Journal;Let 'Em Eat Vermeer
Bad Joke Dep't.:
Q: What's the difference between a revolutionary who tries to stop the Federal Government by bombing a building and a revolutionary who stops the Government by shutting it down?
A: The one who shuts the government down gets a Congressional pension.
It was only nine months ago that Republicans in the House -- and their public cheerleaders on talk radio -- were turning cartwheels to protest that no, their inflammatory words had nothing to do with the anti-government hysteria that fueled the bombing in Oklahoma City. Now that the public has reacted as angrily to the Federal shutdown that is just ending -- however temporarily -- it's deja vu all over again, as the very politicians who fueled the shutdown try to avoid responsibility for it.
Surely the bravest spin came from Susan Molinari, the New York Congresswoman and Gingrich capo, who tried to shift the blame to the President as public acrimony rained down on her party: "This is not our Government shutdown," she cried, "this is his Government shutdown." But no one believed her.
The reason no one did is that the shutdown was entirely consistent with the anti-government message that the G.O.P. revolutionaries and their fellow-travelers have been pounding into our heads for two years. The public recognized that the shutdown was seen by the radical right in Congress not just as a tactic for prodding Bill Clinton to balance the budget but as an end in itself. As the shutdown took hold, Phil Gramm asked rhetorically, "Have you missed the government?" -- assuming the public's answer to be a resounding no. He is echoed in an in-house, for-your-eyes-only memo sent to members of an elite far-right organization, the Council for National Policy (CNP), in September -- and uncovered this week by Freedom Writer, a magazine that monitors the right. The memo featured an interview with Representative Mark Souder of Indiana, the vice president of the House freshman class, who all but panted for a shutdown. And what would happen to the country after the Government closed its doors? "We don't know or really care," came his blithe response.
Mr. Souder and Mr. Gramm have now discovered that much of the public does care. Once voters had to suffer inconveniences or watch the suffering of neighbors who either work for Uncle Sam or benefit from his safety net, they didn't like what they saw. It turned out that the Federal bureaucracy, however worthy of reinvention, cannot just be sent packing, as the revolutionaries' rhetoric has it, without inflicting economic violence parallel to the actual violence that befell the innocent victims of Oklahoma City.
Even so, this wholesale dismantling of government, not to be confused with balancing the budget or the plausible goals of Medicare and welfare reform, remains the underlying evangelical mission of the right wing of the Republican revolution. Having now learned the hard way that to carry out that revolution by full frontal attack is to invite both plummeting poll numbers and the counterrevolutionary resistance of Bob Dole and Democrats alike, the retreating cadres are simply switching tactics -- to guerrilla warfare.
Tom DeLay, the House majority whip and himself a member of the far-right CNP, this week described his "new strategy" as "targeted appropriations" or "line-item appropriations," in which the House majority pushes through spending for just enough conspicuous and popular government programs to calm the public while maiming everything else. In bills written so far this means money for the F.B.I. (but not civil rights or antitrust enforcement), for Meals on Wheels (but not Head Start), for national parks' visitors' centers (but not park preservation or environmental enforcement), for the National Gallery of Art (but not the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports less visible museums beyond Washington).
Call it the "let 'em eat Vermeer" revolution. The middle class gets its passports and tourist sites; the poor fend for themselves; and corporate campaign contributors, free at last of Federal regulation, grab everything that's not nailed down.
