Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 15

Monday, Mrch 16, W8 The Arlom Republic B5 6Tjroopeirgaite9 fetter: Apology? It's always easy to stand up for the truth looks like nothing will change, did change, the change would be Band-Aid and not a cure. It has alwavs when it or if it been the Lisa Graham Keegan a Equal treatment of schoolchildren at heart of issue i 0 If Republican governors act like Democrats By Herbert London One of the overarching arguments for devolution of government from the federal to the state level is the belief that the states will be more fiscally responsible than Uncle Sam. With Republicans representing the majority of governors, this view has become an article of faith. However, according to a recent report, the nation's governors (two-thirds of them Republican) are recommending 1998-99 budgets that make President Clinton's 3.9 percent increase look downright Scrooge-like. In New York, for example, Republican Gov.

George Pataki, who advertises himself as a fiscal conservative, has called for an astonishing 8.5 percent increase in state spending for the 1998-99 budget. That's the highest level since Mario Cuomo's 1988-89 budget, and it's more than four times the rate of inflation, higher than that of any Cuomo budget. New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, also a Republican, has proposed a S.4 percent increase in her budget, despite claims in last year's election that she has held the line on spending. Arizona's new Republican governor, Jane Hull, has recommended an 8.4 percent general fund increase.

Of course, much of these increases can be attributed to the effect of a booming economy. With the states enjoying surging revenues, governors think they have more to spend. That, however, is only a partial explanation. great heritage of our country to uproot injustices. dren are treated equally in the eyes of the state regardless of the property wealth in their school district.

For the parents in south Phoenix, it means their children have an opportunity to learn in a physical structure that is safe and secure. For the parents in Scotts-dale, it means they can continue to build good schools and, if they so desire, can enhance those facilities by asking their voters to pay for it. For property owners, the elimi nation of general obligation bond ing means the gradual elimination of their secondary property taxes. This amounts to the largest state-wide tax cut in Arizona's history, because property owners residential and commercial are currently paying $480 million annually in debt service through their secondary property taxes. That $480 million payment doesn't fix one existing deficiency, doesn't renovate one building, doesn't build one new school, and doesn't buy one textbook or computer.

It's straight debt and, under the current system, it's rising at 13 percent per year. Does that sound like it's good for your kids? Students FIRST is a commitment by the governor and the Legislature to repair all existing deficiencies in K-12 school buildings and bring them up to a reasonable adequacy standard. It's a commitment to renovate existing school buildings to ensure they continue to meet adequacy standards. It's a commitment to build new schools, with a reasonable design standard, to accommodate our growing population. It's a commitment to provide more money per student for textbooks, computers and instructional aids.

It's a commitment to ensure that charter schools are treated fairly and remain a growing and vibrant alternative for parents and students. Finally, it's a commitment, to a student-centered education system in which money funds students, not districts. I urge all parents to look at the facts in Students FIRST with your own eyes and on behalf of your own children not through a filter manufactured by those interests who clearly benefit in a system that crushes equal opportunity. Lisa Graham Keegan is Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction. hot races conservative core of their party, or by African-American and Hispanic Democrats who tend to be liberals.

The other side of the realignment coin is the severe erosion in the ranks of moderate or progressive Republicans from New England, the Middle Atlantic states and the upper Midwest. Those areas, where the Republican Party was born, once elected dozens of GOP members comfortable about voting with Democrats on civil rights, the environment and other issues. But as GOP strength has ebbed in those areas (Bob Dole was virtually shut out of their electoral votes in 1996), Democrats have taken over those seats. Again, the result is fewer crossovers and more unity on each side. The differentiation is not complete, of course.

Some issues obliterate party lines, and some, such as immigration, energy and the allocation of highway funds, split Democrats and Republicans alike. But these are the exceptions. On irtually all the other issues, it makes a real difference whether Gingrich or Gephardt is in the speaker's chair, whether Republican Bill Archer from a silk-stocking Houston district or Democrat Charles Rangel from Harlem is chairman of Ways and Means. And that is why individual House races become expensive national party battlegrounds as we've just seen in California. Story's author pens open note to Clinton By James Plnkerton The man who split the first sex-charged atom in the chain reaction the one hurtling Bill Clinton toward a grand jury Armageddon with Kenneth Starr in the Monica Lewinsky matter has now issued an apology.

Or has he? Interestingly, the words "apology" or "I'm sorry" never appear in, the text of David Brock's five-page! open letter to Clinton that will appear in the April Esquire. So why did at least three of the major news networks use "apology" in their stories last Monday night? One might guess that the word comes from the headline on the press release "David Brock Offers Apology to Clinton for his famed 'Troopergate Story" from Dan Klores Associates, the PR firm handling the Brock account. "I didn't know that," Brock said in an interview last week, noting that he had never even seen the press release touting his story. Nevertheless, Brock's "apology" was in the public domain, and the White House was quick to snap it up. "The president read the article, and he appreciates and accepts Mr.

Brock's apology," a presidential spokesman said. To be sure, Brock allowed that the sentiment in Esquire was "regret." But what's remarkable about Brock's letter to Clinton is the gee-it's-too-bad-you-did-this-to-yourself tone. If Brock were truly, truly sorry for what he had done, and wished to cause no more pain in Clinton's marriage, would he have written that "your main point of vulnerability" is "your so-called zipper Five years after his inquiry into Gov. Clinton's Arkansas sex life was published in The American Spectator, Brock might well feel some pride in investigative work. In the words of Brock's friend, Laura In-graham, a CBS commentator, "David's article was painstakingly researched, and its assertions have been borne out by a pattern of conduct on the part of the president ever since.

It was a huge journalistic coup." Indeed, much of what Brock has written has withstood tough scrutiny. He first burst into fame with his revisionist peek under the halo the media had placed on Anita Hill after her testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Even the New York Times review of Brock's The Real Anita: The Untold Story grudgingly conceded that the chapters dealing with Hill's allegations "badly damaged her case" and "effectively demolished the assertions of the witnesses who supported her." Still, even if Brock retains some surgeon's pride in his scalpefwork, he has made a significant political shift by saying, in effect, that a vast right-wing conspiracy is out to get Dynamics The effort and money expended in the first House special election of the year, a California contest won last Tuesday by Democrat Lois Capps, is a tip-off to the biggest political fact of 1998. For all the make-nice talk between the parties during last year's successful budget negotiations, the rivalry has never been more intense. Or more genuine.

The differences in policy and even philosophy between the Democrats and Republicans are as large as they have been at any time since the New Deal. The great debates, especially on the role of government and the taxes to support it, now fall along party lines just as they did then. Franklin Roosevelt made the Republican leaders of the House the famous trilogy of "Martin, Barton and Fish" the focus of scorn in his re-election campaign. Now, Demo- crats will make Speaker Newt Gingrich their bogeyman, and Republicans will try to do the same thing with Minority Leader Dick Gephardt With Democrats needing only an 1 1-seat pickup to regain the House majority they lost for the first time in 40 years back in 1994, every open seat and every district won by a narrow margin in 1996 will be as fiercely contested as the race between Capps and Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro. That battle produced an unexpectedly wide margin for the widow of By Lisa Graham Keegan As the Legislature debates the Students FIRST plan nut forth hv Gov Jane Hull, House Speaker Jeff Gros- cost, Senate President Brenda Burns and myself, it is important for ail Arizonans, particularly parents, to understand what is at stake.

And what is at stake is the notion that all children be treated equally and fairly. Can anyone explain why one family who lives in a $100,000 home should pay annual school taxes of $1,200 and have their child supported by $3,600 annually; while another family, in a similar $100,000 home the same level of "wealth" pays $600 in annual school taxes and has their child supported by $5,600 annually? All the rationalizing, distorting. and misrepresenting in the world cannot hide this fact. Our current method of taxing and paying for K-12 students is a gross injustice. The Arizona Supreme Court, in its Dec.

23, 1997, opinion con firmed this fact even for the guardians of inequity. It should come as no surprise that the guardians of inequity have pulled out all the stops to defeat Students FIRST. They benefit from the current system and would like to continue their advantage. What is shocking is how some people who previously acknowledged and fought against the inequity of the current system are now de fending the very part of the system general obligation bonding that created the inequity. It always easy to stand up for the truth when it looks like nothing will change, or if it did change, the change would be a Band-Aid and not a cure.

It has always been the great heritage of our country to uproot injustices where they have taken root. It has never been an easy or risk-free battle, but it is one guided by principle and truth. The Students FIRST plan makes fundamental changes to the way we construct schools in this state. No change, especially fundamental change, is ever easy. But it is the right thing to do.

Students FIRST eliminates general obligation bonding. What does that mean for parents and property owners? For parents it means a guarantee that all chil makes for made in January when Congressional Quarterly, NationalJournals older rival, reported its breakdown of 1997 House voting. It found "virtually no overlap between the two parties" on the roll calls where the lines were clearly drawn. On those votes, 88 percent of House Republicans and 82 percent of House Democrats backed the position of their respective parties. Seme voters decry this partisanship.

I have heard many people say, in living-room interviews, that they are tired of politicians who put the interests of their party ahead of the needs of the nation. But the truth is more complicated, and more interesting. The reason there is "virtually no overlap" between Republicans and Democrats in the House is that both parties have been undergoing profound makeovers. The result is more internal cohesion on each side and a bigger ideological gulf between them. During most of the four decades from 1954 to 1994 hen Democrats controlled the House, a big chunk of their nominal strength came from Southerners who were conservative enough to feel very comfortable voting with the Republicans on many defense and domestic issues.

