Molly Ivins January 28

AUSTIN — Isn't this fun? Oh, come on, admit it: American politics is so wonderfully, comically weird that it completely eliminates the need for magical realist fiction. Steve Forbes, the Flavor of the Month, who has surged to the fore on the strength of his Itty-Bitty Postcard ploy, is now adopting "populist themes." I read it in The New York Times, so it must be true.

The Conventional Wisdom is agog, atwitter. For some reason, it never occurred to them that a weenie zillionaire whose main claim to fame is a tax plan that will permit him to pay zero taxes would become the darling of an economically battered people. Those folks have no imagination.

Steve Forbes, the new populist, says he's from "the real world," as opposed to Washington. I'm not quite sure how normal it is to be the heir to a $400 million fortune, but what-the-hey. All these years, Republicans have been deriding Washington, D.C., as the World Capital of Dumbness, and who's sorry now? Poor Sens. Phil Gramm and Bob Dole are in a box. They too could pretend to be "outsiders," but then we'd have to believe they spent all these years circling Washington on the Beltway and casting their votes via the car phone.

The New Populist calls his critics "Chicken Littles" and "the fearmongers, the demagogues, the Washington lawyers and lobbyists" who are hopelessly embedded "in the culture of Washington." According to the Times, those who do not understand the beauty of his flat-tax plan are using "the kind of perverted logic that comes out of our nation's capital."

Dole is reported to be "getting tough" in Iowa. Gramm has taken to posing as The Workingman's Friend; apparently, his recent description of himself as "a blue-collar Republican," which many of us had charitably attributed to his having eaten a bad turkey sandwich in Laredo, is to be a regular campaign theme. (For those who are unfamiliar with the delicious looniness of Texas politics, we once had an agriculture commissioner who claimed it was a bad turkey sandwich in Laredo that caused him to refer to Booker T. Washington as "a great nigger.") Gramm now reminisces about his youth, sitting around "my mama's old Formica kitchen table" and watching Mama struggle with the bills. Sheesh, it's so touching!

Actually, no one ever much minded Gramm's Pore Boy routine; it's his continuing refusal to acknowledge that everything he ever got in life came to him through federal government programs that's so annoying.

I got mine, bubba — now let's cut those programs.

Poor Dole, under relentless attack as the front-runner, now has to "git mean," which only reminds everyone of why they never liked him in the first place. Despite the renewed excitement of an actual race on the Republican side, the charisma shortage over there is still dire. Forbes is zero on the Elvis Scale, Gramm has anti-charm, and Dole, whose best quality is a quick, sardonic wit, has to hide it because Americans don't much like sarcasm.

In 1992, anger was the emotion of the year. The three candidates who briefly caught fire — Jerry Brown on the left, Pat Buchanan on the right and Ross Perot from the Ozone Layer — all articulated anger from their various points of view. 1996 seems to be the Year of Anxiety. It's still the economy, stupid. And people are looking for some reassuring figure with a simple plan to fix it all, which accounts for the improbable rise of Steve Forbes.

On the whole, worry could turn out to be a more constructive political force than anger. At least worriers are thinking. If I might make a modest suggestion: If I were you, I wouldn't listen to any candidate who doesn't at least begin his discussion of the economy with support for an increase in the minimum wage. Clinton wants to oonch it from $4.25 to $5.15, but the fact is, it needs to rise to at least $7 an hour. If this economy is going to produce nothing but zillionaires and minimum-wage workers, then the first thing we need to do is make sure the minimum is a living wage, which economists define as $23,000 a year for an adult and two kids.

Thomas Geoghegan, the splendid labor writer, advocates a "wage policy," including collective bargaining and unions. Labor is going to have to fight that battle by itself; America is now the only Western country that does not have a party representing workers. We have two flavors of party representing capital, period.

One of our less-noticed national tragedies is that we Americans are so provincial. I know that provincialism is a universal characteristic, but a country plopped in the middle of a continent like Europe is forced to take more notice of its neighbors than we do since we have a continent pretty much to ourselves.

Because our version of patriotism calls for endless repetitions of "the greatest nation in the world," we are singularly unlikely to look around and see if anyone else is handling the same problems better than we do.

We ignore even our modest and sensible Canadian neighbors, who, in fact, do several things better than we do — most notably, health care. Geoghegan reports that German unions are now offering restraint on wages in exchange for more jobs. And other European countries are also tackling wage policy in a variety of useful ways.

***

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.