Bleeding-Heart Conservatives

By DAN GOODGAME WASHINGTON

PRESIDENT BUSH TOLD REPORTERS LAST WEEK THAT THE Los Angeles riots "vindicated" a critique of federal antipoverty programs he had made a year earlier at the University of Michigan -- the very place where Lyndon Johnson had launched the Great Society in 1964. "Programs designed to ensure racial harmony generated animosity," Bush had said in his Michigan speech. "Programs intended to help people out of poverty invited dependency."

This provocative analysis was supported by the steady rise of poverty despite the fact that taxpayers spend $220 billion a year -- $6,500 for every poor adult and child in the country -- to fight it. Before that speech and since, Bush has avoided the issue, seldom addressing it in public or in his arm-twisting of lawmakers. But since Los Angeles erupted, a handful of conservative activists among his advisers, led by Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, have been urging the President to fight for new market-oriented, antibureaucratic approaches to poverty -- including programs that Bush himself had halfheartedly proposed in previous budgets. As William Bennett, the former drug policy director for Bush, observed, "If you're going to denounce a set of programs that we've already spent $2.5 trillion on, you'd damn well better have an attractive alternative." Suggestions from these "bleeding-heart conservatives" include:

PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC HOUSING. Kemp has long worked to convert housing- project tenants into homeowners with a stake in their community. Bush has paid only lip service to the program, known as hope. Congress last year approved it in principle, but denied it serious funding and required, in a typical cut-the-baby-in-half compromise, that another housing-project unit must be built for each one that is turned over to tenant ownership. The White House budget office has calculated that this scheme would cost about $100,000 a unit, and that tenants as well as taxpayers would be better served by a simple system of vouchers that the poor could use to buy or rent housing from private owners.

TAX INCENTIVES. Kemp wants to eliminate capital-gains taxes and reduce levies for businesses that locate in inner-city "enterprise zones." Conservatives also would increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, to make even minimum-wage jobs more attractive than living on welfare.

WEED AND SEED. Attorney General William Barr and Budget Director Richard Darman have pushed a scheme that would "weed" career criminals out of inner- city neighborhoods through massive sweeps by federal and local lawmen, and would continue to pacify these areas with intensive "community policing." These neighborhoods would then be "seeded" with social programs such as drug treatment, youth recreation and job training. Sixteen cities are set to receive $1 million each under the pilot program this year, and Bush has requested $500 million more in his budget now before Congress.

EDUCATION CHOICE. Bush has encouraged school districts to let parents choose among various public and private schools, and thus foster accountability. Poor parents like education choice, but many school bureaucrats and congressional Democrats despise it. Conservatives are urging Bush to take on publicly opponents of school choice who educate their own children in private schools. Example: Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.

WELFARE REFORM. Poor mothers who take a job or marry a man with a job stand to lose cash benefits from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and health care for their families under Medicaid. While some hard-liners would abolish AFDC altogether, some conservatives, including Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, would reduce benefits for unmarried mothers and those who remain unemployed after their children enter school, while increasing benefits for poor women who marry and work.

PUBLIC SERVICE JOBS. Once disdained as a relic of the New Deal, the idea of hiring the poor, at least temporarily, to plant trees or patch potholes is gaining among conservatives. Grudgingly aligning themselves with many liberals on this issue, they have concluded that there simply are not enough private jobs available during times of slow economic growth, and that the benefits to the poor, in work experience and dignity, would outweigh the costs.

At a series of Cabinet meetings last week, Bush was warned by some of his more cautious advisers, led by Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, that a full- court press for antipoverty programs would entangle the Administration in a bidding war with the Democrats. But Bush sided with Kemp and the other reformers -- in part because private polls and focus groups showed that his hesitant initial response to the riots had undermined his reputation for decisive leadership in a crisis. Still, some advisers doubt that Bush will make passage of conservative antipoverty programs a real priority, given his neglect of them for the past three years. Said one White House official: "The burden is on us to show that we will fight for this."