http://www.ardemgaz.com/today/edi/wopLyons2.html This article was published on Wednesday, August 2, 2000

(For educational purposes only)

Defining a catchy GOP phrase What a "compassionate conservative" is.

GENE LYONS

With the Republican National Convention under way in Philadelphia, we put some tough questions to our scrupulously nonpartisan Department of Election Rhetoric and Camouflage Analysis here at Unsolicited Opinions Inc.

After considerable grumbling, our analysts agreed to temporarily shelve their ongoing study of the Chicago Cubs' winning streak long enough to offer some no-nonsense answers about the Bush-Cheney presidential ticket.

Q. What is a "compassionate conservative" anyway?

A. It's an alliterative phrase designed to hypnotize voters into buying a used Republican without kicking the tires. Ever since the Nixon administration, when speech writer William Safire gave us gems like "nattering nabobs of negativism," GOP sloganeers have often resorted to poetic devices to soothe the savage soccer mom. Anyhow, it's the opposite of a "limousine liberal."

Q. Poetry? I thought the GOP was the he-man party.

A. Not all poets are sissies. Think about Garth Brooks.

Q. Hey, I seen the man cry on national TV and sing a bunch of tearjerkers about tolerance and such. Cowboy hat or no cowboy hat, the man's a damn Democrat. You still ain't told me what a "compassionate conservative" is.

A. OK, here's an example. Let's say somebody at your church whips out a .44 Magnum and smokes the preacher for sermonizing about John 3:16 instead of the Book of Revelation, as happened up in North Arkansas a while back. And let's say the preacher's the kind of "vicar of vacillation" Safire (and Spiro Agnew) warned us about. Let's say he sets up a metal detector in the vestibule, puts on a SWAT-team Kevlar vest like those jackbooted government thugs who grabbed up little Eli?n and tries to interfere with your constitutional right to keep and bear arms. A "compassionate conservative" like Gov. George W. Bush or Dick Cheney would let you hide a plastic pistol loaded with armor-piercing "cop killer" rounds under your shirt and slip into a front pew secure in the knowledge that, if the need arose, you could deal a little "hellfire" of your own.

Q. You made that up.

A. Well, it's a hypothetical. But Bush did sign a Texas law making it legal to pack heat in church.

And Cheney voted against the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 banning plastic guns for terrorists. Even the National Rifle Association backed that one. Three years before that, Cheney voted against regulating the manufacture, importation and sale of armor-piercing ammo.

Q. Didn't Cheney say he might vote differently today?

A. Well sure, and Bill Clinton might say he'd tell Monica Lewinsky to take a hike if he had it to do all over again.

As for Cheney's reservations, exactly four congressmen agreed with him on the plastic handguns, 21 on "cop killer" ammo.

And speaking of cops, Cheney also voted against giving $50,000 benefits to the survivors of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. He did that twice, in 1982 and again in 1983.

Q. There's got to be more to "compassionate conservatism" than that.

A. You bet. Say your wife, daughter or mother got raped by a motorcycle gang and ended up pregnant. According to the GOP, she'd have to have the kid. Even if her drunken uncle or no-good brother was in on it. They'd allow no abortions even in cases of rape and incest. But Bush and Cheney would feel really bad for her, you just know they would. As long as she didn't try to enroll the little bastard in Headstart, because Cheney voted against that, too.

Q. Enough hypotheticals. Didn't the Washington pundits say Cheney's a great choice?

A. They did. To use Sally Quinn's immortal phrase, all the same "Establishment Washingtonians" who told us what a judicious, sensible moderate Ken Starr was now tell us Cheney's a swell fellow. Evidently, he's never actually bitten anybody at a cocktail party.

Q. But the talking heads on CNN said Bush's choice of Cheney moves the GOP away from the confrontational politics of Newt Gingrich. How about them apples?

A. Well, Newt did take a chunk out of the odd pundit now and again. But if you're talking ideology, even Gingrich says Cheney's further to the right than he is. For example, Newt voted for every bill we've mentioned so far.

Cheney also opposed establishing the Department of Education. He was one of 21 congressmen who voted against financial aid for needy college students;

one of eight to oppose the National Health Service Corps and the Federal Immunization Program. His environmental record makes Gingrich look like the Jolly Green Giant. Cheney fought the Superfund for cleaning toxic waste cites; he was one of eight who resisted the Clean Water Act; opposed renewing the Endangered Species Act; one of nine who didn't want to fund R&D for the Environmental Protection Agency. Gingrich backed all of those, too.

