
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 27, 1993                   TAG: 9303290406
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PHIL GRAMM

IN THE LATE '60s, Bill Clinton spent a couple of years in England as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University - enough, charged the Republican opposition during the '92 presidential campaign, to have infected him with a European virus that blinds him to the evils of activist government.

That's not the half of it, if GOP Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas is to be believed. Clinton's economic program, Gramm declaimed on the Senate floor this week, is tantamount to socialism.

"If socialism carries the day, this program will work," Gramm said. "But it [socialism] has never carried the day. It has been rejected everywhere in the world except Cuba, in North Korea and China, and in Washington, D.C."

Hoo, boy. Instead of Slick Willie, Commissar Clinton?

Clearly, Clinton rates government's potential value more highly than did his Republican predecessors.

Clearly, too, the president's thinking has been influenced by his interest in the mechanics of government, including some governments abroad. During the campaign and after, Clinton has occasionally made reference to programs or appraches that seem to have worked in other industrialized democracies and might be worth trying here.

But the countries Clinton has referred to are places like Germany and Canada and Japan - not exactly hotbeds of Cuba-style socialism. And we don't recall Clinton's calling for government takeover of basic industries, or denial of civil liberties, or abolition of private property, or an end to free elections, or any of the other defining characteristics of the political systems of nations cited by Gramm.

Hyperbole is commonplace in political speech, of course, and Gramm's exaggeration is more comic than caustic. But to compare Clinton's economic package with totalitarian rule is to belittle the hardships and evils of the real thing.

by CNB