THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 15, 1996 TAG: 9608150546
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
DATELINE: SAN DIEGO LENGTH: 58 lines
The overarching rainbow theme for the Republican and Democratic conventions is the American Dream - which, sad to say, has been a nightmare much of the way.
Tuesday's keynoter Susan Molinari delivered a thin speech without one mention of the dread word ``deficit.'' As TV cameras panned to her baby, Susan Ruby, Molinari said that as she rocked her child she wondered whether Susan Ruby's first memories would be of our nation's leader, Bob Dole.
I have rocked many a baby and my thoughts have focused on two things: How can I stop this child from crying and when are its parents coming home? Any look into the future would center on whether the terrible deficit would be eliminated before the child matured.
That towers Godzilla-like over us, as foreboding as any nightmare that has beset us. Just now we are in a relatively sunny spot.
But nightmares persist. Shortly after the horrific first world war, the first Depression engulfed the veterans, who would be in their 90s now. It was a squall compared to the Great Depression, which fell upon us after the boom of the late 1920s. In the early 1930s unemployment hit 35 percent. The day the stock market crashed men threw themselves from windows of tall buildings. There were no bankruptcy laws to offer a second chance.
Men, looking for work, gobbled handouts at kitchen tables so they would have the stamina to go on looking for work.
Veterans without a GI Bill marched on Washington for a bonus. Troops commanded by Douglas MacArthur dispersed the protesters from cardboard shacks, a Hooverville in the flats below Capitol Hill.
The country verged on revolution, fanned by Huey Long. Franklin Roosevelt tried nostrum after nostrum. But what pulled us out of the Depression was World War II.
In recurring wars, soldiers of the first world war saw sons in World War II and Korea, and those young fathers saw their sons in Vietnam. Then came the Iraq war and bloody outbreaks elsewhere.
Medical science warded off polio and other childhood diseases that had been death sentences, and it is trying to cope with AIDS. Lifespans lengthen. Political scientists have learned to control inflation and other economic ailments.
But over it all, even topping the rainbow, is the deficit that, left untamed, could topple everything.
The Republicans have vanished the deficit from conversation. For them it no longer exists. In an interview with USA Today, Jack Kemp didn't mention it.
``I think you can save the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the social welfare net, without hurting people, without raising taxes.''
An economy growing at 3.9 or 4 percent would almost double the growth rate and would provide many more jobs, many more new businesses, much more new revenue, so many new opportunities to which he and Dole are committed, he said. ``But for me to sit here and reform entitlements before I have even been nominated vice president . . . doesn't make any sense.''
But that is the main question. Will that former deficit warrior, Bob Dole, who has proposed a $548 billion tax cut, discuss it today in his acceptance speech?
KEYWORDS: REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION 1996 by CNB