Q. So is there anything they agreed about?

A. Oh lots. They agreed to oppose a resolution urging the South African government to free Nelson Mandela, the George Washington of Africa.

Cheney explained the other day that he considered the African National Congress a terrorist organization at the time. Sensible people realized that the real terrorist organization was the South African apartheid regime.

Q. So how did Bush react to Democratic criticism of his vice-presidential selection?

A. He said it was dirty politics to bring up Cheney's record.

"What do you expect?" Bush asked reporters at an Austin press conference. "I'm running against people who all they do is spend time tearing people down. (???? Just who was doing what to whom 4, 8 years ago?)

And they're going to give it their level best trying to tear Dick Cheney down, but they're not going to be able to do so." According to The New York Times, he added that "Secretary Cheney brought people together and helped to win a war, which stands in stark contrast with Vice President Al Gore, who tends to divide people to create war."

Q. Huh?

A. Exactly. As near as we can tell, a "compassionate conservative" is somebody who's fed up with negative campaigning by the no-account, lying SOB he's running against.

Q. Are there any compassionate conservatives in Arkansas?

A. They're as plentiful as ticks.

Our current favorite is Gov. Mike Huckabee. Here's a guy who took $23,000 worth of suits from Jennings Osborne last year writing an open letter to President Clinton about how Arkansans are too proud to take a "handout" in the form of health insurance for their children.

Huckabee accepts umpty-thousand free, personalized shotgun shells from the Remington Arms Corporation, but appears to think the poor and disabled should be ashamed to accept "charity."

Meanwhile, the state denies Medicaid coverage to families with $2,000 in assets, which pretty much makes it impossible to own a reliable vehicle to drive to work.

If he's not careful, Ol' Huckabuck will lose all the credit he deserves for backing the ARKids First program to begin with.

Over in Texas, Gov. George W. Bush fought the idea tooth and nail. The oil companies, you see, needed a $45 million tax cut in the worst way.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), August 02, 2000

Answers

Cherri--

All due respect, but anyone can copy n paste an editorial column. I'm not so inclined but if that's going to be the game here, then I'll dig up some of the equally ubiquitous conservative columnists.

And I think either one of us can do better than "Arkansas Online".

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), August 02, 2000.

When one sees this type of political rhetoric, one is tempted to check for missing crayons.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), August 02, 2000.

What? Not as funny as cigar jokes?

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), August 02, 2000.

It's interesting to note that the candidate for the US Senate that BC was stumping for in FL. voted the same as Dick Chaney on some of the issues he was being chastised for by the talking heads. So if what he did is so bad then why was Bill stumping for a candidate with a similar record?

As for Big Oil. Compare the market caps of companies like MS, Oracle, or Cisco with the value of Big Oil. Not even close.

-- The Engineer (spcengineer@yahoo.com), August 02, 2000.

"Soothe the savage soccer moms"...? Ones like me, who pack plastic heat to all the games? LOL

Oh shit, I'm busted like Venus de Milo.

This is too, too funny..........

So glad to see old 'hoodies again.

-- lisa (lisa@home.now), August 02, 2000.

POLITICIAN,A-ARE-POLITICIAN,S-ARE-POLITICIAN,S!! THEY JUST CAN,T HELP-DERE-SELVES!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), August 02, 2000.

Welcome back Lisa. Hey, I caught Larry King spying on my Y2K supplies, what do you suppose I should do to him?

-- Butt Nugget (catsbutt@umailme.com), August 02, 2000.

No representives repersents us they are a butch of liars cheaties, we have to hunt else where. I am hunting, I think for the constition party. The others are too one sided.

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), August 02, 2000.

Marvin Olasky, the originator of "Compassionate Conservativism"

HY Times

Where W. Got Compassion

Marvin Olasky, who has been a Communist, a Jew and an atheist and is now a zealous Christian, wrote the book on compassionate conservativism. Governor Bush is the movement's most powerful convert. But is it policy or evangelism? By DAVID GRANN Photographs by MICHAEL O'BRIEN

ne Sunday afternoon in Austin, Tex.  not far from the Governor's Mansion  Marvin Olasky, the man widely regarded as the godfather of "compassionate conservatism," is working on his most recent disciple. As we drive through the city after services at the Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Olasky keeps looking in his rearview mirror at Fred Cantu, a tattooed ex-con who is sitting in the backseat, as if trying to discern something he can't quite make out.

Cantu has just been released from prison for the third time, and Olasky, an ordained elder, is trying to help him  not through the state's traditional welfare services but through his own faith-based program, New Start, a model of the philosophy on which George W. Bush is staking his Presidential campaign.

