Gramm's challenge - Phil Gramm - Editorial

National Review, April 3, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Phil Gramm did not wow them in New Hampshire at that first meeting when all the candidates got to speak for eight minutes. The young activists in the audience aspirated with tremulous pleasure when he said, ``I was conservative before conservatism was cool.'' The problem is that people don't vote for you in gratitude for the length of time you have reasoned correctly on public issues.Consider the different public attitudes toward the President who kept a country out of war, and the President who engaged in a war and won it.

Presidents who brought their country back from a depression are venerated, never mind that the depression, or its longevity, was heavily their own responsibility. So what does Candidate Gramm offer that can make the blood tingle?And then there is the vision-thing. A week or so back, at a television forum crowded with brainy figures, the taunt was leveled that one critic lamented the loss of the nineteenth century. It seemed that merely to make the point was to score. Who wants to go back to the nineteenth century? Nobody, if what you mean by the nineteenth century is no cars, airplanes, TV, air conditioning, or penicillin. If what you mean by the nineteenth century is united families, enduring marriages, a near-universal commitment to transcendent faith, and a sense of raw excitement over the exercise of freedom, then, yes, it is right to bemoan the passage of the nineteenth century.Phil Gramm has a problem nicely identified by political scientist Edward Banfield in The Unheavenly City: the Monday/Tuesday problem. The liberal-populist is promising you something that will be delivered on Monday (free health care). The conservative is preoccupied with Tuesday. If you diet on Monday, on Tuesday you will be healthier. If you save on Monday, on Tuesday you will reap the benefit. If you reorient welfare policies on Monday, on Tuesday you will have a crack at rescuing an underclass from what appears to be ineluctable growth.The problem in particular has to do with departure from the status quo. Americans have become used to the accretions of welfarism. Our taxes are deducted at the wellhead: we never see the money withdrawn, and we come to think of it as a mere statistical abstraction. The subsidies that flow out of Washington maintain legions of beneficiaries appeased, and here is the conservative candidate ready to disturb that somnolence!The challenge of Gramm is to reawaken those instincts that are gratified by freedom. Jack Kemp, when he was a candidate, used to whisk out of his briefcase a large, graphic map depicting the bureaucratic stages through which someone who wished to build a house needed to travel before actually laying down the cornerstone. Two dozen agencies, preoccupied with the environment, labor contracts, zoning laws -- amounting, in the end, to as much as 30 per cent of the cost of the dwelling. The radical conservative wants to trim that back sharply. But to generate excitement in that process requires two stages of awakening, the first, to make felt, make palpable what it is you no longer have -- fine public education, safety in the streets, enduring families -- followed by the prospective excitement of recapture.That is a tall psychological order. Senator Dole, facing the same crowd in New Hampshire, offered himself less as a social transformer than as a super-competent technician, which indeed he is, though the confrontation in New Hampshire came just a week before super-technician Dole failed to bring off a favorable vote for the Balanced Budget Amendment. Still, one-more-mission Dole has the advantage of letting the voter focus on those aspects of his life that are relatively untroubled. We are not at war, there is no depression, there are a great many Americans who don't get mugged, raped, or shot: so why not focus on that, and promise that you will exhibit the skills necessary to keep the stolidities of life in order?It isn't really Gramm who is to blame for the vitality of torpor. Whether he can call people to life from that condition is entirely another question than whether the Republic would benefit from the awakening.