But now there are only 34 non-Latino, White Southern Democrats left in the House. The other 103 seats from the region are held either by Republicans, who provide the Marty LedertiandlerAssociated Press David Brock's open letter to Presi dent Clinton in the April issue of Esquire has been called an apology. Clinton. But David Horowitz of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture argues that ideology is no motivator for Brock: "I've read everything he's written, and I don't see any politics in him." Moreover, Horowitz says, "The issue in Troopergate was the abuse of human beings. That's not an ideological issue; that's a good government issue." Asked if he is (a) a conservative or (b) a Republican, Brock says simply, "I don't want to call myself anything." Others agree: Norah Vincent, who worked with Brock as an editor at Free Press, the publisher of his books, says, "I think he's a very good reporter, but he's not really a writer, or a thinker or an intellectual he's a journalist." The one noteworthy self-description that Brock applies to himself, of course, is gay.

And that leads Rich Tafel of the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay caucus within the GOP, to suggest that Brock misunderstood his position in the conservative "movement." He failed to realize, Tafel says, that because he was gay, "he was never going to be accepted by the hard-core anti-Clinton crazies he was running with." Tafel is a Republican because he believes in Republican principles, not because every Republican likes him. Brock's mistake was confusing political alliance with personal affection. Yet while he may be naive, that doesn't mean he's innocent. Tafel regards Brock as "very opportunistic," adding, "David views the media as controlled by the left, and so he's repositioning himself for a new career." Yet the fact remains that David Brock wrote an article in 1993 that today seems truer than ever and it. changed history.

That's why Clinton's foes should be permanently grateful to him. And that's why, no matter what Brock may be saying now, Clinton's friends will never forgive him. James Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist of House DAVID BRODER Washington Post Writers Group of Rep. Walter Capps, who in 1996 became the first Democrat in a half-century to capture the Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo district. Gephardt said her victory made him "very optimistic" that Democrats ill recapture the House in November.

Rep. John Linder of Georgia, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was just as quick to predict that Bordonaro will win the rematch in November, when the same two candidates face off for a full term. These partisan battles are for real stakes. They are about policy, not just politics. As National Journal reported recently in its analysis of roll-call votes.

"If anything, the 1997 session featured a hardening party lines on every day votes. The partisan differences ran across the board on virtually all issues, economic, social or foreign policy." Much the same point had been Those governors facing the prospect of an election challenge are invariably the big spenders. In this sense, Republicans are no different from Democrats. While many pundits trumpeted a new era of fiscal conservatism at the state level, it is apparent with recent budget submissions that politics trumps economics and ideology. As Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute has noted, "It's almost as if these Republican governors have become 'Clinton New A study of government statistics by the State University of New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government found that state governments added 319,000 jobs from 1990 to 1996, years when many Republican governors were elected, while federal employment in the same period declined by 1 1 percent, thanks in large part to defense budget retrenchment.

Many states that embraced fiscal discipline for a year or two cannot resist the pressure for new spending, particularly in areas such as education and corrections New Jersey officials note that almost two-thirds of the state's spending increase can be attributed to education. Yet the question remains: Why don't Republicans hold tight to the reins of spending? Why don't they build rainy-day reserves for a time when financial markets turn bearish? Robert King, budget director of New York, argues that the state buildup of reserves accounts for 1.5 percent of the 8.5 percent budget increase. Yet even if true, and his arithmetic seems exaggerated, a 7 percent budget increase is still Vh times greater than inflation. Some analysts contend that, in New York, it would be far better to pay down the largest per capita debt in the nation rather than engage in a spending spree. But in New York, as in other states, paying down the debt doesn't have the same political visibility as new spending.

Not all Republican governors can be tarred with the same brush. Gov. John Engler of Michigan has requested a 2 percent budget increase, consistent with his belief that state spending should not rise more than the level of inflation. Several governors contend that state spending increases are designed to compensate for a reduction in county property taxes. New York's Gov.

Pataki, for example, makes this argument. But it has a hollow ring. What the governor actually means is this: He is transferring tax-levied funds from state government to county government so that he can take credit for a property-tax reduction. Surely there are sound reasons to consider the devolution of government, including the Jeffersonian belief that government closer to the people is more responsive to real constituent concerns. But when it comes to spending, there is little evidence that the states are more responsible than the federal government and quite a bit of recent evidence that they are less responsible than the federal government.

Moreover, it appears as if partisan claims won't wash. The Republican governors of the 1990s are starting to resemble Democratic governors of the 1980s. When incumbents catch campaign fever, spending is the likely result Pataki in 1994 may have run against Cuomo's fiscal irresponsibility, but the fiscal conservative of 1994 has emerged as the profligate liberal in 1998. Gov. Pataki is certainly not alone.

Before fiscal conservatives start accepting political rhetoric, they would be wise to consider a record that suggests Republicans and Democrats are often indistinguishable once in office. Herbert London is John M. Otm professor of humwirbes at New York University and president of tht IrKtanapofts-based Hudson Institute.