Venus aces slick Willie

After winning the Women's U.S. Open September 9, 20year-old tennis star Venus Williams grilled President Clinton on his fiscal policies and asked him for a tax cut when he called to hail her on her victory.

After the President congratulated Williams, telling her she was "in the zone," Williams asked Clinton why he left the arena after the men's semifinal match and didn't stay for the all-U.S. women's final between her and Lindsey Davenport. "He said he had to eat dinner," Williams told "Good Morning America" host Antonio Mora. That didn't satisfy Williams, who said she told the President, "I wanted to eat dinner, too."

The highlight of the phone call came when Williams asked Clinton, "Can you lower my taxes, please? I work so hard, Mr. President. Did you see me today?" President Clinton tried to laugh off the question, but Williams persisted. "So what can you do about it?" she asked.

"Not much, right now," Clinton responded disingenuously. Then he outright lied. "We're working on it," he said. After proposing a possible exemption for athletes, Williams threw one more jab.

"Should I read your lips?" she asked.

Williams also complained about the traffic jams in New York City caused by the President's Secret Service caravan. Williams' younger sister, Serena-the 1999 U.S. Open champion-expressed a similar distaste for the IRS's 39.6% tax rate. "I'm going to hate to se my tax return," she told reporters after her win.

The Williams sisters defy the liberal idea of "the rich," which consists entirely of, as one Democratic senator put it last summer, "those who have won the lottery of life." Venus and Serena are from a poor family and a rough neighborhood. Their father decided when they were babies that he was going to train them to be world-class tennis players, and he did so on ill-kept inner-city courts.

Unlike Democratic Senators Kennedy and Rockefeller, the Williams' family was dealt a bad hand and made the most of it. What does this get you in President Clinton's book? Williams says, "[B]asically, he didn't cut me a deal."

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 22, 2000
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