ustxtxb_obs_1987_02_06_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

_ –=-7. =-7.—- FOE ‘eS S . THE I = = psvi’l t iN e% …,, Ai” t P _ . “-In St PR IF1 It 4,r NO …..-,_ ______ ‘ –‘_ il F14 roil , ,,,, ill, in 14 i P. . q u ill ,, ,…, . ,, .,……_ _77dth —– ——-__ – ‘.-I . . : .. , .. : z . . . .. WINN ,..111111 _ _ ——–am. ” –‘–7_.-7.–.,- TEXAS TB SERvER .::.E,, The Texas Observer Publishing Co.. 1987 Vol. 79, No. 3 …- February 6, 1987 Copyright 1987 by Texas Obserrer Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission. PUBLISHER Ronnie Dugger EDITOR Dave Denison EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Kathleen Fitzgerald ‘LAYOUT AND DESIGN: Valerie Fowler CALENDAR: Kathleen Fitzgerald EDITORIAL INTERN: Joan Fereday. Ann Kendrick WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Richard Ryan POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE: Dana Loy EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: Frances Barton, Austin; Elroy Bode, Kerr ville; Chandler Davidson. Houston: Bob Eckhardt. Washington, D.C.; Sissy Farenthold, Houston; Ruperto Garcia, Austin; John Kenneth Galbraith, Cam bridge, Mass.; Lawrence Goodwyn, Durham, N.C.; George Hendrick, Urbana, Ill.; Molly Ivins, Dallas: Larry L. King. Washington. D.C.; Maury Maverick. Jr.. San Antonio; Willie Morris. Oxford, Miss.; Kaye Northcott, Austin; James Schwartz, Galveston; Fred Schmidt, Fredericksburg, Robert Sherrill, Tallahassee, Fla. CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Bill Adler. Warren Burnett, Jo Clifton, Craig Clifford, Louis Dubose, John Henry Faulk, Ed Garcia, Bill Helmer, James Har rington, Jack Hopper. Amy Johnson, Michael King, Dana Loy, Rick Piltz, Gary Pomerantz, Susan Raleigh, John Schwartz., Michael Ventura, Lawrence Walsh. CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS: Alan Pogue, Alicia Daniel. CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS: Mark Antonuccio, Eric Avery, Tom Ballenger, Jeff Danziger, Beth Epstein. Dan Hubig. Pat Johnson. Kevin Kreneck, Carlos Lowry, Miles Mathis, Joe McDermott, Ben Sargent, Dan Thibodeau. A journal of free voices We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the’whole truth, to human values above all interests. to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy; we trill take orders from none but our own conscience, and never trill we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the power fill or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. . Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in publishing them we do not necessarily imply that we agree with them because this is a journal of free voices. Managing Publisher Cliff Olofson Subscription Manager Stefan’ Wanstrom Office Manager Joe Espinosa Jr. Publishing Consultant Frances Barton Development Consultant Hanno T. Beck The Texas Observer paid at Austin, Texas. z Subscription rates, including 5 118% sales tax: one year S23. two years S42, three years $59. One year rate for full-time students. S15. Back issues S2 prepaid. Airmail. foreign. group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm editions available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N. Zecb Road. Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyright 1987 by Texas Observer Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission. POSTMASTER: Send form 3579 to: 600 West 28th Street, #105, Austin, Texas 78705. 2 FEBRUARY 6, 1937 #. EDITORIAL Bill Clements took office the first time around just. before Ronald Reagan began to shape modern Republicanism into what it is today. The political current in 1978 had more to do with Howard Jarvis, the leader of the Proposition 13 movement in California, than with the man who became our best-dressed president. And Jarvis was certainly as unconcerned with sophistication as Clements turned out to be. But then came the Reagans. They were the ones who saw it fitting to spend $209,508 on new White House china while pulling the plates out from under thousands of poor people. The Reagans helped Republicans remember who they were, and what they stood for, and most importantly, that style can win elections and can even triumph over the unpopularity of their public policies. Someone, and it is commonly said to have been his wife, explained this to Bill Clements. And so Clements did indeed change to “the Reagan extreme.” He gave himself over to political professionals. During an embarrassing time in his campaign, for example, he used the Reagan approach: he took a vacation. \(For a while it looked like his press secretary, Reggie Bashur, was running against to victory. He was the “new” Bill Clements, professional, tempered, genial almost to the extreme. Already, though, you can detect some potential problems with this low-grade Reaganism, coming as it does, a good six years after it came into style. One is the obvious problem that Clements will never have genuine charm, no matter how many professionals are enlisted. More important, Reaganism simply has no answers to the problems facing state government today and is, in fact, responsible for intensifying them. Ronald Reagan speaks, as he did just last week in his State of the Union address, of giving state and local government more and more responsibility for social spending, while he directs a growing amount each year to the military. At the same time, the kind of block grants from the federal government that fuel social spending are being cut. It becomes immediately obvious that the cold attitude that Clements is already taking toward human services spending is not only heartless, but senseless. Secondly, Reagan has been able to keep up his “no new taxes” rhetoric for six years only because he has grown secretly fond of deficit spending \(it enforces austerity in welfare spending, and so the fanatical fear of new taxes that seems to motivate the new governor is nothing less than a prescription for unenlighted, bargain-basement government. Already he is facing the problem as if he were at the helm of a failing company; he wants to sell off the assets and leave the customers to go elsewhere for service. The fallacy that lies at the heart of Reaganism, and which Clements now seeks to perpetuate, is that there is no longer enough money to fund the government. The cash shortage is said to be so severe that citizens have no choice but to stoically accept drastic cuts in services. This is bosh! Texas is not strapped. We are not a Third World nation with no resources to draw upon. The value of the oil in the ground has dropped; the price of farm products has dropped; there are too many companies making microchips and semiconductors. Fine. But one thing that Bill Clements knows first-hand, and one thing that he demonstrated in a stunning manner with his four inaugural gal8 on January 20 \($150 a on the loose, and there is a lot of disposable income going