Gramm Shows Dole The Better Man
Considering the horrors of the stubborn budget impasse, Republican voters should have no problem distinguishing between competing presidential candidates Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.
One is a responsible leader and the other a partisan poster boy.
Dole stands up and shoulders the practical and often thankless burden of political leadership. Given a chance, he prefers a record of legislative accomplishment, even if (or perhaps because) it makes him look suspiciously presidential in a ferociously anti-government era.
Gramm has more affinity for running his mouth than running the federal establishment on which America, like it or not, depends. He would prefer unresolved policy issues with which to beat up opponents, rather than grappling with a government that needs reform but not demolition.
Their contrasting styles show up starkly in the way they are handling the mean-spirited GOP strategy of holding hordes of federal employees - as well as private contractors dependent on government business - hostage to a one-sided balanced-budget agreement.
Gramm joked Sunday about not missing the 280,000 unpaid workers forced to take a long, involuntary furlough and suggested that axing another 200,000 wouldn’t be noticed either. “Have you missed the government?” he scoffed on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.” “Doesn’t it strike you funny that … large segments of the government are shut down?”
Well, no. Only the hard-hearted and narrow-minded would laugh.
Real people are being hurt. Real services are being destroyed. The country is not yet in a panic, but it is suddenly becoming obvious that the government does perform useful tasks after all.
Members of Congress are impervious to the pain because they continue to collect their own salaries, the selfish clods.
But federal workers and private contractors not being paid are frightened about failing to meet mortgage and other financial obligations. The government is losing millions because an airline passenger tax cannot be collected.
Services are collapsing as the providers of Medicare benefits, Meals on Wheels for the elderly, federal prison services, State Department security and other essential functions go unpaid. Parks are closed and vendors cry bankruptcy.
State legislatures can’t plan their own budgets because proposed new federal block grants for Medicaid and welfare are in limbo.
Dole properly fails to see humor in the situation. He has tried repeatedly to work out a formula acceptable to both the House GOP majority and the Democratic minority that would allow federal employees to go back to work on salary.
“We need to end the impasse,” Dole declared firmly as 1996 opened. He had kind words for the cooperative attitude of President Clinton, most (but not all) Senate Republicans and the Democratic minority. But he did not similarly smile on Speaker Newt Gingrich and the doctrinaire House Republicans, who throughout the crisis have been more interested in pressuring Clinton to knuckle under than in putting the government back to work.
This is the kind of reasonableness for which Dole is famous and which Gramm, who belongs to the Gingrich all-or-nothing school of politics, finds wimpy.
What is going on here is a clash between two philosophies of governing. Dole believes in making government function by cooperating, compromising and working out the inevitable disagreements of a diverse society.
Gramm believes in political purity for purity’s sake. He has tried to discredit Dole by scorning him as a deal-maker who actually talks to the partisan enemy.
“I am the only true conservative in the race,” he repeats mindlessly, although he has plenty of competition for right-wing honors from his GOP rivals.
In any case, rigid ideology does not suggest an ability to inspire a sprawling country of more than 260 million people, only about a third of whom say they are conservative. Gingrich is an instructive example here; his dogmatic determination to push a narrow partisan agenda generated great GOP excitement last year but pitifully little legislative accomplishment.
Gramm’s favorite theme is that big government is responsible for the decline in individual morality and family values and probably for everything else wrong in the world as well. This is a familiar Republican message that Dole echoes in milder form and that resonates with many voters.
But cruelly mocking unpaid workers and undelivered public services is not the way voters expect general political theories to be translated into the real world.
So far Gramm has been unable to close in on Dole in the public opinion polls. He is still in the trailing second tier of candidates. To the extent that his gaffe Sunday is seen as revealing Gramm’s true nature, it may polish off his remaining, slender nomination prospects. And it should.
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