Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503180018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
No wonder the Republicans hate to see their old friend go. During the debt explosion of the Reagan-Bush years, the amendment was held out as the stake that would slay the monster. Even though, in reality, no amendment that could be enforced by the courts could be passed. And despite the fact that ratification by the states was always problematic, the more so as they could see the feds shifting obligations toward them.
Even so, senators like Robert Packwood, R-Ore., equated passage with ``a hope [his emphasis] of the courage to do what we all know is necessary.'' And the quest for magic continues. Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla., comes now with a proposal to create an independent ``spending-reduction commission.'' The commission would package $45 billion in spending cuts each year; Congress would vote yea or nay without amendment. Or fingerprints. Heaven forbid that their eminences should dirty their hands with details and risk offending the home folk.
Why do we not hear cries for action from those citizen-legislator advocates of term limits elected last November? The founding fathers created a commission to handle spending and called it the Congress, but they could not bequeath it courage. It's absurd to think that Congress can remedy that lack by appending its own P.S. to the Constitution.
The arithmetic of politics would go right on working. For example, the clamor over spending cuts by House Republicans is not about reducing deficits but about funding $200 billion in tax cuts promised in the so-called Contract With America. That promise echoes those made by the past three presidents in their campaigns.
Bill Clinton reversed himself, of course, and fought through tax increases sufficient for short-term deficit reduction. But he never dwelled on the subject and now has reversed himself again; he is at auction offering his own tax cuts and trying to show that he has done his part against deficits and that the burden now falls upon the Republicans.
He hasn't, in fact, done his part. He hasn't led, hasn't conveyed a steady concern about the corrosive effect of debt - hasn't, withal, made a dent in the nation's essential indifference. Worse, he's been an accomplice in fear mongering among Social Security recipients that puts new hurdles in the path of deficit reduction.
Clinton has done a bit better than Reagan and Bush, but given the stakes and need for leadership, the difference is hardly worth noting. And yet, if hope remains of avoiding a fiscal train wreck, that hope resides in the chance that a truly serious person might run and by some alchemy be elected to the presidency.
Such a person - Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. - has announced his intention of running. ``If we are serious about budget discipline,'' says Lugar, ``we cannot spare our friends.'' He proposes to phase out farm subsidies despite his role as a farm-state senator who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee. Lugar also says that ``only the president can deal with the two challenges on which our future really depends - nuclear security and fiscal sanity.''
Lugar is a person of experience, substance and candor whose grasp of foreign policy is unexcelled in the Senate. He is not well-known and has taken no part in the money-grubbing that absorbs the leading candidates.
But chance still has a place in politics. Had George Bush been a serious man, he would have chosen Lugar over the junior Hoosier Dan Quayle as his vice president, and Lugar would now be a leading contender. Fortune owes him some good cards.
Perry Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk.
by CNB