Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991 TAG: 9104050640
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Part of the problem is, of course, that one gets worse oneself. The faculties dim. The bones thin and grow brittle. The arteries harden and clog. The muscles grow inelastic. The memory grows both unreliable and frivolous. Dissolution looms.
Equally unhappy, if that is possible, is the realization that the public weal, rarely very good, is daily growing seamier. World War II seemed to me horrifying enough, but most of us came home from it certain that nothing of the sort could ever happen again.
Alas, five years later we had Korea, which seemed to many Americans both aimless and hopeless. That was followed all too quickly by Vietnam, which few care to ponder at length; then by American frolics in Grenada, Lebanon and Panama, happy little outings that shocked and distressed many who hoped the United States had outgrown such things. Then came the Persian Gulf.
So too with public leadership. Once Kennedy vanished we had little to cheer: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter. . . . I had thought we could sink no lower than Ronald Reagan, but then we got George Bush.
Which brings us at last to recognition of the dreadful truth that there is, after all, something worse than Bush. I fight the knowledge might and main, but there it is.
It is named L. Douglas Wilder.
Wilder is, I am sorry to remind you, governor of Virginia. I am equally sorry to say that I helped put him there - cheered on his candidacy, showed the poor judgment to vote for him and finally, despite the warnings of friends more active in the cockpit of Virginia politics, had the colossal idiocy to think it would all come right at last.
I confess these transgressions with shame but in the hope of redemption upon some latter day. Sin is the common lot, and I have sinned. But there is hope in salvation, and salvation lies in truth.
The truth about Wilder is, as so many knew before I, that he is one of those politicians, not rare, who pursue one office only to gain a platform upon which to pursue the next.
Elected in a squeaker but to national acclaim as the first black governor of modern times, he had hardly taken the oath - televised nationally, of course - when he set off for fairer fields. There being only one fairer, to his eyes, than the governorship of his native state, he was after the presidency.
But everyone knows this - knows how, that is, he spent most of his first and second years in office not only out of the state but out of the state on personal political business, speaking here, there and anywhere Democrats were innocent enough to ask him, pumping relentlessly his virtues as a candidate of the "new mainstream."
The "new mainstream" has proved, unfortunately, to be nothing better than warmed-over Reaganism: no new taxes, the application of a ruthless ax to crucial state services (many labeled, as only Wilder could label them, "niceties"), and an unfailing preference for the political bromides that are quickly reducing the nation and the state to an economic has-been and a humanitarian disaster. Wilder appears to have no other ideas.
Along the way he has demonstrated a zeal for settling old scores that takes the breath away. Virginia politicians, like politicians everywhere, have generally let their defeated enemies, whether fellow party members or rivals from across the aisle, wither in neglect; Wilder has fired Robb and Baliles appointees until, as one observer recently told me, "the streets of Richmond are littered with the bodies of his victims." His vindictiveness toward those who disagree with him - or have disagreed with him in the past - is legendary.
The worst, however, is that L. Douglas Wilder shows no aptitude for the complex demands of a difficult world. His view of politics is wholly personal - the satisfaction of his own ambition for power and status - and beyond it he appears to have no interest in the subtleties of a world rapidly threatening to go out of human control.
We ought to be used to incompetence and runaway egotism by now; but the idea of Wilder in the presidency is so appalling one hopes it is all a bad dream.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB