Gop Contract Delivers Key Business Goals

‘ Most Americans want to help minorities and women succeed, but reject any programs that seem to give them an unfair advantage in school and the workplace.”

- USA Today

Laws now being enacted by Congress to implement the GOP’s “Contract With America” will force government to function much more like a business and far less as a purveyor of social services.

Predictably then, most of the contract items enjoy strong backing by business, whence sprang much of the impetus for last November’s historic change of course.

Abolishing unfunded mandates, giving the president line-item veto power, reducing the deficit, balancing the budget, cutting taxes and entitlements - all are long-cherished goals of the business establishment.

Ever since my arrival in this community 33 years ago, Spokane industrialist Luke G. Williams, former chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, has preached these principles. Finally they are nearing reality.

The italics above are the lead of the top story in last weekend’s edition of the national newspaper USA Today. It reported results of a new poll that shows half of Americans are for the broad concept of affirmative action. But fully two-thirds are against scholarship setasides and hiring quotas for minorities.

These are the attitudes expressed last November at the polls. And on Main Street today. Along with other Americans, business people are compassionate and giving. But a majority feel hornswoggled and led down the garden path by a social agenda run amok.

Take the federal lunch subsidy to day care centers, which caused a considerable stir locally. It subsidizes not only the poor, but middle and upper-income working parents as well.

Republican lawmakers want to end the free lunch for the upper crust. But social welfare advocates wail and scream that is taking food out of the mouths of children. Affluent children.

So taxpayers of modest means must subsidize in silence the career aspirations of upper-income working parents who neither need nor desire this gratuity. Either that, or risk the wrath of a force so organized that its power to coerce, to control, to discipline, and to punish through application of the mean spirited label is near absolute.

And its demands are always the same. More. More. Give. Or get trashed.

What better illustration than Newt Gingrich, the framer of the “Contract With America.” Upon its unveiling last September, he spoke as follows:

“As a history teacher, I would insist that it is impossible to maintain American civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of AIDs, and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t even read.”

Who will deny the tragic reality of these trends? And yet, never before has one paragraph incited such an extreme reaction from so many liberals. Talk about violence. Intolerance. “Mean spiritedness.” Misinformation.

But few who flay have ever bothered to hear or read Gingrich firsthand.

Typically the views and statements attributed to him are second-hand or third-hand at best. And they scare the liver out of people. Or at least they would, if you believed them to be accurate.

Get the verbatim transcript of a Gingrich speech. Listen to a tape of the talk. Or read his 20-hour college course on “Renewing American Civilization.” And you get another Gingrich altogether. One who makes a lot of sense.

So, is it Gingrich who makes people skittish - or is it the liberal media elite who set heads spinning?

For a fact, some approaches of the new Republican regime are unpalatable. Typically, they emanate from the extreme right. But not always.

Bob (“What health care crisis?”) Dole wears the label of moderate. Likewise Sen. Phil Gramm can make one cringe. And columnist Pat Buchanan. All presidential contenders.

Granted the gravest threats to the GOP revolution are meanness. But real meanness. Not Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.”

Go ahead and cut entitlements. Cut welfare for the poor.

But be doubly sure to cut corporate welfare, too. Fail that, and the revolution won’t persevere. And the GOP majority will be gone with the wind again.

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