Why Can't Conservatives Govern?
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 21, NO. 5 / MAY 1988 Fred Barnes WHY CAN'T CONSERVATIVES GOVERN? For one thing, they seem to forget that Americans want big government. At the final session of the...
...Answer: they aren't...
...Goals can be gimmicky, like President John Kennedy's vow to put an American on the moon, but they capture the public's imagination...
...Their airports are dangerously overcrowded...
...Now, conservatives should fashion a domestic agenda that takes such failures into account...
...A better, andpolitically more appealing, proposal is a universal tax credit for day care...
...Reagan, after all, is as conservative a President as we're going to get...
...Smart, tough conservatives have discovered that the bureaucracy is tractable...
...The Devine agenda is a lost cause, which is probably enough to make it irresistible to conservatives...
...Snuffing out the libertarian impulse won't be easy...
...This is nuts...
...It's the one proposed in the Republican presidential race by Pete du Pont and originally concocted by Mickey Kaus, now a writer for Newsweek...
...Rather, conservatives have "disdain .. . toward careers in government...
...Practically nobody wants bigger government...
...I have four pieces of advice...
...Few are interested in government service as a career," wrote Phillip Longman...
...At Education, Bennett has already moved in this direction and created a new set of conservative issues...
...Well, somebody's going to run them...
...Conservatives don't mind working in the White House, CIA, Justice Department, FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, or even a few of the regulatory agencies...
...I found his column downright thrilling...
...It's one of the tenets of the faith...
...And conservatives shouldn't waste their energy on trying to achieve the impossible...
...What would help the poor as much as anything is an effective anti-drug program...
...And we need more airports...
...It's when they think money is being wasted or used to no good end that people get upset...
...Its enrollment has risen in the Reagan years, but still it reaches only 425,000 kids...
...The government must step in and say, If you can't find a private job, we'll put you to work at slightly less than the minimum wage...
...Sure, Washington would play a bigger role in American life than before...
...The prod, of course, is that theywouldn't get paid a dime if they didn't accept a job somewhere...
...She's sold public housing to poor tenants at bargain basement prices...
...A lot of conservatives knew this, but hadn't articulated it so succinctly...
...Jobs for all the poor aren't available, and even if they were, many of the poor are unqualified for them...
...I'm sorry to have to admit it, but they like big government...
...Unfortunately, there's a problem, and that's where big spending by the federal government comes in...
...Might work...
...The argument would be that UDAG, SBA, Amtrak, and CPB must go so we can save the underclass...
...They should know better...
...Once the poor start working, many of them will want to get better jobs or start businesses of their own...
...We've fallen badly behind the Soviets in space, which is a national embarrassment as well as a threat to our national security...
...Second, learn to like government work and to get along with bureaucrats...
...Today itisn't advocated by any presidential candidate except Jesse Jackson, and he claims that universal health care would actually save money...
...Sure, a big bureaucracy would be required...
...President Jimmy Carter said it should be implemented gradually...
...Why not expand it to cover every poor child in the country...
...Deregulation has left them more efficient and able to fly millions more people at reasonable fares...
...My rule of thumb is that any conservative goal that wasn't achieved by Reagan isn't achievable, at least not this century...
...It's not just a stepping stone to a big job at Procter & Gamble...
...Liberals regard government work as an end in itself...
...Among the amendments advocated by Devine were ones mandating a balanced federal budget, giving the President a line item veto, and making education a local, not a federal, function...
...Except in foreign and defense policy, conservatives seem to believe that acts of omission are preferable to acts of commission...
...It's deeply ingrained in the conservative mindset...
...Some jobs they like...
...If you don't believe 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 me, ask Education Secretary William Bennett or Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams...
...For them, the new crying need is more day care...
...True, I'd love to see Devine succeed, but he hasn't a prayer...
...The American people don't want sharply reduced government...
...frequently came up short...
...House Republicans have pursued the same thing, and they nearly succeeded...
...But the result—people working and improving their lives—would be worth it...
...British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has shown the way here...
...Conservatives are cheap...
...As good as the interstate system is, it needs to be expanded to keep up with the number of cars...
...It wasn't achieved in the nearly eight years of the Reagan Administration—far from it...
...That's a sign of the times for you...
...If they can't gain approval (and the school prayer amendment hasn't even gotten over the first hurdle, Congress), how in the world are Devine's less popular amendments going to...
...In 1976, President Gerald Ford discovered as much when he madly sought examples of activist government to brag about...
...Why aren't students reading the classics...
...It told of the flight of young conservatives from the Administration...
...He tried hard, for instance, to kill the utterly wasteful Urban Development Action Grant program, and failed...
...These programs aren't going to be wiped out or drastically cut, neolibprotests notwithstanding...
...Teddy Kennedy said we ought to have it immediately...
...Conservatives should do the persuading...
...This is a major achievement in itself...
...For conservatives, what should have been an alarming article appeared in the New York Times Magazine last February under the title, "Reagan's Disappearing Bureaucrats...
...Kaus's blazing insight was that "only work works...
...Why not propose that spending at NASA be doubled for the next ten years to overtake the Soviets in every phase of space exploration and travel...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 15...
...You'd get the credit no matter where you stashed your kids: at home, with a nanny, at a church, at a for-profit day-care center, and so on...
...Liberals certainly think he did a lot, and they're right for once...
...Even mothers with children three years and older would be required to work, as I envision the program at any rate...
...The agencies that carry out social policy are the ones conservatives detest, and thus normally avoid...
...Such a program has to include more than tax breaks...
...Sure, there would be some corruption...
...The problem with air travel in this country isn't the airlines...
...That's what liberals are doing...
...But later I sobered up and realized it was all a pipe dream...
...Conservatives aren't alone in the fight to trim government...
...If conservatives would learn the lessons of the Reagan presidency, they'd come up with a realistic, realizable agenda...
...Here's a program that is crying out for conservative leadership...
...Head Start, which prepares poor kids for elementary school, is one...
...But his strength was abstaining from federal intervention, which didn't help him in the presidential election...
...Poor people need an incentive: if they don't work, they get no money...
...In effect it would be a grant, and it would cost plenty...
...And paying for the program might have an interesting byproduct...
...He may not have satisfied David Stockman or Howard Phillips, but I think he took the country as far in a conservative direction as it is willing to go...
...If your ideas are sound, your orders clear, and you are willing to be flexible in the short run to accomplish things over the long haul, the bureaucracy will knuckle under...
...Economics columnist Robert Samuelson, for example, is leading the charge against the Amtrak subsidy...
...Why are some ghetto schools able to educate kids so effectively and some aren't...
...That's bad politics...
...Popular amendments, such as the egregious Equal Rights Amendment and the silly amendment decriminalizing school prayer, have failed in recent years...
...Samuelson was bold enough to declare, "A $3.5 million grant to the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour does not serve an important national priority...
...Folks are comfortable with just the size of government we've got now...
...El our, spend...
...But people like big-spending programs so long as they are for an indisputably good cause...
...Department of Day Care...
...Conservatives should be hunting for problems to solve...
...These are "difficult to achieve," he conceded, "but it's a fight worth fighting...
...These are conservative questions, and they've now overshadowed the old liberal question of how much money are you spending on education...
...Set a firm goal perhaps, and keep talking it up...
...I think conservatives ought to give them two new spending programs to cheer about...
...First, forget the libertarian ideal of, in Stockman's phrase, "minimalist government...
...The Devine agenda is a lost cause, which is probably enough to make it irresistible to conservatives...
...More expensive yet is the only welfare program that stands a chance of working...
...The idea is that the underclass will find its way out of poverty and despair through regular paychecks...
...Conservatives need to pick out programs that work and champion them...
...A raid by the Delta Force on Medellin, Colombia, would certainly show seriousness of purpose...
...Neoliberals agree with them...
...The problem is clogged airports...
...Transportation is another ripe area, highways in particular...
...Conservatives should be up in arms...
...Still, there's good news from the Reagan experience...
...Make interdiction of drug traffic a top priority, not merely a lip-service issue...
...William Kristol, Bennett's chief of staff at Education, says conservatives might be able to eliminate programs they hate by insisting the money is needed for a higher purpose...
...When Irving Kristol suggests that conservatives find domestic programs of their own, he's on to something...
...How come colleges don't teach the fundamentals of Western civilization anymore...
...At the final session of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in February, Donald Devine proposed an extraordinarily ambitious agenda for conservatives in the post-Reagan era...
...They haven't been dominated by bureaucrats, but instead have exploited the career types for conservative purposes...
...Have you flown into Atlanta or Boston lately...
...If conservatives don't, liberals will, and they'll love every minute of it...
...When two or three conservatives get together, the subject of eliminating a government program is bound to come up...
...The goal is constitutional amendments, said Devine, who ran the Office of Personnel Management in President Reagan's first term, then served as an adviser to Senator Bob Dole until Bill Brock, Dole's presidential campaign manager, fired him...
...Worse, they like some of the worst programs—the Small Business Administration, the subsidy for Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's funding of PBS and National Public Radio...
...That would entail another big cost, money for day care for their children...
...Actually, their disdain isn't all-encompassing...
...Maybe local authorities can be persuaded to build more airports...
...This would be enormously worthwhile on both scientific and military grounds...
...No longer would the federal government subsidize sloth...
...For the poor, the tax credit would have to be refundable...
...He also called for an end to farm payments, elimination of SBA and federal funding for local mass transit, and cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and federal retirement programs...
...That means the rich and middle class could claim it, and parental choice would be preserved...
...In fact, it is a need, but the answer isn't a U.S...
...Eight years ago, the chief debate in the Democratic party was over national health insurance...
...This won't be achieved overnight...
...The best Reagan has done is keep alive the space shuttle and the space station, but a lot more could be done...
...And upward mobility from the lowest economic rung, stymied by the welfare system for five decades now, will return...
...Sometimes this happens, but it's not automatic...
...In truth, one is old: the space program...
...There's no reason conservatives shouldn't take the lead on this issue...
...Rev up the Coast Guard, use the military, hire more border guards...
...Third, be programmatic...
...Bureaucrats may even become enthusiastic about conservative programs, which is the best of all worlds...
...But he also Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Conservatives have fallen for the myth that the permanent bureaucracy seizes control of conservative appointees and turns them into feckless pragmatists...
...Head Start could be one part of a broader conservative anti-poverty program...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
