THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512150003
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
When James C. Miller III declares his intent to ``whump'' John Warner for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate, one understands his desire to liven his blandness with a bit of color.
Having lost the 1992 nomination to the charismatic Oliver North, Miller now challenges a 16-year incumbent straight from central casting. Warner looks the part - and has it. Miller, by contrast, is a study in gray whose campaign launch, put mildly, lacked splash. Not his fault, of course, that he's been dealt so few face cards. He persists.
Miller does not lack for pluck or for support. A constituency of resentment against Warner (mostly for scorning North in a striking display of courage) is booted, spurred and ready to ride. Miller, though, isn't entirely comfortable with a politics of revenge: He wisely wants to be seen as something more than a bounty hunter serving pro-North party activists - wants to ``talk about who can do the better job.'' Thus he pictures Warner as doctrinally soft and himself as a ``rock-ribbed Republican, Ronald Reagan conservative.''
This may be the best spin that can be put upon a candidacy against a Republican senator with a safe seat whose key committees include Armed Services and Environment and Public Works. But all the same, it is a contradiction in terms that misrepresents Miller and the president he served as budget director.
The Ronald Reagan that Miller seeks to evoke is a Reagan that never was. Between 1964, when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater, and 1994, when the GOP captured Congress under the flag of Newt Gingrich, there was a collapse of small-government, low-tax Republicanism. Reagan mouthed the slogans, but with a wink, set the table for a gigantic free lunch, and blamed the Democrats for running up the tab. The fastest-growing spending, however, was on Republican constituencies - pensioners, farmers and veterans.
According to Martin Anderson, his chief economic adviser during the 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Reagan ``was not calling for reductions in federal spending, or even for just holding the line. All he wanted to do was stop it from growing so fast.'' Had Reagan not approved some stealthy tax increases, the flood of red ink loosed on his watch would have crested even higher.
Jim Miller ought to be more careful in describing the Reagan years lest, in the record, bananas be found in place of ``rock ribs.'' Besides, it's Miller himself, a stranger to elective office, who wants voters to oust a successful, hard-working senator. If the argument for doing so is that Miller is the model honest-Injun, Scout's-honor, cross-the-heart conservative, he ought to lay out more fully some of his stock positions.
Even the true-believers at the Wall Street Journal think a balanced-budget amendment is bunk. And there are questions about the school vouchers that Miller also supports: 1) What's the evidence that a cross-section of students will perform better in a private than a public school? 2) Will vouchers bring private-school virtues to public education, or instead, the flaws of the public sphere to the private?
Vowing he ``will fight Bill Clinton and stand up for the taxpayers and families of Virginia,'' Miller also declares for adoption of a flat tax and an end to capital gains and inheritance taxes. From any such change, there will be winners and losers; it would be interesting to know which taxpayers Miller thinks would be winners under a flat-tax scheme.
Merely reciting a wish list of reforms does little to define them - or their advocate. If Jim Miller wants to lift his candidacy above party feuds, he needs to get to the innards of some issues that set him apart from John Warner. And, as well, from the fiscal follies of Ronald Reagan.
MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB