Feeling Good, Doing Bad

FRENCH STUDENTS, last week, protested in the streets because of educational reforms instituted by the newly installed conservative government. This proves a well-known rule. No, not that two Frenchmen will have three opinions, but rather that Europeans take their politics much more seriously than Americans do. Nothing bears this rule out more than the Iran-Contra fiasco that is washing up on our shores.

From the scandal's beginning, Democratic party leaders have been bashful about making political hay out of this scandal by publicly needling Reagan to resign. Michael Kinsley '72, in The New Republic, manages to summon up the courage to tell fellow liberals to get a guilt-free chuckle out of the whole sordid affair.

In Europe, after a scandal of the proportions of Contragate, Presidential advisers would form a queue out the door and Reagan himself would be strongly considering following suit. Yet this crisis, a quintessential political scandal complete with upstart underlings and clued-out Cabinet members has somehow been successfully extricated from the realm of politics. This is wrong.

IT IS NOT a coincidence that the last two Republicans elected President have both been involved in scandals that question the nature and scope of the executive, nor should it be taboo to mention that fact. The coming of the Nixon and Reagan scandals mimics the rise of the fervently ideological wing of the Republican party.

Pages, many too many pages, have been spent analyzing and debating the similarities and differences between this latest fiasco and Watergate. Some argue breaking the law in the already dirty world of partisan politics pales in comparison with an attempt to conduct foreign policy illegally. Others argue that the more directly the President is involved, the more serious the scandal, and in that way Watergate is by far worse.

My simple tastes in politics tell me that the two scandals are very similar. Both prove that the Republican Party is "so far right, it's right out of the picture." In 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the right wing grabbed hold of the GOP and barring a few small lapses, it has solidified its grip to this day.

This faction of the party blindly follows a strict ideological line. It also contains a "populist" element that revels in bringing political hacks to the upper reaches of government. Time was when the Republican Party stood for integrity, even if it did not stand for a progressive or caring government, but now no longer.

Henry Cabot Lodge '24 and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, during the '50s certainly were as much the "feel-good" administrators as our present leaders are, except they thought that the best way for government to meet that modest mission was to be a stabilizing influence. One should not forget that it was Eisenhower who first noted and tagged the "military-industrial complex," while it was Reagan, who, through the well-charted link of his Cabinet officials to Bectel, arms merchant to the Middle East, is now famous for institutionalizing that fearsome coalition.

Reagan has been a wild man, charging forward come hell or high deficits. He has used those deficit budgets to cut social services, as David Stockman revealed, and has promoted the destabilizing judicial activism of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. It did not require a great leap of cynicism to go from these reprehensible schemes to the White House basement plottings of Lt. Col. Oliver North.

The non-partisan commentators look to this scandal as vindication of Abraham Lincoln's words, "you can't fool all the people all the time." And those are fine words to vindicate. But the election of another ardent conservative, Ronald Reagan, after the humiliation that was the Nixon Presidency, would seem to prove that while you can't fool everyone all the time, you certainly can do so when their collective memory fades.

I'd rather think of this scandal as vindication of a certain lifestyle. The lifestyle that reqires moving to Minnesota and sporting a t-shirt that reads, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Mondale." The lining in this cloud is that it may be another 10 years before President Laxalt takes over, and I have to move to Oregon.