ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 20, 1997 TAG: 9701200086
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: GEORGE F. WILL
SOURCE: GEORGE F. WILL
IN HIS FIRST Inaugural Address, President Clinton packed into his 40-word peroration a congestion of cliches. There was ``a call,'' issued from a ``mountaintop,'' to ``service in the valley.'' There were ``trumpets,'' too, and an assurance that ``we have changed the guard.'' Still, style isn't everything and if such an address is supposed to set the tone of the president's term, the address was a success.
At the beginning of the address Clinton said, ``Each generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.'' But at the end he said, ``Today ... we rededicate ourselves to the very idea of America.'' Let's see: Although there is some enduring ``very idea of America'' to which we should rededicate ourselves, every generation can - no, ``must'' - redefine America. Clintonism was foreshadowed: incoherence couched in high-sounding verbosity.
Four years after that address, which was freckled with 11 uses of the word ``change'' (``we can make change our friend,'' etc.), there has been remarkable change, most of it unfriendly to his hitherto avowed purposes. And now he is poised to complete an eight-year emulation of a man walking across a field of snow and leaving no footprints.
Clinton's crabwise scamper to the center is less remarkable than the continuing rightward migration of the center during the first Democratic presidency in a dozen years. Throughout this century, the liberal project has been to (as liberals like to say) spread the ethic of common provision, or to (as conservatives disparage it) conscript the individual into collective undertakings organized by the central government. The largest accomplishment of that project is the Social Security Act of 1935. And look what just the last six months have brought.
Clinton has accepted welfare reform that repealed the portion of that act that established a national entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And a splintered Advisory Council on Social Security has issued three proposals, all recommending considerable changes. Two of them envision substantial privatization of the system, which could transform the residual public portion into something valued only by the elderly poor. That would become another responsibility ripe for devolution to the states.
In California, where one of every eight Americans lives, Gov. Pete Wilson is demonstrating the conservative uses to which devolved powers can be put. He proposes limiting new welfare recipients to just 12 months of benefits over two years, eliminating the requirement that counties provide a safety net, and asking county welfare offices to urge mothers who are too immature or impoverished ``to provide a loving, stable and secure environment'' to consider putting their children up for adoption.
Conservative welfare proposals usually bristle with requirements for recipients (work, drug treatment, establishing paternity of children, etc.), thereby demonstrating that conservative programs can involve a net increase in the quantity of government. Still, a casualty of this is the liberal project of nationalizing life in the name of efficacious compassion. Today the conservative project is to replace materialist compassion - the amelioration of pain -administered by the national government. The replacements are state experiments involving rigor and responsibility as government's primary means of social therapy.
The federal budget soon will have the smallest percentage devoted to nondefense discretionary spending since the 1950s. The balance of financial, as well as intellectual, resources is tilting to the states, 32 of which, with 72 percent of the nation's population, have Republican governors. The Supreme Court is evincing an inclination to sail away from the wilder shores of judicial activism, even revisiting the issue of how expansively the federal government can construe its power to regulate interstate commerce.
The centrifugal forces producing the devolution of powers from the central government can have various consequences for the nation's political culture. Justice Charles Fried of the Massachusetts Supreme Court writes that citizens may come to be governed ``less grandly and remotely'' and the states may develop ``more distinct characters'': ``Although we would be more strangers to other Americans, we would be more closely tied to the smaller places where we live.'' Fried anticipates a cost to such a transaction:
``Our economy of allegiance simply is not infinitely expandable. If we become more Virginian or Georgian, surely we will also feel more remote, less responsible for the poor of Kentucky or of the ghettoes of Chicago. If we became more Virginian, we would be less American.''
Conservatives demur, arguing that as we become more tied to where we live, we will become more connected to those, including the poor, who live with us. Perhaps. What is certain is that Clinton is no formidable obstacle to the reduction of the liberal project to a subject of antiquarian interest.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 87 linesby CNB