Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993 TAG: 9303190510
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TONE-DEAF TRANSFORMATION
A TIME of change is a time of transformation, and "change" is in the air - is a la mode - this year. Whether the "change" sought or effected is necessary, whether it is a good thing or a bad, seems less to matter than the fact that it occurs, or at least is trumpeted.Along with it go various "transformations," another buzzword of the '90s, and some are so bizarre as to challenge one's sanity.
A president who assiduously evaded military service in the '60s returns a salute - altogether improperly, by my reasoning - from an admiral. Gun nuts pose their objections to all forms of weapons control as protection of the "law-abiding." Self-styled "pro-life" advocates defend murder in the name of their cause. Religious looneybirds in Texas slaughter federal agents.
These are the familiar paradoxes of what we are pleased to congratulate ourselves is "democracy," all of them, and endlessly capable of extension.
Yet few contemporary "transformations" match, for me, the transformation of the Republican Party into the defender of what it - like everyone else in these tone-deaf times - calls the "middle class." What the "middle class" is and who the "middle class" are remain maddeningly undefined and probably beyond definition. But every politician, newspaper or broadcasting reporter or commentator, indeed everyone on the street, seems to know, somewhere down deep, and to be obsessed with its salvation. In this noble endeavor, none is louder or more sanctimonious than the Grand Old Party.
Why this extraordinary reversal has occurred is not difficult to understand. Bill Clinton and a host of other Democratic, as well as a few Republican, candidates based their success in last fall's elections on appeals to the mysterious "middle class." The "middle class," whatever and whoever it is and they are, was downtrodden, neglected, overtaxed, underserved and above all unappreciated. So also said Ross Perot, the Texas Socrates. Voters, all of whom regard themselves as "middle class" whether they make $10,000 a year or $5 million, ate it up. Misery loves sympathy.
So now we have the Republican Party embracing the same shibboleth.
This is the party that gave us the scandals of the Grant, Harding, Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations - none of them mere pilfering, which is what Democrats do, but in each case large-scale thievery of public lands and resources, concerted attempts to undermine the legal system at its core and determined efforts to rob the U.S. Constitution of any significant application to ordinary lives.
This is the party that gave us Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra and a still-unraveling involvement by the administration of George Bush in the activities of a Middle Eastern despot with whom he was still swapping money and weapons, even as he prepared to go to war against him.
This is the party that tried to undermine the constitutional right of women to abortion by imposing absurd - and probably unconstitutional - restrictions on what doctors could tell pregnant patients about their medical options.
This is the party that tried to undermine every environmental restriction it could find by using the office of the vice president, whose name I forget, to subvert environmental protection in the name of "economic growth."
This is the party that employed a discredited - and indeed ludicrous - notion called "trickle-down economics" to lower taxes on the rich, raise taxes on the poor, deepen the national debt and bring the nation near ruin; that so relaxed federal oversight of savings-and-loan associations that it brought on unprecedented bankruptcies; that so slighted securities laws that a whole stack of corporate dominoes collapsed.
And this is the party that now - demanding opposition to President Clinton's attempt to reverse the nation's economic decline - calls itself the tribune of the "middle class"?
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.