THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
Question: What results do you get if you oppose high tax rates while espousing lavish social-welfare spending?
Answer: The essence of the Reagan campaign and of what passed for political conservatism in the 1980s.
Ronald Reagan's embrace of the welfare state is a major theme of Dead Right, a new book by David Frum, a former Wall Street Journal editor and columnist for Forbes magazine and a clear-eyed conservative. The book is honest, astute and incisive, and is likely to prove unsettling to Republicans who really believe that: (1) Congressional Democrats sabotaged a bona fide conservative agenda put forth by Reagan; (2) George Bush was a wimp who yielded up the Reagan tax cut.
Frum, of course, is not defending the ``profligate'' Democrats nor masking the collapse of liberalism. He's documenting the fact that in the Reagan years ``big government conservatives'' supplanted ``big government liberals.'' He would snort, one guesses, at Newt Gingrich's current campaign to portray Republicans as committed to lower taxes and limited government.
Candidate Reagan, Frum recalls, didn't campaign for cutting federal spending but merely for slowing its rate of growth. And President Reagan didn't eliminate a single major federal spending program, but fattened many left in place. By the middle of Reagan's watch, Frum notes, it was obvious that taxes had to rise, spending had to be cut, or the United States had to borrow ``on a scale never before seen in human history.'' Loving power and popularity like their liberal counterparts, the Republicans borrowed and kept on borrowing.
Regarding George Bush, Frum contends he was scapegoated by Reaganites seeking refuge from their own chronic overspending ``that made the (Reagan) tax cut unsustainable.'' Bush broke a campaign promise but he did not break the line against tax increases. That was the work of ``conservative antitax die-hards (who) quietly acquiesced in a series of stealthy tax increases in 1981 and 1982.''
Who were the spenders? The better question might be who were not. But Ed Meese, a Reagan counselor some thought a true-blue conservative, stood at the head of the line. On his own initiative, Frum writes, Meese announced that Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits, Head Start, Supplemental Security Income for the poor, and ghetto summer-jobs programs would be exempt from Reagan's budget cuts. Meese also protected federal subsidies for real-estate development in distressed downtowns. Frum thinks Meese was able to rationalize Washington paying ``for luxury hotels in Los Angeles'' because of his ``extraordinary mental slovenliness.''
William Bennett had no such excuse for his record as head of the Department of Education which Reagan had promised and failed to abolish. Bennett's rhetoric denouncing bureaucracy and demanding back-to-basics schools electrified conservatives, but his department's spending on liberal programs kept right on climbing. Meantime, subsidies to the farm - that citadel of self-reliance and right-thinking - went ballistic. And so it went generally with particular attention given to the care and feeding of traditional Republican constituencies.
Understandable? Of course. Politics is about feathering nests - shifting federal goodies from one set of constituencies to another. But politics also is about myth-making, and noxious myths lead individuals and nations down blind alleys. The myths left by the Reagan years have twisted the concept of conservatism into a replica of liberalism that has failed.
Frum's is a book of many virtues. His assessment of Republican leaders and scattered efforts to renew conservatism is rewarding. Given the currency the book deserves, its mix of fact, analysis and philosophy could spur a conservative spirit truly interested in shrinking government and paying past-due bills.
The sooner it is grasped that neither party means to do that, the better the chance the country can begin to reverse its decline. It will be a while, though: On the verge of recapturing control of Congress, Republicans are promising to make the stupendous national debt all better by fiddling with the Constitution. Newt Gingrich presents the work of the founding fathers as a wand that works magic. Pity. He knows better. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB