Jerry Ford Played it Straight

In a 1978 speech, Newt Gingrich trashed Gerald Ford for all the reasons that he was good.

Ford was "incredibly dumb" to suggest a tax hike before an election, Gingrich told College Republicans in Atlanta. "In the second place, he did not maneuver them [the Democrats] and force them to propose it, which they consistently do." Democrats have a habit of spending big money and handing Republicans the bill, Gingrich complained bitterly. "Then we run around the country piously saying, 'How are we going to pay for all these things?'"

A street fighter like Gingrich didn't get Ford at all. The man from Grand Rapids, Mich., wasn't plotting for the next election. He wasn't into demonizing Democrats. He was only thinking about what was good for the country. Not running up debt was good for the country.

As Gingrich saw him, Ford was just too middle class. He was not slithering around all day, planning some sneak attack on reputations across the aisle, or peddling the free lunch of tax cuts to be balanced by unspecified spending reductions.

"One of the great weaknesses of the Republican Party is we recruit middle-class people," Gingrich lamented in his speech. "Middle-class people, as a group, are told you should not shout at the table, you should be nice, you should have respect for other people, which usually means giving way to them."

These partisan charges of fiscal irresponsibility have since turned entirely around. After Ford, Republicans embraced both prodigious spending and tax cutting to create stupendous deficits. And Democrats became regarded as the party of budget discipline.

There is now even a Gingrich-like debate among liberal Democrats about whether paying the debts amassed by Republicans is a sucker's deal.

They wince at the goody-goody deficit-fighting policies of the Clinton years. The 1993 tax increase told the world that America intended to pay its bills and set off a spectacular stock market rally. But Democrats suffered for their fiscal rectitude.

Even though the tax hike affected only the top 1 percent of income earners, Republicans marketed it as an assault on the middle class. The issue helped Gingrich rout the Democrats and create a Republican Congress led by him.

Ford wasn't the only sensible Republican scorned by the free-lunch wing of his party. The elder Bush got whipped for trying to reduce some of the Reagan-era deficits with higher taxes. Several years earlier, when Kansas Republican Bob Dole suggested taxes to contain the spiraling deficits, Gingrich called him "the tax collector for the welfare state."

The modern Republicans' ardor for tax cutting — combined with their impotence on the spending side — has left the United States mired in fiscal squalor. We're in hock to the Chinese and face escalating intergenerational warfare as retirees make demands on a debt-ridden land.

Jerry Ford assumed that the American public wanted a straight story. Not many presidents would say, as Ford did in his 1975 State of the Union address, that "the state of the union is not good." Indeed, an energy crisis was hurting the economy. He proposed raising the tariff on oil to reduce American dependence on foreign energy. Could you imagine George Bush asking for that sacrifice, though small and in the national interest?

Our age of political bombast dismisses a quiet and decent man like Ford as weak. Ford was wrong to pardon Richard Nixon, but he bravely suffered the political consequences in the belief that he was helping the country. He never played politics with America's future.

It took many of us a long time to appreciate how really special Jerry Ford was.

To find out more about Froma Harrop, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2006 THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.