Molly Ivins August 27CHICAGO — So far, this is shaping up as another snorer. Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana says that all the Democrats are obeying the commandment "Thou shalt not make news." Even the Texas delegation is disgustingly full of harmony and unity — and if you can't get Texas Democrats to fight, what's the point of a convention? The funniest speech to date was by Veep Al Gore, which gives you some idea. It's so dull that people are actually nostalgic for 1968, when Democrats were gassed and beaten by Chicago cops. The cops have all been sent to charm school and are being just darling. An entire slum, the Near West Side, was cleaned up in just 18 months. Da Mare II (Richard M. Daley), son of Da Mare I (Richard J. Daley), has sprinkled trees liberally throughout downtown, which looks terrific but has half the Windy City griping that the money should have been spent on education. Our best hope is that the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who will not be censored (unlike the hapless dissenters in San Diego), will attack welfare "deform" with the energy it so richly deserves — and be wildly cheered for same. Robert Novak, the Darth Vader of the journalistic right wing, said he had been unable to find a single delegate who approved of President Clinton's signing the bill. An even more Democratic eventuation would be Clinton mentioning welfare deform and getting roundly booed by his own party. That would be nice. An early-morning stint on C-SPAN convinced me that the media have done even worse than I suspected in explaining what is actually in the welfare deform bill. My fellow SPAN-heads, among the country's most well-informed people, demonstrated a complete ignorance of what the bill does. One woman with a Mitteleuropean accent said she had been a legal immigrant; she and her husband had sponsored relatives as legal immigrants, and they had had to sign a paper saying that their sponsees would not become a burden on the state. She wanted to know when that rule had been repealed and when legal immigrants started coming here just to sign up and lie around on the dole. Thank you, ma'am, but nobody ever changed the rules. We're talking about legal immigrants who came here to make a better life (just like all those granddaddies the Republicans bragged about having); worked hard; paid their taxes but weren't able to save much; and will no longer be eligible for either food stamps or Supplemental Security Income, the federal stipend for the poor, elderly and disabled.
The Democrats have their Message all mapped out. On Monday, we got a blazingly controversial proposal to ban handgun purchases by those who have been convicted of domestic abuse. On Tuesday comes a fantastically daring assault on illiteracy. On Wednesday, it's the environment (almost everyone's against clean air and clean water), and on Thursday, Clinton accepts. Oh, take away those tenterhooks. There was a time, children, when Democrats used to rear back on their hind legs and talk about economic justice at their conventions. Honest. Right in front of God and everyone. Little Bobby Novak said on C-SPAN that he thinks redistributive politics (policies that redistribute wealth) is just a terrible idea. Me too. As it happens, we are in the midst of the greatest redistribution of wealth upward in our nation's history. I'm sorry to do this to you again, but wealth in this country has been flowing to the already-rich like nothing any of us have ever seen before. The top 1 percent of the population has 40 percent of the country's wealth; the top 10 percent has 80 percent. There's nothing natural or inevitable about this. It's the result of deliberate policies that favor the rich. And Democrats are too timid to even talk about it. This is class warfare, all right — and the rich folks won while the rest of us sat around worrying about the morals of teenage immigrant welfare mothers on drugs. The biggest surprise of the convention so far came from a Republican, Rep. Enid Greene (formerly Waldholtz) of Utah, she of the unfortunate choice of husband. She gamely showed up for a panel on women and the media; we all wandered off into the mystery of why men in leadership positions can now cry in public — viz., Clinton, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Bob Dole — and they all get the Alan Alda Sensitivity Award for it, but women can't. Identifying herself as "the most infamous crier of this year" (hey, her only problem was that her life was in shambles), she proved wry, observant and rather valiant. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
