THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406230398
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH: Medium
We run into them every election season.
{REST} Bubba and Joe Sixpack are the names that the Washington Beltway folks attach - collectively, and with a hint of a sneer - to all of those lumpenproletariat whose sad little lives are limited to work, family and the faithful payment of taxes. Which are then tossed to the winds by the very people who make fun of Bubba and Joe Sixpack.
Witness Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, who last week tagged the Clinton welfare-reform plan as ``more boob bait for the Bubbas.'' Which proves that Democrats, long the purported champions of the working stiffs, are no less immune than Republicans to the belief that their Washington status places them higher on the social scale than the rest of the citizenry.
In the view from the Beltway, it seems, the America outside the city limits of Washington, New York and L.A. is populated by a vast race of dimbulbs who wipe their noses on their sleeves, swill beer and wallow in their Barcaloungers as Roseanne tells Geraldo what she knows about Burt and Loni's divorce.
Bubba. Joe Sixpack. Boobs. In what contempt do the governing hold the governed if they openly disparage large groups of the voting public with crude pejoratives?
Don't the pols, the pundits and the editorialists understand that the people who are reading and watching might become just a tad . . . offended? Anyone up there in D.C. ever heard of Marie Antoinette? Does ``Let 'em eat cake'' ring a bell here?
Apparently not.
My dad was a Joe Sixpack. After a day of laying bricks in the kind of heat we've had this week, he might even have been a Joe Twelvepack. But he was also one of the most well-informed people I've known. He had me reading Poe and Orwell before I was 10 years old. He could tell you Harry Truman's hat size and what Lee had for breakfast at Gettysburg. He devoured books and read three newspapers a day until the day he died. And he complained that none of them carried enough news.
Certainly there are louts and cretins and Luddites among us, but their numbers are hardly large enough to constitute a significant voting class - particularly one that can be written off with a couple of snotty nicknames.
If those who govern, and those who comment on their governance, would drift out of Washington a bit more often, they might learn that the day of the hick is over. The image of the hardhat who reads little more than the label of a Bud Lite bottle is a distant cliche. I saw a hardhat an hour ago, taking a break from the sun in back of a Virginia Power truck on Brambleton Avenue. He was reading a pamphlet titled ``Family Voice: Educational Reform.'' Honest.
Rambling among these purported Bubbas and Joe Sixpacks, the Beltway Boys might learn that few of them steal postage stamps and trade them in for cash, as Dan Rostenkowski is purported to have done. Bubba's towels and bathrobe may be a bit frayed, and he may have purchased them at - gasp - Sears, but he doesn't steal new ones from the Navy, as did the Clinton retinue and the Washington press corps on their visit to Normandy.
Bubba and Joe may have simple tastes, but they also have simple standards: a fair, frugal and effective government that provides a safe place for them to live and work. They deserve that.
More, they deserve a leadership intelligent enough to understand that mocking the sweaty masses is a quick ticket to joining their ranks. by CNB