Taking the tenth - 1994 conference of Republican governors - Column

Williamsburg, Va.

ODDLY for someone who makes a living writing speeches, what I found most exhilarating about the Thanksgiving-week conference of Republican governors was the complete absence of prepared texts, Teleprompters, or other signs of self-conscious performance. These are the props of big government, and it was nice for once to find an air of naturalness, with people too busy getting things done to worry much about appearances.

Gone, too, were the usual interminable discussions of "streamlining strategies" for this or that program. Gone were the tedious policy specialists with their "paradigms" of newer, smarter, better big government. Much of the talk focused on "unfunded mandates." But the question was not, "Where do we get the funds?" It was, "Where does the Federal Government get off mandating things in the first place?" Governors as different as William Weld of Massachusetts, Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, and John Engler of Michigan seemed to agree on the appropriate paradigm: limited government, defined powers, taciturn leadership, and sovereign states.

In the way of lofty rhetoric, there was only a joint statement by the governors entitled "The Williamsburg Resolve"--all but written with quill and ink to dramatize the Colonial spirit. "We gather at an historic moment at an historic place," it began. "Today, the challenge comes from our own Federal Government--a government that has defied, and that now ignores, virtually every constitutional limit fashioned by the framers to confine its reach and thus guard the freedoms of the people."

AFTER most conferences such stirring declarations can be safely tossed, along with the name tags and meal schedules. In this case, though, the skepticism passes when you consider the example of the conference host, Virginia Governor George Allen.

You could see his mark even on the basket of complimentary treats awaiting each governor in his or her hotel room: Virginia Gentleman whisky, a carton of Marlboros, and a Philip Morris T-shirt. Having survived the Ollie North treatment from the Washington Post--serial endorsements of his opponent, long profiles examining his character just before election day--Allen seems to be a man completely liberated from any illusions about media praise, with the result that he is immensely popular. In office a year, he has cut taxes, abolished parole, supported parental consent, and stood up to the feds on mandates in the Clean Air Act--all with serene contempt for what the enlightened folk up north might think of him.

New York Governor-elect George Pataki arrived late, delayed because someone forgot to pick him up at the airport, and I suppose because it took more time than expected to have Mario stuffed and mounted. He was hailed by all and immediately surrounded by reporters, as were Pete Wilson of California, the chirpy Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, and Weld, who dragged himself around with an air of pained superiority he may want to lose before a presidential bid. On the last day Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich appeared with incoming Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Both avowed state sovereignty and pledged to include a ban on unfunded mandates in the balanced-budget amendment.

But let's avoid the usual bicoastal vision and assign a little credit to the governors from the expanse in between. "The '94 election was a victory for conservative ideas," as Republican Chairman Haley Barbour said. But early on, it was a handful of conservative midland governors who had the courage to act on those ideas. Engler, a likable, lumbering fellow, was challenging the teachers unions back when Republicans in Washington were signing on to things like the visionary--and now forgotten--"America 2000." Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin was overhauling welfare when the idea still brought mobs to the Capitol steps. Arizona's Fife Symington abolished parole a year and a half ago, enacted truth in sentencing, cut taxes for three years running, and now intends to get rid of state income taxes altogether. Without these men, it seems fair to say, the principles that won the 1994 election could hardly have won a hearing outside conservative journals and Federalist Society colloquia. The most hopeful sign was a disciplined silence among the governors on the subject of looming intra-party differences. In training for their coverage of the 1996 convention, reporters could be heard asking Governors Whitman and Wilson, "What about school prayer? What about the abortion language in the next platform?' But as it turned out, these sowers of discord will have to wait to write their party-of-intolerance stories. The general response was: We have bigger business to attend to at the moment, like restoring freedom and constitutional government. Well get back to you on those other topics.

IN the idiom of policy conferences, a consensus formed around "structural transformation." The beauty of this formulation was apparent in former Attorney General William Barr's point that the Republican Congress can achieve nothing greater than to limit the power of Congress itself, and then of the courts, by constitutional refinement. In a way no one ever expected, populist federalism suddenly unites all factions of the party, each with its own reasons, in a common project of scrapping the apparatus of the coercive state and humbling the arrogant asses of the federal judiciary. "The basic insight of federalism," said Barr, framed at the lectern by a billboard-sized banner bearing the Tenth Amendment (another Allen touch), "is that you can run away and vote with your feet from a small tyranny, but you cannot run away from a big tyranny."