DATE: Tuesday, November 18, 1997            TAG: 9711180004

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

THE NEW GOP: IT'S THE PARTY OF GRAND OLD PIETIES HOW LARGE IS THE CLASS OF CITIZENS THAT SHOULD BE DEBARRED BY INCOME AND JOB STATUS FROM HAVING THEIR OWN OPINIONS ON PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES?

President Clinton came to Virginia recently to plump for election of Democratic nominee Donald Beyer as governor. Having no argument better than Beyer himself had offered, Clinton chided for ``selfishness'' those Virginians giving top priority to ending the ``car tax.''

The silly breach of manners invited a rolling barrage of counter-instruction in manners and morality from Virginia specialists in such matters. Richmond Times Dispatch columnist Robert Holland offered a portrait of the Clintons living the high life while refusing educational alms to ghetto children in the form of tax-paid tuition grants to private schools.

The proposition seems to be this: People like the Clintons, wanting to live in first-class public housing and to travel by limousines and jets, assume in advance moral obligations to support certain public policies.

One such is provision by the feds of tax-paid tuition grants to private schools, many of them religious schools.

Other obligations, including tax exemptions for stock market profits, may be found in any copy of the Republican campaign playbook. Never mind that creation of a new federal entitlement program further undercutting local control of education, seems an ill fit for a political party that preaches downsizing of bureaucracies.

Still, questions arise: If the Clintons lived in a boarding house and rode Amtrak and taxicabs, could they then send their daughter to a private school without being held up as heartless hypocrites?

How large is the class of citizens that should be debarred by income and job status from having their own opinions on public policy issues? Wouldn't creation of any such group reflect the ``class warfare'' that Republicans deride as the cause of Democratic opposition to tax cuts for the better off?

How is it that so-called conservatives insist on deconstruction of public schools without first offering some little description of the alternative system that glimmers (it does, doesn't it?) in their active imaginations?

Such questions, admittedly, have little to do with today's politics, which is aimed at countering ideas by discrediting those who hold them.

The technique is used to stifle dissent even within party councils. When the conservative Weekly Standard criticized his flat-tax proposal for exempting stock-market profits, House Majority Leader Dick Armey blasted the magazine for adopting ``the old left-wing class-warfare mantra.''

So much for saffron-robed pinkos daring to ask who is going to tote the tax load taken off the backs of the better-off. Such is a mere detail, one's to understand, better left to the wise heads of the GOP who recently got off with an Oops! after slipping a $2 billion tax break to the splendid folks at Big Tobacco. Is this a Grand Old Party, or what?

Republicans in recent years have shown leadership in ideas and action that made a me-too accommodatory of the ever-flexible Bill Clinton. Now they are in large part right about the need to end affirmative action based on race. And, also, to simplify the tax structure.

Something else entirely is party rhetoric suggesting the other side is morally wanting. For one thing, this stance ill becomes a party that found congenial for so long a centuries-old whites-only quota system and that still seeks to undermine respect for a judiciary that ended segregation and other preferences. For another, pious rant is a poor substitute for the hard thinking required for worthwhile reform of tax policy and the structure of public education.

Belay the pieties, GOP: Let's see the merchandise. Show us who gets what after you're finished reforming. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former executive editor of The Virginian-Pilot.

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