Molly Ivins April 19

SAN FRANCISCO — Cultural update from the Bay Area: When last I stopped on these shores, many natives were still searching for their Inner Child, a complex and laborious process. Good news! A new course of therapy now helps the hopeful get in touch with their Inner Clown.

Not only is it a lot more fun, but at a total of four hours for the entire course, it's much cheaper. Participants dress in wigs and baggy costumes and get back in touch with that funny, sweet and crazy guy or gal who lurks within us all. Just what the country needs. Send in the clowns!

Speaking of clowns, more good news from Washington, where the R's in Congress have apparently decided not to cancel the income tax as of 2001 and then try to figure out what to replace it. This knacky notion was the flavor o' the day for a spell in the nation's clown capital, with Sen. Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas pronouncing, "It's an absolute political winner." End the income tax, and replace it with ... something else. Whatever.

Signing up as co-sponsors of the Whatever Act were 153 representatives and 36 senators. Then, according to the New Republic, a private poll taken by the Republican National Committee determined that the public thought that abolishing the entire tax code without specifying what would replace it was, on the whole, profoundly stupid. Thank God for polls.

Should you be wondering from whence cometh such a startlingly idiotic notion, why, from the same fine folks who thought shutting down the government was a shrewd maneuver.

Back at the beginning of the Republican Revolution (circa 1994, for those of you who are ahistorical and/or suffer from short-term memory loss), when the world of Washington was obsessed with Newt Gingrich and the Republican leadership, I boldly suggested that we should concentrate on the followership instead — the little Newtzies who were quite obviously like nothing we had seen before in politics. I am pleased to report that Linda Killian has done so in a splendid book: "The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?"

I doubt that Killian has ever heard of me; nevertheless, I take a secondhand maternal pride in her very fine study of the followership.

She has definitively answered my plaintive question: "Who are these creeps?"

And what material she has to work with. Most of the 73 Republican freshmen elected in '94 came to destroy government, not to save it. Killian's beautifully researched book tries very hard to figure out why; her aim is to "get inside their heads." She does, and what a bleak landscape it is.

Killian is so fair that if there is any redeeming social value to be found, she finds it; the late Sonny Bono, bless him, provides one of the funniest chapters ever written. But on the whole, this is a terrifying report.

Had a tribe of real revolutionaries been elected to Congress, at least the results would have been interesting. The trouble with these bozos is that even though they came as outsiders, they instantly succumbed to the very worst aspect of insiderism: the money. They came to change the way government works, and they promptly made it worse. Ann McBride of Common Cause says, "They came to shake Washington up, and they stayed to shake it down."

They blithely destroyed programs that help poor and working-class people, while letting corporate lobbyists rewrite environmental law, communications law and regulations of all kinds. All this with a mean-spiritedness, a spiteful nastiness, that almost defies belief. And liberals get accused of "fomenting class warfare"! Great Bozo's ghost.

In return for their servile servicing of corporate interests, the freshmen collected great geysers of cash for their re-election, which made it difficult to defeat even those who were patented idiots. There were a few honorable exceptions, and Killian finds them all; those who persisted in their commitment to changing campaign financing wound up on Gingrich's dirt list and paid a very high price indeed.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book deals with the cult-like quality of the Class of '94; like cult members, the more they were criticized by outsiders, the more furiously they clung to their odd beliefs. The showdown came with the three-week shutdown of the federal government in 1995. By any sane reckoning, this was one of the dumbest stunts ever pulled and also the beginning of President Clinton's big comeback. So immune to common sense are these Republicans that they'd actually like to do it again. Well, it's a concept.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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