, Pentagon planners conceded late last week that they would have to dispatch more American soldiers–Reservists and the National Guard–to Iraq. The rising price of the conflict, in terms of money and lives lost or disrupted, is turning even Republican legislators antsy; several vowed to flyspeck the administration’s $87 billion funding request for the war.
At the same time, the administration has been forced to admit that its most urgent reason for going to war in Iraq in the first place–the imminent threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein–now seems flimsy, at best. Even friends are becoming problematic. One of them is David Kay, whose preliminary report found no conclusive evidence that Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction, or programs to make them. Administration officials still expect to strike gold, so to speak. “I’ll tell you what,” said one Bush political insider. “We really need to find some f—in’ WMD!”
But hope is not a plan, and Bush strategists have one; indeed, they have been crafting it and pursuing it for a year. The first objective is to try to discount, in advance, polls that show declines in Bush’s standing. Such patterns are a historical inevitability, Bush’s handlers say, and they’re right. At this point in his first term, in 1983, Ronald Reagan was 16 points behind Sen. John Glenn in a test matchup; Bill Clinton was four points behind Sen. Bob Dole in 1995. Still, the newest NEWSWEEK Poll has enough gloomy data to keep the Bush spinners busy. Even though Bush’s speech to the United Nations was popular (Americans want the U.N. to take over the war and its aftermath), his “re-elect” number is weak: 46 percent “yes” and 47 “no.” His marks for handling the economy–by far the most important issue to voters–are at a low ebb, with 37 percent approving, 55 percent disapproving.
Another pre-emptive step is to crow about the supposed weakness and division in the Democratic field. Indeed, at a CNBC-Wall Street Journal debate at Pace University in Manhattan, there were nasty exchanges, especially between Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, over the issue of Medicare, and the field does include some not-ready-for-prime-time players. But it’s impossible to overstate just how hungry Democratic loyalists are to defeat Bush, and White House strategists cannot afford to be dismissive of any likely nominee, including Dean, whose give-’em-hell, anti-Washington persona is still lighting fires on the Net.
Clark may pose a special danger to the commander in chief: a battle-tested general with his own, internationalist theory for fighting terrorism and experience deploying it. Bush insiders won’t talk about Clark for the record, but the decibels rise in private. They cite Pentagon scuttlebutt that the general is too hard-charging and manipulative to wear well for long. “He is a little too tightly wrapped,” said one adviser. GOP operatives unearthed and released a two-year-old video in which the general lavishly praises the early leadership of President Bush and his administration. Still, the general’s commando raid of a campaign is showing signs of taking hold. Unschooled in domestic matters (though he is being tutored by teams of former Clinton administration experts), he has inched ahead in his role as front runner among Democrats, with 16 percent support, compared with 12 percent for his closest rival, Dean.
The next strategic imperative for Rove & Co. is to accept the obvious: that the nation’s post-9/11, rally-round-the-flag sense of unity has long since evanesced, and that the electorate is back to where it was: Red versus Blue, deeply divided, just as in the days when we were counting chad. “We’re looking at, in effect, two nations that, on some level, barely seem to know or understand each other,” said one GOP strategist. To oversimplify–but only slightly–that means maximizing turnout in your own nation, and forgetting what’s going on in the other one.
To be sure, the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign (known on the inside as “BC04”) will go to great lengths to woo voters who lie beyond what has come to be the traditional base of the party. Polltaker Dowd is a leading advocate of outreach to Hispanics. A symbol of that effort is the backdrop campaign officials cart to press conferences coast to coast: it intersperses the words BUSH-CHENEY with VIVA! More substantively, GOP strategists insist that Bush’s tough foreign policy, pro-business tax cuts and cultural traditionalism will earn him perhaps 40 percent of the Latino vote. “They used to be a Democratic constituency,” said Dowd, “but now they are up for grabs.” The same goes for Jewish voters, Bush strategists believe, at least for those who evaluate candidates based on the strength of their support for Israel. Pro-Israel activists think that the president, unrivaled in modern times for his down-the-line backing of the Jewish State, could win a third of the Jewish vote. That could matter big time in some of Rove’s targeted states, chief among them Florida.
But the primary demographic objective of BC04 is more obvious: to increase turnout among families that consider themselves evangelical Christians. The GOP defines them as voters who say they are “born again” and who attend church regularly, at least four times a week. Rove and his team–led by campaign manager Ken Mehlman and regional director Ralph Reed–have carefully scrutinized exit-polling data in recent elections, and the Bushies frankly admire the success labor unions have had in recent years in turning out not only their members, but their members’ extended families. One reason the GOP did well in last year’s midterm elections, strategists say, is that it was able to best the labor unions at their own turnout game. In 2002, evangelicals composed 21 percent of the electorate, according to the polls. The Bush-Cheney aim this time is 24 percent. “These polls are an inexact science, but that’s the goal,” said Reed.
The real trick, Rove & Co. know, is to get the Red in the right places, amplifying evangelical (and other voter group) turnout in precincts that could tip wavering states into Bush’s column next year. Population shifts already have helped Bush. Growth in the West and South, and declines in the East and Midwest, mean that a rerun of the 2000 race would raise Bush’s victory margin in the Electoral College from four votes to 18. Bush-Cheney has identified 17 states on which to focus in ‘04: ones Bush either narrowly won or lost, or where demographic changes are viewed as especially favorable.
With little fanfare or national press coverage, President Bush and his political minions have been traveling these states in recent months, laying the groundwork. The Republican National Committee will have perhaps $200 million to spend–much of it on a laser-targeted, precinct-by-precinct turnout operation that will spring to life in the last 72 hours of the campaign next year. By e-mail and snail mail, door to door and word of mouth, Republicans are planning to narrowcast discrete appeals–on everything from taxes to gun control–on a voter-by-voter basis. Rove made his money in direct mail, and it’s still the way he tends to work.
But this machinery of pointillistic politics won’t succeed without a popular leader and an inspiring message. Bush’s advisers see him as the ultimate “get out the vote” device, a president whose popularity at the GOP grass roots meets or exceeds that of Ronald Reagan. Evangelicals see him as one of their own. His policies–from a Manichaean definition of the war on terrorism to support for faith-based programs–are designed to make sure “the base” continues to view him in that worshipful way. Rove & Co. will market their man (who, in fact, loves the granular detail of political gamesmanship) as a beacon of principle, unwilling to bend on the war abroad or on fiscal and tax policy at home.
It’s a risky strategy. The war in Iraq, a dicey proposition at best, could turn catastrophic with one truck bomb. The mounting deficit could sink the dollar or the recovery, or both. It’s also dangerous to turn the struggle between Red and Blue states into a moral clash of black and white. If you argue, as Bush does, that we are fighting evil, then, by extension, anyone who opposes you (including the Democrats) is in league with evil. The notion could scare as many voters as it attracts, not to mention dividing the country even more bitterly. The president won’t say as much, of course, but some of his more enthusiastic and unscrupulous supporters (and maybe a cabinet member or two) surely will.
In fact, Bush may have no choice, since his strategy was set in motion the moment he decided to go to war in Iraq. It was one of the most fateful presidential calls in recent decades, and one Bush had to know would define his presidency and determine his, and its, fate. Bush and Rove are confident enough about that decision that they chose Madison Square Garden, hard by 9/11 hallowed ground, as the site for the Republican convention next year. It will be another September in Manhattan, and it will be interesting to see if George W. Bush is able to feel at home.
