The Thirty years War (Thomas W. Pauken)
Kannon, John Von
ent is in his research on what fatherhood actually is. In a series of interviews conducted in four major cities, Blankenhorn and his colleagues questioned real fathers leading real lives with their...
...Most journalists haven't read conservative magazines or think tank reports, either...
...And still other programs shouldn't be funded at all...
...An all-powerful, all-nurturing government is charged with the task of making everyone happy...
...CI around votes that defy the entrenched interests...
...But he soon realized that some centralization M uch as George Will did in his 1992 book Restoration, Tim Penny has written a persuasive screed in support of term limits...
...If one works, keep using it so long as it helps to advance the political objectives of the moment...
...Yes, Penny explicitly backs term limits for committee chairmen and urges voters to side with any candidate "willing to impose his or her own term limit...
...Penny doesn't make the leap from problem to solution, but if anyone should, it's he...
...Both friends and critics of the Republican Congress should learn them...
...In a series of interviews conducted in four major cities, Blankenhorn and his colleagues questioned real fathers leading real lives with their wives and children...
...Penny cites the case of Sanford Bishop, Jr., a black Democrat from Georgia who changed his mind and voted in 1994 for the ban on nineteen semiautomatic weapons...
...He ran for office four times, each time losing narrowly, and during the first Reagan term came to Washington and headed up the ACTION agency, which runs federal volunteer programs...
...We now live in a culture where almost everyone expects to be loved unconditionally...
...More important, while Penny is willing to raise taxes to shrink the deficit—he backed George Bush's catastrophic budget deal of 1990—he's faCOMMON CENTS: A RETIRING SIX-TERM CONGRESSMAN REVEALS HOW CONGRESS REALLY WORKS—AND WHAT WE MUST DO TO FIX IT Timothy Penny and Major Garrett Little, Brown / 262 pages / $21.95 reviewed by FRED BARNES 72 The American Spectator August 1995...
...They provide the warm, nourishing environment that gives children the confidence to grow...
...and eliminate funding of leftist political organizations...
...Only Penny, who imposed a 12-year limit on himself by leaving the House of Representatives in 1994, doesn't realize it...
...While the anti-nuclear movement prevented the development of that industry, Hayden and Fonda failed in their effort to build a broad-based political movement...
...Pauken decided to try to counter Hayden's campaign by producing a documentary film that "traced the activities of the New Left from the anti-Vietnam era to its current involvement in nuclear energy...
...As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski put it, the mother may provide nurturing, but the father serves as an indispensable link between the child and the outside world...
...Pauken relates the simple yet rarely followed game plan: develop a sound strategy, hire people who are both competent and committed to the agenda, keep a close watch on the bureaucrats and the media, and work like hell...
...That is, now that the war in Vietnam was over, the former anti-war activists were scavenging for another issue with which THE THIRTY YEARS WAR: THE POLITICS OF THE SIXTIES GENERATION Thomas W. Pauken Jameson Books /220 pages / $22.50 reviewed by JOHN VON KANNON The American Spectator August 1995 71 to promote their agenda...
...Thus Blankenhorn arrives at his most important distinction: Mothers love their children unconditionally...
...Instead, all see themselves as servants, "My wife and kids come first," is the common explanation...
...Entitled Whatever Works, the documentary showed that, in the hands of the left, issues such as Vietnam and nuclear power are merely "political weapons to be used to gain political power...
...Everything in Common Cents, every argument, every anecdote, every statistic, says they would be...
...As chairman of the College Republicans in the mid-sixties he debated the major John Von Kannon is vice president and treasurer of the Heritage Foundation...
...But he has been unable to play the devious game that took his acquaintance at Georgetown, Bill Clinton, into the Oval Office, and indeed is the accepted way of doing business in both parties...
...T his resume is filled out in great (and interesting) detail in The Thirty Years War...
...01 n the spring issue of Forbes MediaCritic, editor Terry Eastland made the striking point that Washington's well-educated and intellectually curious journalists simply don't know much about Congress's new Republicans...
...The longer a member of Congress stays, the more he grows tight with lobby after lobby...
...Some programs may well be better off run by sensible conservatives in Washington, rather than leftist activists in the states...
...That's activism...
...What characterizes these men...
...They expect some kind of performance and cultivate character traits they believe will help children survive in adulthood...
...Concerned about policy drift—the imposition of wage and price controls and the preservation of Great Society programs—he got out before Watergate and returned to law school in his native Texas...
...issues of the day, perhaps most importantly the wisdom of the war in Vietnam...
...He returned again to Texas, where he is now chairman of the Texas Republican party...
...He took his licks from the media, stayed his course, and won: Within a four-year period at ACTION, our Reagan team managed to cut the staff from more than a thousand to five hundred, reduce the budget by 25 percent...
...When it inevitably fails in this task, then everyone feels justified to adopt a posture of permanent adolescent rebellion...
...Two anecdotes from the last decades will illustrate perfectly his political style, a style we will see more of as the 104th Congress (which shares it) finds its footing: In 1978, after the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident led to media coverage and widespread public concern over the safety of nuclear power, Tom Hayden, a founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, decided that the construction of nuclear power plants might be an issue around which to launch a national grassroots political movement...
...1 n 1981, when Pauken joined the Reagan administration as the director of ACTION, his assignment was to reduce ACTION's budget and to begin drying up the federal funding that had flowed to activists promoting a left-wing agenda under the guise of volunteer programs...
...They are new to Congress and less frightened by the entrenched interests, they have decided to leave and are no longer beholden to the entrenched interests, or they have built a political career Fred Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard, which begins publication in September...
...Note that two of these conditions would occur far more frequently with term limits: more newcomers, more departees...
...If Pauken were a liberal he would be known as a "community activist...
...If Americans seem to be growing less mature and less independent all the time, it may be because there are too few fathers around...
...Well, don't feel bad...
...Pauken unveiled his film in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in conjunction with Hayden's kickoff of a national tour of his own, and followed Hayden around the country...
...I'm not sure if term limits would be good public policy," he writes...
...And the only solution is mandatory term limits...
...The ideal [of fatherhood] does not vary much from place to place, or between blue-collar and white-collar, or across racial, ethnic, or religious lines," says Blankenhom...
...Some of the problems he faced are relevant to Republican reformers today...
...He worked in several positions in the Nixon White House...
...This memoir is filled with such lessons...
...I'm trying to set the example of the type of person [my three daughters] would want to marry," explains one...
...This is what their- fathers did before them (and these men do not fault their fathers, no matter how hard-pressed they were or how little time they spent with them...
...Pauken's filmmakers scoured the film archives for graphic evidence of their point and they found a zinger: the then-unknown but now-notorious clip of Jane Fonda sitting in the cockpit of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes...
...While learning to pronounce the names, Washington journalists should spend some time learning about the ideas that motivate the new Congress, and about the conservative movement that developed it...
...A good place to start is with Tom Pauken's fine book...
...All that has changed is that the economy has improved and the task has gotten a little easier...
...Pauken's first instinct was to decentralize decision-making and allow local agencies to determine which organizations would get ACTION's grant money...
...First, they still see themselves first and foremost as "providers and protectors," fending between their families and the world...
...Never heard of Pauken...
...Bishop found it possible to chart a new direction because he wasn't wedded to the gun lobby," Penny says...
...Not content merely to debate, he joined the army and served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam...
...This is wacky...
...Well, if that's true for Bishop, it's also true in the case of every special interest in Washington, from the peanut lobby to AARP...
...is necessary, if only to direct the downsizing that voters have called for...
...Most lawmakers find it easier to vote courageously when one of three conditions is at play," Penny insists...
...As Robert Novak writes in the introduction: Considering the fact that he has been on the political scene for the 30 years of this book's title, he should be a major American political figure by now...
...It was Pauken's belief that the furor over nuclear energy had less to do with the issues than with the desire to consolidate a powerful political bloc...
...In Jimmy Carter's administration, ACTION had been run by the former anti-war activist Sam Brown, which gave Pauken plenty to reform...
...Hayden enlisted the help of his wife, Jane Fonda...
...He's a real deficit hawk, not a rhetorical hawk like Leon Panetta...
...But constitutionally mandated limits on Senate and House terms...
...Questions of sexual role-playing and "gender power" are basically irrelevant...
...Their wives may work, they may provide less than half the income, yet they still see supporting their children as their one and only purpose in life...
...Eastland was right: It is only in the past few weeks, for example, that TV commentators have begun to pronounce correctly the name of House Budget committee chairman John Kasich of Ohio, despite his repeated pleas that it rhymes with "basic...
...Simultaneously, we developed an alternative social policy to the Great Society approach of helping the poor which accomplished more with less money...
...Fonda dropped out of the tour, and the nuclear campaign never became the basis for any broader politics...
...What emerges is a remarkably uniform culture that flies beneath the radar of popular analysis...
...They haven't talked with many of the idea-filled Republican politicians who now make up the leadership of the 104th Congress...
...Others might be better handled by the states and other authorities...
...Fathers, on the other hand, love their children conditionally...
...Penny is one of that dying political breed, a moderate-to-conservative (and pro-life) Democrat...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
