THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409160014
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Any straws snatched from the political winds will say the same as any other: Democrats will lose so heavily in the November elections that Republicans dare hope that control of Congress will pass to them. If so, they want that passage symbolized as a defeat for Bill Clinton and as a repudiation of the welfare state.
To paint that picture, Newt Gingrich will gather his GOP flock on Capitol steps to pledge immediate action advancing a line-item veto, a balanced-budget amendment and limits on congressional terms. The pledge will be genuine; the agenda, as usual, piffle.
Gingrich, the House whip and would-be Speaker, seeks to camouflage Republicans as conservatives eager to cut government down to size. But government spending has Republican as well as Democratic constituencies and until Gingrich is wiling to confront that fact, he will fail to qualify as a serious critic of the welfare state.
The election, therefore, will have less to do with the size of the free lunch than with who gets the biggest portions. This fight over spoils is a legitimate function of politics; the urge to retch is caused by pretense that something noble is afoot.
Stipulate that Democrats are big spenders who've had almost unbroken control of Congress, and agree that their seal is set upon a record of profligate spending. And agree as well that long tenure has touched more than a few with arrogance. This is the GOP's indictment, but the question is what Republicans will do to change course: More precisely, what will they do to change the public's mind in order that national policy can be changed.
Not much, the record suggests. In a brilliant essay in the September 5 issue of Newsweek magazine, George Will, a genuine conservative, contrasts Barry Goldwater, who really wanted change, with Ronald Reagan, who wanted to be elected.
``Reagan,'' Will writes, ``did not abolish any major spending program, and the only program of any sort he abolished, a job-training program, was promptly replaced by another with essentially the same mission. Having promised to abolish the Education Department, Reagan kept it and fed it. Its budget swelled from $14.7 billion in 1981 to $21.5 billion in 1989. In the booming 1980s tax revenues soared and spending did even more, and the fastest rising spending was for GOP constituencies - pensioners, farmers, veterans.''
As regards government meddling in the market place, consider Richard Nixon. He imposed wage and price controls - a massive intervention - and was a forerunner of Bill Clinton in proposing that employers be required to ``provide basic health insurance for their employees.'' Nixon described what now is hotly (and accurately) portrayed as a tax on employers as a natural progression of the New Deal from requiring a minimum wage for employees, to providing them with disability and retirement benefits and to setting occupational health and safety standards.
Nixon as a liberal on health care was no surprise. His Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had validated the New Deal and appointed, Earl Warren and William Brennan, the architects of liberal judicial activism: Nixon would follow with appointments crucial to establishing abortion righs and racial quotas.
``Our gamble,'' says Newt Gingrich, ``is that the country wants to change directions. The real message is that if you think the welfare state is working, re-elect Bil Clinton'' and his team.
Well, not quite. Gingrich is gambling nothing and saying nothing that offers promise of cutting welfare-state expenses. Everybody knows that individual and corporate citizens want a balanced budget; nobody knows what, if anything, they're willing to give up in exchange.
If the nation had a true conservative party, that question would be thrust forward. Having only Democrat and Republicans, the question at hand is whether Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich will be the first to offer a tax cut to a country knee-deep in debt.
MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB