ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 TAG: 9701210080
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
PAUL TSONGAS, who died Saturday at age 55, was a bit preachy at times. But he stepped into the national political arena with a point that at the time very much needed to be made, and still needs to be heeded.
In 1991, the former Massachusetts senator launched a bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. He ran on a platform calling on America to face up to hard decisions necessary to make if the nation is to meet the economic and social challenges of the coming decades. He continued making the point via the Concord Coalition, which he subsequently co-founded with retired Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire.
Unlike many in his party, Tsongas supported pro-business initiatives and insisted that spending growth in middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare had to be brought under control. Unlike many in the opposition, he refused to support budget-busting tax cuts, and maintained a belief in the good that the appropriate kinds of governmental activism can do.
Parts of Tsongas' point - deficit reduction, for example, and the need to reallocate government spending in favor of investments with economic and social payoff - were picked up by Bill Clinton, the eventual winner of the '92 race. Indeed, the deficit is much less a problem than it was then.
But Clinton and other politicians treat too gingerly another essential part of Tsongas' point: Such reallocation also requires a measure of middle-class sacrifice.
This point flowed, again, from Tsongas' insistence not so much on austerity as authenticity. Except in Republican supply-side fantasies and Democratic dreams of ever-larger government, both of which tend to expand public debt, more here generally must mean less someplace else.
As it is, programs for the poor get slashed, but the big-money middle-class entitlements go unreformed. And few if any gains are made in the education, research-and-development, and infrastructure investments that will go far in determining the kind of nation that America will be in the 21st century.
Tsongas departed from the orthodoxies of both left and right, but he was no centrist if by that is meant a politician addicted to splitting the difference. Some differences cannot be split, Tsongas said; they must be recognized, and one path or the other chosen.
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB