THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410210016
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
It is going to be wonderful, isn't it?
The Republicans can feel it in their bones, read it in the polls, see it in the squirming defensive strategies of their opponents. Come Election Day, voters are going to unload on the Democrats and maybe give control of Congress to the GOP.
This power shift, to be sure, is not assured. But around the country, ground is giving way under the feet of even the strongest Democratic incumbents. Some of these are fleeing identification with their party, some with a president who gets no respect even for genuine achievements, and others with Congress itself. More than a few incumbents are threatened by opponents who benefit from having no political experience of any sort.
This reflects a hostile public, one eager to shake the political system by its shoulders and improve its deportment. Does it also reflect a public beguiled by the notion that there's a painless fix for the hardest of problems? A comment by Rep. Fred Grandy, an Iowa Republican, has a point: ``People say, `Why is Congress so out of touch?' We're not. We are responding faithfully to the schizophrenic signals you're sending us, which is `cut our taxes and increase our entitlements and do it in a noble manner so that we can have pride and respect in you.' ''
That kind of truth-telling, of course, comes only from politicians quitting office as Grandy is doing. Those who wish to gain, or stay, in office are more inclined to make great show of offering trinkets.
Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who may become the new speaker of the House, speaks of reduced taxes, increased military spending and a balanced budget in the same breath. Although that spurious Reagan formula ran up astronomical debt, Republican candidates en masse have endorsed it yet again. Gingrich, to be sure, vows to ``dismantle the failed liberal welfare state,'' and insofar as that is a promise to reduce spending, it could add substance to empty talk about a balanced budget.
Politically, though, cutting spending has the same effect as raising taxes: It offends voters and threatens office-holders. After decades in the minority, it's idle to assume an ascendant GOP would risk losing new-found power or offending the Republican constituencies that fed regularly at the public trough. Anything said about Republicans in this regard, of course, would apply equally to Democrats. If the two parties ballyhoo differences in philosophy, the differences are not expressed in policies directed toward real change in the fundamental problems besetting the nation. The primary problem is lack of money to pay for the benefits the two parties have taught us to believe is our due - billions upon billions in ``entitlement'' spending that doesn't require an annual appropriation of funds and that is subject to neither vote nor veto.
If ever there was a president who had enough clout to point to the open spigot, it was Ronald Reagan. He gauged public sentiment; he was silent, and he was popular.
It's hard to watch the swipes and digs of the current campaign without feeling nostalgia for Ross Perot and his charts. On his lucid days the twangy Texan did more than the two parties combined to talk sense to the public. He made it possible, perhaps necessary, for Bill Clinton to fight through a temporary reduction in deficits.
Interestingly, no credit for that is claimed or given in the campaign. And just as interestingly, Newt Gingrich, so-called champion of conservatism, doesn't talk about actions that would balance the budget but about fiddling with the Constitution to make it say we must do what no politician even dreams of doing. This amounts to a GOP commitment to plunge the nation even deeper into debt. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB