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Jewish World Review /Jan. 13,1999 /24 Teves, 5759

Don Feder

Don Feder Conservatism "with a heart" is conservatism without a head

(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) CALLS FOR COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM are invitations to play footsie with the welfare state. Real conservatives will shun such allurements.

Last week, The Washington Post ran a piece on the hottest emerging political trend -- Republican governors who don't gloat at the sight of widows and orphans starving in the streets.

The article profiled Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore, who "urges conservatism with a heart." With the state's budget surplus, Happy Gilmore wants to cut tuition at public colleges, give government workers a raise and lower the sales tax on groceries.

Gilmore
The Post reports that compassion also echoes in the agendas of Republican Govs. George Bush Jr. (Texas), Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey) and Frank Keating (Oklahoma).

Kinder-and-gentler conservatism targets tax cuts to lower-income wage-earners, to dispel the notion that (in the words of a Gilmore advisor) Republicans "don't care about the little guy."

The Tax Foundation reports that the most affluent 10 percent now pays 62 percent of all federal income taxes. What's compassionate about tax cuts that offer them little if any relief in favor of those who pay next to nothing to begin with?

Conservatism with a heart is conservatism without a head.

Conservatives should strive for justice. They should view reality through eyes unclouded by emotion. At the very least, conservatives should have the integrity not to preen for popular approval with professions of devotion to the less fortunate.

Bill Clinton -- who can cry on cue and has a hug that would shame Oprah -- should have discredited the notion of political compassion once and for all.

The president is committed to the cause of women's rights, when he isn't busy sexually exploiting or harassing individual women. He cares about kids, but was willing to risk alienating his own for a little on-the-job nooky.

Republican governors are trying to counter the media myth that congressmen of their party are ax-wielding skinflints. This perception supposedly cost the GOP support in the last two elections.

But Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute notes that after four years of a Republican Congress, meaningful tax reform is nowhere in sight. Between 1995 and 1998, the federal tax burden rose from 19 percent of GDP to 21 percent. In the same years, the Department of Education's budget swelled 29 percent and spending for the Department of Health and Human Services went up 24 percent.

The National Taxpayer Union's Pete Sepp caustically comments, "The first significant vote of the 105th Congress was to reinstate the airline ticket tax, and one of the last significant votes was to squander the budget surplus on pork-barrel spending programs rather than provide tax relief."

The NTU rates congressmen based on every tax and spending vote. Since the GOP gained control of Congress in 1994, its pro-taxpayer rating for the average House Republican fell from 83 percent to 56 percent.

Political compassion hasn't played well at the polls. The only GOP senators defeated in 1998 both thought appropriations were the shortest route to voters' hearts. Sens. Al D'Amato (New York's Senator Pothole) and North Carolina's Lauch Faircloth respectively voted for $25.3 billion and $24.3 billion more in spending than the average Republican senator.

In 1993, Whitman ran for New Jersey governor as a tax rebel and ousted incumbent James Florio. In her first two years, she hewed to principle and cut the state income tax by 30 percent.

In the second half of her term, Whitman contracted a near fatal case of compassionitis, seeking to raise the gas tax among other levies to pay for government goodness. In 1997, she was re-elected by a scant 27,000 votes, out of 2.2 million cast.

Jesse Ventura, who became Minnesota's governor last week, wasn't elected by mimicking Mother Teresa. When asked by college students how he would help them to pay for their educations, Ventura growled, "Get a job."

During the campaign, he criticized state-subsidized child care, charging families shouldn't have children until they can afford them. Though he's now waffling on a campaign promise to give the state's surplus back to residents in $1,000 increments, it was part of a winning strategy.

Voters looking for love at the ballot box don't elect a former professional wrestler and ex-Navy Seal who tells them to stand up straight and stop whining (you lousy gold-bricks!).

Compassion is the province of families, neighbors and charitable institutions. Political compassion has brought us a national debt of $5.6 trillion, the injustice of racial quotas and chaos in the inner-cities.

Up

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©1998, Boston Herald; distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc.