Deconstructing Lamar
Plaidless In NashvilleEvery now and then, an opinion columnist needs to turn off C-Span, come out from behind the word processor and have a first-hand look at the people and events that are grist for the mill of penetrating, acerbic commentary. It was this intrepid spirit (plus a clear calendar on a gray, dreary Tuesday morning) that brought me to the old Supreme Court chamber down at the State Capitol last week to hear Lamar Alexander’s announcement that he will seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2000.
Adhering to time-worn political wisdom that favors a packed room over a comfortable one, Alexander’s advance team crammed hundreds of supporters into a tight space ruled from above by banks of crowd-warming stage lights. It was witheringly hot in there – picture a group sauna with a battalion of Republicans in suits. Waiting for the candidate to arrive, I pondered the unmitigated whiteness of the crowd. Were there any people of color at all in Lamar’s legion? Oh, there’s one – no, wait, he’s standing by an exit with a funny looking button and one of those earplug things – must be on hand to protect the great man, not to endorse him.
When Alexander finally took to the podium to make his formal announcement, two things were immediately apparent. The first was that he no longer orders campaign wear out of an Eddie Bauer catalog. The second was that the man does not sweat. In a sweltering room full of ripening armpits, not a bead of perspiration was on him. One of the warm-up speakers, former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, described Alexander as "someone like us." This might be true on some dimensions, but the regulation of body temperature is apparently not among them.
In his announcement speech Alexander pitched a handful of themes as the foundation of his campaign. For starters, he wants to "fix public education" with a series of policy proposals that are likely to accomplish precisely the opposite. Reprising a melody that went nowhere in 1996, Alexander wants to dismantle the federal education bureaucracy, send unrestricted tax dollars earmarked for education to local governments and school boards, and let them figure it out. He decries government regulations, court orders, union rules and teacher tenure. In doing so, he implicitly rejects national standards, efforts to undo segregation, legally protected worker rights and due process. Curiously, Alexander is under the impression that local control, which created some of the most intractable problems with public education in this country, is the path to solving those problems.
Alexander’s second broad theme is economic: raising family incomes. His policy centerpiece, which quickly surfaces in every interview he gives, is a plan to increase the annual tax deduction for each child to $8,000. He says this will restore the deduction to what it was once worth. Will he also restore the minimum wage, eroded for decades by inflation, to what it was once worth? The child deduction proposal does nothing for poor families, who pay little or no tax anyway, but it is potentially pretty hefty middle-class tax relief. Of course, Alexander doesn’t stop there; he wants to end capital gains taxes, end inheritance taxes and lower the top tax rate – all bonanzas for the wealthiest taxpayers, whose welfare obviously keeps Lamar awake at night.
His third focus is national defense. Apparently believing everything he hears from the fiscally ravenous military-industrial complex, Alexander declares that "our military defense is weak." The U.S. military budget exceeds the combined levels of spending of all of our potential enemies and most of our allies, and that’s "weak." He wants to pour billions into the scientific fantasy of a missile defense system, and proposes a whole new branch of the armed forces to perpetuate the futile game of drug interdiction. If there is some subtle reality to the much discussed military readiness issue, Lamar is far from grasping it.
Things went from troubling to disturbing as Alexander veered onto the subject of race near the end of his announcement speech. Following some preliminary boasts about all the fine black people he had bestowed with appointments back when he actually worked for a living, Alexander declared, "Our government should never make distinctions based on race." It was one of the biggest applause lines of the speech – a near-grotesque display from a room full of white people applauding a white leader’s insistence that race can play no role in public policy. Taken at face value, it suggests a rejection of virtually all federal efforts to legislate racial justice. Shall we do away with the Civil Right Act, Lamar?
Alexander wrapped up the speech soon after, and I bolted for fresh air. I had come to the Capitol bemusedly assuming that Alexander’s endless campaign – now well into its fifth continuous year – will fare no better than his early fizzle in 1996. I left an hour later perplexed that the former Tennessee governor is pinning his campaign hopes on some fundamentally loopy ideas about education, economics, foreign policy and race. Loopy enough, I reassured myself, that his bid will again go nowhere, as his befuddled agenda collapses under its own lightness of being.
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