Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 25, 1995 TAG: 9509250078
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE F. WILL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
England's ``South Sea Bubble'' was the episode of speculation in South Sea Company stock that drove the price from 128.5 pounds in January 1720 to 1,000 pounds in August. The bubble burst in September, ruining investors and teaching the nation that prosperity could not be conjured into existence simply by unconstrained expansion of credit.
Powell, riding a media whirlwind, and perhaps a bubble, risks a rapid deflation. If, after months of what amounts to political foreplay, he decides against running for president, he may be dismissed as a tease who treated the political process frivolously. And, given his background and what seems to be his temperament, if he runs he might be a retrograde force in politics, and at odds with the mood of the Republican nominating electorate.
He has had slight opportunity or professional need to become conversant with most of the important arguments about America's domestic arrangements, so it is understandable that autobiography is his preferred form of communication. But because of this, a Powell candidacy probably would set back the process of maturation in American politics evidenced in 1994 when, for the first time, congressional elections were consciously nationalized by an act of national leadership.
The instrument for this was the Contract With America. (An irony: The uprising against the centralizing tendencies of modern government, and against Washington's leadership claims, was organized on the Hill where the four quadrants of the federal city meet.) Even people who disagree strenuously with the Contract's particulars can concede that, as a mechanism for manufacturing a mandate and generating party discipline, the Contract served to pull American politics up from parochialism and personalities.
A Powell candidacy would resurrect personality-driven politics. It would apply to presidential politics, our grand national conversation, the tactics of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings - politics as autobiography. Supporters of Thomas, who should have defended him as the fine jurist he has proven to be, seemed to say that he should be confirmed because of the heartening story of his rise from poverty in Pin Point, Ga. His is a grand story, as is Powell's, but both stories are only marginally relevant to judging fitness for high office.
The Contract made very explicit promise-keeping central to political life. This has continuing consequences: Republican candidates in this year's Virginia state legislative races have unveiled a contract. One reason Pete Wilson's campaign is feeble is that Californians are disgusted by his cavalier disregard of his promise not to run. And the new seriousness about promise-keeping may make the welfare legislation an agony for President Clinton.
He praises the Senate bill, but warns that he might veto the final legislation if the conference committee moves toward the House bill's provisions denying women extra payments for children they have while on welfare, and denying cash assistance to teen-agers who have illegitimate children. But many House Republicans, having promised radical reforms, now regard their welfare bill as the best hope for preserving their reputations as promise-keepers.
If the conference produces a compromise significantly more like the House bill and the president vetoes it, he becomes vulnerable to the charge that, adding to his long list of broken promises, he has broken the most popular promise he made in 1992 (to ``end welfare as we know it''). But if he signs such a bill, how can Jesse Jackson refuse to challenge him and still retain any relevance to the nation's political discourse?
If the conference produces essentially the Senate bill, Phil Gramm can oppose the result (he says he voted for the Senate bill in the hope that the House would prevail in conference) and portray Bob Dole as a split-the-differences compromiser indifferent to the Contract.
Gramm, who is slowly gaining ground on Dole but still is far behind in polls of Republicans generally, often beats Dole in straw polls among the highly motivated activists who participate in such polls. The Republican nominating electorate seems attuned to the post-Contract politics of explicit promise-keeping, which raises the ratio of substance to personality in politics.
If Powell, whose personality sparkles, were to run as the candidate of personality and of exquisitely inexplicit promises (such as to be ``a fiscal conservative with a social conscience'') Gramm, who is no sparkler, would be the UnPowell, but perhaps also a needle against a bubble.
- Washington Post Writers Group
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB