Gop May Have Found Its Man

On Tuesday, we learned that Bill Clinton is a liberal, O.J. Simpson is a criminal and Rep. J.C. Watts, a black Republican from Oklahoma, is the ideological heir to Ronald Reagan.

What a night!

After saying a year ago that “the era of big government is over,” President Clinton invited the country to sup with him at a banquet table loaded with federal food. He says he wants to spend $51 billion more on education, but he acknowledges the same system into which he wants to pour these enormous new resources has produced legions of children who can’t read by the eighth grade.

And he would continue the imprisonment of middle- and low-income parents and their children in these intellectually failing schools by allowing them their “choice” of public schools. This is like allowing the condemned to choose their means of execution. Real competition which would raise all intellectual boats must include private schools so that every American can exercise the option the Clintons had when they enrolled their daughter in Washington’s elite Sidwell Friends school.

The president also demagogued on Social Security again, suggesting that Republicans had better not touch retirees’ Social Security checks. This brought what sounded like boos from the Republican side of Congress.

Clinton also wants to move the hand of big government into mammograms and mastectomies. He wants to put a computer in every home so that even “a sick child must no longer be a child alone.” This laundry list sounded like what it is: the product of polls and focus groups with something designed to please almost everyone and make people feel good about him.

But even the president and Simpson had to step aside for J.C. Watts. In his Republican response to the State of the Union address, he said more in less time than the president said in an hour.

Watts began with his own story: a small-town boy who grew up to be a star football player, with parents who had instilled character in him, a man honored to be experiencing the American dream.

Watts rejected the idea floated by some timid Republicans that working with Democrats means pretending there are no serious ideological differences between the two parties.

“The state of the union really isn’t determined in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “It never has been and it never will be.” Those words could have come from Reagan’s lips.

“But for a long time,” Watts continued, “the federal government has been grabbing too much power and too much authority over all the people. And it is those people - it is all of us - who decide the real state of the union.”

Exactly right.

Watts also rejected the idea of government as our keeper. “The strength of America is not in Washington (but) at home, in lives well-lived in the land of faith and family; … not on Wall Street, but on Main Street; not in big business, but in small business with local owners and workers. It’s not in Congress; it’s in the city hall.”

While the president said he’s on a “crusade,” Watts used a different religious term to underscore what he “prays” is the understanding of government by the Republican Party: “We have made it our mission to limit the claims and demands of Washington, to limit its calls for more power, more authority and more taxes. Our mission is to return power to your home, to where mothers and fathers can exercise it according to their beliefs.”

Then Watts spoke of knowledge beginning with “the ancient wisdom that we are nothing without our spiritual, traditional and family values.” What good does it do to hook kids up to computers if it merely speeds up the process by which they receive bad ideas?

Watts said he didn’t get his values from Washington but from his parents.

He pitched the proposed balanced budget constitutional amendment, which he said “will lower your house payment, your car payment, your student loan.”

Democrats must have been worried about Watts’ image and his power to persuade. Press reports before his speech told of disparaging remarks Watts had made about the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Washington Mayor Marion Barry (“race-hustling poverty pimps,” he was reported to have called them). There also was a story about how a fund-raiser had used his speech to solicit campaign contributions.

But these allegations, even if true, don’t seem in the same league with personal attacks directed at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the White House’s flagrant fund-raising improprieties.

It’s clear, just as the era of O.J. Simpson is fading along with Bill Clinton’s big liberal government, the era of J.C. Watts is dawning.

He could be the quarterback the Republicans have been scouting for.

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