Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 25, 1995 TAG: 9501280018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE DEMOCRATIC Party held its winter meeting last week. While it wasn't exactly a wake, some of the participants seemed to be whistling past the cemetery.
President Clinton, trying to buck up troops dispirited by the massacre in the November election, said, ``The reports of our demise are premature.'' Actually, those reports are up-to-the-minute. A U.S. News & World Report poll discovered that the president's popularity (a dubious label, given his unpopularity) has declined to 40 percent. Worse for him and his party, the poll shows a majority of Americans feel he should work with Republicans, whose agenda they prefer to the Democrats'.
In the midst of the usual political posturing, there was this bolt of light from an unlikely source: ``Democrats' addiction to other people's misery does not solve their problems or substitute for national policy. While we must acknowledge the pain of the impoverished, we must also require them to take charge of their own lives. We must find ways to reward those who work or get into a program for self-sufficiency.''
Comments from Newt Gingrich? A quotation from the ``Contract With America''? A speech by Jack Kemp? None of the above. These are the words of liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in a Washington Post column on Jan. 22.
Mikulski continued, ``We must ensure that welfare rules do not destroy the family. Democrats should stand up for the family, and that includes men. We need to end the `get the man out of the house' rule, which has pushed men out of the house so a family can qualify for public benefits. Shortsighted intentions have created rules that dismantle families, emasculate men and deny their children a full-time father. Being a dad is more than writing a child-support check.''
Could a meeting of Republican and Democratic minds emerge from such wisdom?
There's more. Writing in the same newspaper two days earlier, columnist Stephen Rosenfeld commented on documents released from the archives of the Soviet Union and chronicled in a PBS series. What these documents reveal leads Rosenfeld to ``confirm the approach long attributed to the political and academic right. The Soviet Union, being driven by an illegitimate leadership's hostile ideology, was in fact evil, repressive and expansionist. It was not just the misperceived, put-upon and often unoffending conventional state depicted by the political and academic left.''
So, then, Ronald Reagan was correct when he referred to the old Soviet Union as an ``evil empire,'' despite the hoots and hollers that came from political, academic and journalistic liberals.
As welcome as these admissions by Sen. Mikulski and columnist Rosenfeld are, it should be noted that they come long after most other people had reached these conclusions. Still, if someone of Mikulski's unchallenged liberal credentials can now see that the welfare state has failed - and that Democrats who cling to it are not holding on to a life raft but to a sinking ship - this could produce a basis for negotiations with the new congressional majority that might promote the legitimate welfare of those who have been on the dole as well as those who have been paying for it. The acknowledgment of evil empires could also help give direction to a nonexistent U.S. foreign policy.
Democrats have two choices. They can pretend, as Vice President Al Gore did at the Democratic National Committee meeting, that everything is fine. ``We will re-elect the man who through the strength of his convictions has given the United States of America new strength,'' said Gore. To what convictions is he referring?
Or, Democrats can listen to Barbara Mikulski, who wrote, ``We have too often substituted agonizing for action, and it has paralyzed us.''
The choice for Democrats is irrelevance and loss of the White House in 1996, or getting back in the game by admitting mistakes and promoting government programs that help people take responsibility for their lives, not encourage them to sit back and wait for handouts.
The election of liberal Sen. Christopher Dodd to head the Democratic National Committee and the strong possibility that the equally liberal White House aide Harold Ickes will direct the president's re-election campaign are troubling indications that the party will remain addicted to its failed policies and won't hear the pleadings of Mikulski and Rosenfeld. They are shining a light to lead the dispirited Democrats out of the deep, dark hole they have dug for themselves.
- Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB