Compared with provocative proposals like these, Dole’s more temperate stands can seem merely workmanlike–a fact the competition happily points out. And yet there is something conspicuously absent from Buchanan and Alexander’s bold plans: details. Ask Dole about welfare reform or cutting the deficit, and he will glaze your eyes with legislative specifics. Boring, sure. But unlike Democrats Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton, who won points in their ‘92 primary race for issuing policy tomes, Buchanan and Alexander often can’t offer the skimpiest notion of how their ideas will work.
Alexander breezily argues that the states and private charities can take over welfare from the federal government. He proposes giving the $50 billion the Feds currently spend on welfare each year to the states, which would use the money to encourage private “neighborhood charity foundations.” After five years the federal payments would stop, and the states would be on their own. Eventually, he predicts, the charities–who are themselves skeptical–will take over entirely. End of welfare.
Sounds great, but where would the money come from after the five years are up? Alexander says he doesn’t know. Even some conservatives dismiss the scenario, which Alexander aides tell NEWSWEEK came from a telephone chat he had with GOP guru Arianna Huffington. “Who would police for fraud?” wonders Martin Anderson, Ronald Reagan’s campaign issues director. Alexander brushes off the criticism. If the states want to waste welfare money, he says, “that’s up to them.”
Alexander would also dismantle the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development and ship most other federal programs out of Washington. He’d turn members of Congress into part-timers, slashing their salaries from $133,600 to $70,000 and sending them home six months a year. He’d also repeal most federal criminal statutes, retaining only a “handful” of specific federal offenses such as treason. How does he plan to get Congress to go along with all this? He says he would have to persuade them.
Alexander doesn’t offer much more detail about his plan to curb illegal immigration–a lonely expansion of federal power. His proposal: create a new branch of the armed forces to patrol the border. Alexander admits he has no clue how the program would work, or even whether it’s constitutional. And he becomes irritated when bothered about specifics. Asked by reporters last week what the force – dubbed the “Lamarines” by staffers –might cost, Alexander said: “I don’t know . . . You just do it.”
Buchanan has his own ideas about how to seal off the country: stretch a 70-mile-long barbed-wire fence along the Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out. How effective would a fence be? Buchanan doesn’t know. He would also freeze all legal immigration for five years and slash the number of subsequent legal immigrants from 880,000 a year to 233,000. What about states like California, whose economies depend on immigrant fruit pickers? Buchanan doesn’t say.
He’s not much better at explaining how his plans to pull out of the NAFTA and GATT agreements–and erect stiff tariffs on foreign products–will help his working-class constituency. Buchanan wants to enforce 10 percent tariffs on goods from Japan and as much as a 40 percent tax on Chinese products. Only Western Europe and Canada would be exempt. But the rest of the world would doubtless retaliate with anti-American tariffs of their own. As a result, “a whole lot of high-tech, high-paying U.S. export jobs would be lost,” says Reagan economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum. At the same time, Buchanan’s low- and middle-income supporters would pay higher prices on everything from athletic shoes to VCRs. “It’s just ridiculous,” says Herbert Stein, an economic adviser to Richard Nixon. Maybe. But as Buchanan knows, a campaign is no time to let a detail like that get in the way of a winning idea.
Running as alternatives to Dole, Alexander would shutter much of Washington, and Buchanan would erect walls against foreigners and foreign goods.
FEDERAL POWER: “Cut [Congress’s] pay and send them home,” he says, proposing a part-time, “citizen” legislature that would meet for six months a year. He would also shut four cabinet departments.
WELFARE: Saying “states are way ahead of Washington on this one,” he would send all federal welfare back to them, then on to charities. If the private sector came up short, the Feds still wouldn’t step back in.
TRADE: He rails against corporate greed and opposes NAFTA and GATT. Would dramatically raise tariffs–which would in turn raise prices, hitting working-class consumers especially hard.
IMMIGRATION: An advocate of making English the official language, he would build “a Buchanan fence” along the Mexican border. Also wants a five-year ban on legal immigration.
