THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505050028
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
After an impressive early response to the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton seemed to target his talk-show tormentors while decrying inflammatory rhetoric. He denounced ``purveyors of hatred and division'' whose ``loud and angry voices'' volley across the country, poisoning political dialogue.
Knowing this would incite more of the same, the White House staff hastened to say the president wasn't speaking of anyone in particular. But, of course, he was, and, Lord knows, with plenty of provocation, and not just from the fringes.
There was a time when high public office offered some protection to officials against daylight aggression. The vicious stuff was saved for whisper campaigns before elections. Now government and its chief elected officer are abused openly and incessantly not only by the likes of Gordon Liddy but by principals of the Republican Party.
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole blames loss of a voice on the lack of a ``real president.'' House Speaker Newt Gingrich ties the killing of children (including Susan Smith's in South Carolina) to failed social policies of the Democratic Party which, he likes to say, ``despises the values of the American people.''
When asked if such talk might have played into the bombing of a federal building, Gingrich relied that the question was ``grotesque.'' Fair enough. Better it might have been to have asked: (1) If he ever regrets - for any reason - his own verbal violence. (2) If he, as a high official, has any concern about the vicious and dehumanizing speech that characterizes some talk-radio hosts.
Both Gingrich and Dole, it's reported, have been guests of Gordon Liddy, famous now for on-air instructions on how to kill federal agents. Both may have read reports of another talk-show host saying gun-control advocate Sarah Brady ``ought to be put down. A humane shot at a veterinarian's would be an easy way to do it.''
Clinton's staff nonetheless was wise to trim his own rhetoric. Even the appearance of speculative linking of individual crimes to groups or places (as Dallas was blamed for Oswald's assassination of John F. Kennedy) tends to dig up snakes. No one knows the mind or motives of the Oklahoma bomber. Besides, angry speech and actions run across the political spectrum. Insurrections and contempt for authority now feared from the right began decades ago on the left. And recently, on the floor of the House, Georgia Democrat John Lewis depicted Republican advocates of welfare reform as Nazis.
An apt question for leaders of both parties is what has brought government so low in public esteem that condemnation of it has become a national pastime. The answer has nothing to do with self-styled militiamen running around cornfields in greasepaint, but something to do with leadership - or the lack of it.
With a little less than half his term remaining, the president offers little more than re-election tactics. His administration has no central idea. When Republicans are brave enough to target subsidies to their own farm-belt constituencies, Clinton rushes to protect goodies for agribusiness. The re-election campaign is continuous.
The Republicans, for their part, squelch their own honest counsels who insist that they cannot give a big tax cut while chopping deficits and balancing the budget. Gingrich paramounts the tax cut knowing that Phil Gramm will do the same in the Senate and that the normally sensible Dole will be brought to heel.
At length, the debt problem fobbed off yet again, the two parties will reach into war chests stuffed by interests who know how to buy access, and find the money to paint each other in the most sinister shades possible.
Yes, this is politics-as-usual, but that's the problem: The nation has unusual problems - a weak dollar, a ferocious debt and declining ability to pay for basic social benefits whose costs are zooming upward. Politics, meantime, is producing no visible results for the average citizen, and has pretty well depleted its stores of civility. The political establishment ought to be trying very hard to elevate its own behavior. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB