Do The Rope-a-Dope, Bill

Bill Clinton should just sit back and smile. The voters have spoken. It's time for the president to stop being a frenzied activist trying to fix intractable problems and instead assume the what-me-worry attitude that worked so well for Ronald Reagan. Played right, the Newt Gingrich revolution should be just the tonic Clinton needs to look strong without doing anything. Just hold the Republicans to the contradictory goals of their contract with America and say, "OK, fellows, you're so smart, show us how to cut taxes and balance the budget. Both."

The contract promoted by Gingrich promises $200 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, mostly for the rich, while increasing defense spending and leaving Social Security and Medicare intact. If he can pull that off, he deserves an office higher than president.

Let the Republicans hang out there as champions of a reduction in capital gains taxes--with 90 percent of the benefit going to the richest ten percent in the country--while they seek to whittle away the mortgage interest deduction that benefits most of us. The deficit run up by the past two Republican presidents now soaks up 28 cents of every tax dollar to pay the interest on the last Republican debt. The Republicans have controlled the White House for 20 of the past 26 years but always blame our troubles on a Democrat-controlled Congress. Well, the tables are turned.

Everyone is for balancing the budget, but not really. We all feed lavishly at the public trough. The big lie is that it's the minority poor who soak up federal dollars. Gingrich's wealthy suburban white-flight district of Cobb County, Georgia is the third biggest nonmetropolitan recipient of federal funds in the country. It gets $3.6 billion, which is 59 percent above the national average in pork. Lockheed, the biggest employer in his district, has been soaking taxpayers for billions for years and is almost constantly a subject of audits for huge cost overruns. Gingrich even lobbied with the feds to get approval of Lockheed's sale of planes to Muammar el-Qaddafi. No wonder Gingrich's budget cuts do not include defense spending.

Then there are the conaressmen from farm districts who won't touch the next biggest welfare program--agricultural subsidies. The proposed Solomon bill would eliminate the irrational agricultural subsidy program in which we pay farmers not to grow food. But even Solomon's bill makes a glaring exception of support for dairy farmers, who are well represented in his own district. Hypocrisy is the name of the game.

What about welfare for the poor? Sit back, Bill, and let your enemies come up with a welfare reform bill. Talk is cheap. But if you want to really freak out state governors, most of whom are Republicans, eliminate welfare as Gingrich's contract promises. The governors know that welfare is a cynical bargain that provides the poor with a subsistence living and holding cells in the projects. Cut off those people, 9.5 million of whom are children, and we're talking about a new army of homeless that will overflow the cities into the suburbs. Alternatives to the existing welfare system, whether they're the job training proposals of the Democrats or the foster homes and orphanages of the contract, cost big money. Welfare reform is a terrific campaign sound bite, but woe to the politician who attempts to implement it.

The same is true with Gingrich's demagogic attacks on any sort of community-based program, including midnight basketball, that might keep kids off the streets. Jump shots after dark became the Willie Horton of the last campaign. Let it go, Bill. Let them build as many prisons as they want; that plan represents the biggest government boondoggle since the B-1 bomber, and it's backed by one of the powerful government employee unions that Republicans are always railing against. Go libertarian, Bill. Remind people that it was your opponents who gave us the growing socialist police state in which nonviolent prisoners (many of them casualties of the pointless Big Brother war on drugs) are spending their lives in federal prisons covered by expensive medical care.

Meanwhile, keep your eye on the ball--our eroding standard of living and the elimination of the middle class, two things that the trickle-down apologists for the wealthy never want to deal with. All of our problems start here, from crime to the breakup of the family.

Median family income in this country doubled between 1947 and 1973 but has been stagnant for the past 20 years. But that's the good news, because median income disguises the fact that the rich have gotten much richer while the rest of the population has been pushed way down. The latest Census Bureau figures show that almost 40 million Americans now live below the poverty level. It is no longer possible to speak of America as an essentially middle-class society when the wealthiest 20 percent receive an amount of income nearly equal to the total of the rest of income earners.

This is the source of our widely felt social discontent, and the right-wing Republicans have been skillful at exploiting it. All of their proposals--including lower inheritance taxes, tax breaks for wealthier people on Social Security, a $500-per-child tax credit for the rich and substituting regressive sales taxes for income tax--make the rich richer and the majority poorer. Of course, the right-wing ultras will never admit this. Instead, they distract us with phony lifestyle issues and a hunt for such scapegoats as gays in the military or blacks and immigrants on the dole. Their big lie is that the poor, not the rich, have impoverished the middle class.

Clinton needs to cut through this rot. He needs to grab the populist banner from the Republican lackeys of the rich and defend the economic interests of the American people, be they small farmers, factory workers or white-collar service employees. In the hard times that are sure to come, they are the ones who will need the food stamps, the job training, the Medicare and Medicaid, the free public education, in order to survive and bounce back. Those are the programs that have made this country great by ensuring that its ordinary people remain proud despite the ruthless swings of the business cycle. All of us need the environmental and labor safety standards that the ultras now seek to destroy.

Those are the lifeline programs that the ultrarightists in Congress are determined to eviscerate. Clinton should, for once, find the courage to defend them.