Pied Piper on the Potomac

By Hugh Sidey

The tax messiah hit Washington last week. His message was the same: cut. But its meaning was not as easy to absorb in the capital as it was when delivered back in the sunny precincts of California. That, of course, is an old story along the Potomac.

Howard Jarvis was given a five-hour tour of Capitol Hill by California's senior Senator, Alan Cranston, a proud liberal who had opposed Jarvis' heretical Proposition 13. At one point, as Jarvis surveyed the federal splendors, Idaho's Senator Frank Church, the Snake River Valley's unabashed advocate of activist government, leaped up from his salmon and tea to wring the hand of the famous visitor. Jarvis had taken his political tactics from the book of populism in which Church claims entry. But Millionaire Jarvis' right-wing views and his bank account would make a legendary populist like Pitchfork Ben Tillman turn over in the red earth of South Carolina.

In short, Jarvis confused political theology wherever he went on his Washington rounds. While liberals were announcing their conversion to the Jarvisian principles of fiscal evolution, longtime Republican fundamentalists like Kansas' Robert Dole and Delaware's William Roth were elbowing their way into the limelight that surrounded Jarvis, fearful that the oldtime virtues might be usurped by the Democrats. Jarvis and his tax problem did nothing so well as expose the near chaos and/or panic that grips both political parties. Where to put Jarvis in the political spectrum? How to reckon his movement in long-range national terms?

The White House debated whether President Carter should invite Jarvis down to the Oval Office and glean a little of his luster, then mysteriously decided against it. The Congress vacillated, voting one day for a spate of 2% cuts in appropriation bills for some agencies, then refusing the next day to do the same to the budgets for other agencies.

The ADA got a rousing call to oldtime liberalism from old-time Liberal George McGovern. But there was no rush to the barricades, McGovern's record for persuasiveness being what it is. The nation's cash-starved mayors meeting in Atlanta were bipartisanly unenthusiastic about the Jarvis message. But Senator Edward Kennedy, having a good political ear, brought a whiff of the Jarvis theme down to them. Eloquently redundant, Kennedy told the mayors that all levels of government must find "more effective ways to cut the fraud and the fat and waste to counter the rising frustration of the taxpayers who pay the bills."

There was yet another curious turn back in Washington. Eager Republican congressional candidates attending a workshop on how to be elected in the fall were cautioned against rushing joyfully down the path behind the beguiling piping of Jarvis. "We just don't know yet where this thing is going," warned Vince Breglio of Decision-Making Information, a political polling and consulting firm. But he did urge fellow party members: "Stick with the Republican tradition of less government spending."

The political scene for the fall promises to be every man for himself as each candidate scrambles to accommodate the changing moods back home. Normally, Republicans should make huge gains in such an environment. But as House Minority Leader John Rhodes ruefully noted last week, the Democrats have thrown away their old banners and quietly stolen Republican colors.

Out in Iowa, for instance, the cry has gone up against liberal Democratic Senator Dick Clark that he is nothing but "a clone of Teddy Kennedy." Republicans had better take a second look. As his words to the mayors in Atlanta show, Teddy Kennedy is talking about ways to keep the lid on spending. He is even arguing that his $27 billion national health-care plan is the essence of frugality; otherwise health costs will be even higher. Teddy's heart may not be in the same place as the heart of Howard Jarvis, but Kennedy and his friends are getting good at the new lingo.

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