Molly Ivins August 10

AUSTIN, Texas — One million dollar donors. A club of million-dollar political contributors. The Republican Party expects to find at least 100 supporters who will give $250,000 a year over four years in soft money — that is, directly to the party rather than to individual candidates.

As Fred Wertheimer, a veteran of the campaign-finance wars, said: "When you solicit and institutionalize million-dollar campaign contributions, you are putting the government up for sale in a manner that is unprecedented in modern times. The ultimate price will be paid by the American taxpayer in the form of billions of dollars of government favors and tax breaks given to Team $1 Million donors."

The people who should be getting alarmed by now are the professional free-marketeers, like those cuddly folks who run the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, because this system of legalized bribery is so out of control that it is substantially interfering with the economy. You need look no further than the Republicans' proposed $800 billion tax cut for evidence — it is larded with special tax breaks that favor one industry over another, one competitor over another.

If businesses are not competing on a level playing field, the whole system is thrown out of kilter. With the government selling tax breaks to the highest bidders as though it were the medieval church selling indulgences, the precious free market so beloved of these theorizers becomes instead a rigged game, a stacked deck.

In one of the funniest statements heard in years, Julie Finley, chair of the Republican Team 100 program (these are the pikers who give only $100,000) explained to The New York Times what the million-dollar donors will get for their money: "What they get is they are left alone. They don't get calls to buy a table at the gala, they don't get calls to give to the media program. They have a pass that lasts all year." And, by George, if that's not worth a million bucks, what is?

Oh, they also get private meetings with the people who write the laws for all of us. And, of course, some Team members are corporations rather than individuals. Among those already on board are the retired president of Amway, the American Financial Corp. and the Philip Morris.

On other matters political, President Clinton's new push to get the states to enroll more children in the new health-insurance program is at least partly a political maneuver. Not that getting poor kids health insurance is an ignoble goal, but I guarantee some of this is aimed at one George Dubya Bush.

One of the dirtiest little secrets of Texas government is that the reason it's so cheap is because the state makes no effort to find people who are eligible for various programs.

In fact, we're notorious for doing the opposite — practically hiding programs from people who qualify for them. "Outreach" is not in the vocabulary of this state.

This was openly discussed during the last legislative session, when the Lege faced the choice between insuring children up to 150 percent of poverty or up to 200 percent. The issue was in doubt for a while (we finally took the high road, since it wasn't state money) because they were afraid that when parents brought their kids in to enroll them in the new program, they would find out that the whole family qualified for Medicaid.

This is the same reason that several counties in South Texas are always named in those hunger surveys — no one ever tells the people who are hungry that they qualify for food stamps. Texas has been running this little game for years now, and Clinton is about to send some federal inspectors down here to say, "Gotcha."

Texas' Medicaid enrollment has actually dropped, and considering that this state has an unusually high percentage of working poor people, that gives you some idea of just how successful we are at keeping such programs secret.

The good news is that Clinton wants the schools to do some outreach. The education secretary will write to all the superintendents and elementary school principals, urging them to help enroll the poor children in Medicaid or the new program for kids. This may sound far afield from the education mission, but as principals and teachers know too well, poor kids are especially likely to suffer from asthma, ear infections and vision problems. And if you can't get your breath, see the blackboard or hear the teacher, it sure does make school a lot harder. We get all our poor kids health coverage and you can bet the school test scores will go up.

I hate to blame one party more than another for the political incivility that plagues us, since I think there's plenty of blame to go around, but I notice that Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, was quoted on the current impasse over a tax cut: "We've never had a surplus of the magnitude projected, at least in my lifetime. There's a legitimate philosophical debate over what you can do with it. This is the noise of democracy." Whereas Trent Lott, the majority leader, went on a Sunday chat show and simply called the president a liar, several times, quite explicitly, using all his time to vilify Clinton and none to defend the Republican position on the tax cut.

I used to think Newt Gingrich was about the meanest person I ever heard in politics, but I'm beginning to feel homesick for him.

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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