THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406170006
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
As he prepared an article that appeared on the editorial page of this newspaper last Sunday, his party had been fractured by infighting over the candidacy of Oliver North. The latter had been declared morally unfit by the incumbent Republican senator, John Warner. And Marshall Coleman, two-time GOP candidate for governor, was on the verge of launching an independent fight against North and of reversing himself yet again on the issue of abortion rights.
{REST} It's no wonder that McSweeney voiced concern over the weakening of parties. And he was right to argue that parties remain ``the most effective vehicles to bring coherence and continuity to our government and politics.'' The point, however, lacks weight, because the weakness of both parties has proceeded so far so fast.
McSweeney, for example, quotes James McGregor Burns as having warned 18 years ago that if parties waned, the following would wax: ``A politics of celebrities, of excessive media influence . . . of massive private financing (of campaigns), of gun-for-hire campaign managers, of heightened interest in personalities and lowered concern for policy.'' Much of this has already come about (Oliver North symbolizes more than a little of it) and with the active encouragement of the parties themselves.
What McSweeney doesn't say is that parties as vehicles have to have fuel, and don't make much of a difference unless powered by distinct principles. The Perot phenomenon is a sign of the irrelevance of the major parties regarding the crippling national debt.
As James Bryce wrote in The American Commonwealth more than a century ago: ``Neither party has anything definite to say on (then central) issues; neither party has any principles, any distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. . . . Both have certainly war cries, organizations, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are in the main the interest of getting or keeping the patronage of government. Tenets and policies . . . have all but vanished. . . . All has been lost, except office or the hope of it. . . . The American parties now continue to exist because they have existed. The mill has been constructed and its machinery goes on turning, even when there is no grist to grind.''
Now and again, of course, a cause comes to a party or a genuine leader invests it with one. The Republicans became the anti-slavery party before bowing to reaction; the Democrats curbed economic oligarchies but didn't know when to stop making government bigger. Nowadays the parties are palsied. There are mountains of grist but the parties won't grind it; the government hasn't paid its bills for a long time and has no prospect of doing so. So what are the cardinal Republican principles that will take the nation off the road to ``financial ruin'' that properly worries McSweeney?
Less spending is a predictable answer, but less spending on what? No audible answer there. Other typical Republican responses to runaway debt are term limits for members of Congress, a line item veto for the president and a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Some of these might have marginal effect, but all are dodges.
For example, the balanced-budget amendment, which has bipartisan support, specifically prohibits judicial action to enforce it. The line-item veto has more merit but carries no warranty that a president will be less inclined than a Congress to dispense pork. All these measures, if they can be called such, are born of an irresistible desire to avoid telling voters that they must begin paying a dollar for a dollar's worth of government services.
If he chose, McSweeney certainly could argue that no party rises to great stature unless the nation is gripped by crisis. But as many a hard-rock Republican knows, the debt more than meets that criteria and is growing at a terrific rate. Sixty percent of all federal spending is mandated before budgets are prepared. Even if one stipulates the party line that ``it's all the fault of the Democratic Congress,'' is it not fair to ask McSweeney what his party would do about it? If it is not fair to ask, it makes no sense to stress the importance of parties. by CNB