Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 19, 1994 TAG: 9401200319
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The state's first Republican governor in 12 years no doubt welcomes such a comparison. But it's when Allen is least like Reagan that he's most interesting.
Like Reagan and the presidency in 1980, Allen was elected to the Virginia governorship on the basis of public disenchantment with the Democratic status quo. Among the issues for Reagan were a perception of U.S. weakness abroad. A central issue for Allen was a perception of state weakness against crime.
In taking a hard line against hardened criminals, Allen has a point: One part of the answer to cutting crime is keeping violent and chronic offenders locked up. Similarly, Allen has a point in his call for "workfare" to replace welfare: The system should foster a sense of responsibility, not dependency.
Unfortunately, like Reagan, Allen is eager to propose get-tough initiatives without saying much about how to pay for them. If no-parole policies cut crime, and workfare policies shrink the dependency culture, there will be long-term economic and social gains. In the short term, though, building prisons costs money, and so does provision of the day care, job training and, if necessary, public-service jobs that must be part of any serious and broad-based effort to reform the welfare system.
Fortunately, unlike Reagan, Allen's speech Monday night also seemed to reflect sympathy more than scorn for the downtrodden, and an understanding that welfare dependency is less a life chosen than a fate accepted. With crime, too, Allen spoke of erasing the fundamental, long-term causes, and talked feelingly of the bleak choices faced by many in the most poverty-stricken sections of Virginia's inner cities. The difference is vast between Allen's view that the goal of social-welfare programs is to empower the poor, and the more traditional view that the poor exist to be patronized.
Allen's attempt to revive the distinctive if threadbare Reaganesque mix of populism and anti-tax protections for the privileged could mean trouble if the new governor is taking it too seriously. He may not be. In his speech Saturday, he said that state government has been "stifling initiative under the heavy, grimy boot of excessive taxation and spending," words so silly as to suggest they might have been uttered with some sense of irony. One hopes they were, anyway.
Certainly, whatever the 12 years of Democratic rule did, they did not nudge Virginia from its position as a low-tax state. It's easy to believe that swing voters last November were looking for an alternative to what seemed Democratic disarray and arrogance. It's hard to believe, particularly after the past four years of retrenchment, that tax relief and government cutbacks are Allen's mandate.
The governor's facile proposal for an initiative-and-referendum procedure by which the electorate could bypass the General Assembly and governor to make laws would be bad news, as Roanoke Del. Clifton "Chip" Woodrum noted, for outpopulated and outvoted Western Virginia.
Worse, establishment of the procedure - not to mention Allen's irresponsible proposal that income and sales-tax increases require two-thirds majorities in each house of the legislature - could threaten Virginia's hard-earned reputation for fiscal stability. This reputation has persisted, until now, through the administrations of Democrats and Republicans alike.
Reagan, with his program of borrow and spend, did lasting damage to the federal government's fiscal stability. Allen is constrained by the requirement of a balanced budget. But public investments are needed to assure Virginia's future prosperity. Unseriousness, Reagan showed, can have serious consequences.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994
by CNB