"Fred just needs to show he can stick to a job," Olasky says to me as he eyes Cantu. "Then he can take some writing classes at the community college, and then who knows?"

Cantu blinks, as if trying to imagine it. "I hardly write nobody," he says. "I was writing my mother, but I stopped doing that because I don't want to upset her."

Olasky is still wearing his church clothes  khakis, a blazer and tie  and tightly grips the steering wheel as the car rumbles through the Texas hills. A delicate man with little round glasses and a neatly cropped beard, this former Communist seems like an unlikely figure to have emerged as one of the stars in Bush's constellation of policy wonks. Yet Olasky, once a relatively obscure author of a dozen books, has hit the conservative movement, in the words of The Weekly Standard's editor, Bill Kristol, like "a thunderbolt."

In July, Bush vowed, in his first major policy speech as a candidate, to "rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty"  one based on religious and community groups like New Start  and afterward he paused to thank Olasky. "He has really been one of the people who has been most helpful," Bush told me, in shaping these ideas. Indeed, when I ask one of Bush's top aides to explain what a compassionate conservative administration might look like, he says simply, "Talk to Marvin."

Now, in the car, Olasky describes all the things that Cantu will have to do when he enrolls in New Start  everything from attending Bible study and meeting with a church mentor  that are central to what Olasky and Bush have called "the transforming power of faith."

But whether faith or even private charities are really a viable or appropriate alternative to government assistance is open to debate. "To expect small-scale fragmented groups to bear the brunt of the most pressing concerns of society is foolish," says Thomas Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Liberals and even some conservatives observe that the welfare state arose precisely because in the first part of this century, private charities failed to adequately address the needs of the poor.

And so far, Olasky's own personal test with Cantu does not appear to be going well. The subject, who has just served a three-year stint for burglary, seems to be only partially listening.

"Can I borrow your truck?" he asks suddenly. Olasky squints in the mirror. "We'd have to work out an arrangement," he says. "We would know the mileage -."

"Obligations are O.K.," Cantu interjects. "I need that discipline."

By the time Olasky pulls into the bus station, Cantu has seemingly undergone a miraculous transformation. "I'm enthusiastic about God," he says. "I'm on fire to serve Jesus Christ!"

He then slams the door, leaving behind the faint smell of tobacco. As we drive back through the valley, I ask Olasky if he thinks Cantu will make it this time out. "The question is," he says, "has this been a genuine conversion?"

lasky has always had the conviction of a convert, of someone who is not only embracing one set of beliefs but is also actively repudiating another. He was born in Massachusetts in 1950 to second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants, and early on began his search for a unifying theory of the universe, his own private Big Bang. Initially, he found it where all the Olaskys had  in the Torah. But as a teen-ager, he grew increasingly skeptical of religion, until, under the spell of his older brother and the writings of H. G. Wells, he disputed God's existence altogether. "I was bar mitzvahed at 13," he says, "and an atheist by 14."

It wasn't until college, however, that he truly renounced his roots. In 1968, as Bush was finishing his four years at Yale as a cocky athlete and member of the secret fraternity Skull and Bones, Olasky was enrolling as a shy and awkward freshman. Both men  in what would be essential to their eventual spiritual and intellectual convergence  were equally adrift. But while Bush drank to excess and purportedly participated in branding rituals with his fraternity brothers, Olasky grew his sideburns long and read Marx and Lenin. Even in his activism, his classmates say, he was oddly "puritanical" and "monkish," once going on a five-day hunger strike to improve the conditions of university workers.

After graduating in only three years, he married his high-school sweetheart and settled in Oregon, where, consumed with visions of revolution, he became almost an ascetic. Thin and drawn, he grew a beard down to his chest like Fidel Castro's and did something almost unheard of at that late date: he joined the Communist Party. To sign up then "was truly outlandish," says Todd Gitlin, a leader of the New Left. "It meant to join the party of Brezhnev, to join the party that had invaded Czechoslovakia."

For Olasky, however, Communism represented what he had always been looking for  a codified worldview, a theory with neat rules and by-laws. He wasn't an idle member. "Lenin had said it would be necessary to 'crawl on one's belly, like a snake,' for the good of the revolution," he once wrote, "and I was ready to slither." As his marriage crumbled, he hopped a Russian freighter and toured the Soviet Union. Upon his return, he propagated his beliefs as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, often bullying his fellow students in class.

But while researching his dissertation, in part on the persecution of Reds in Hollywood, he underwent his ultimate conversion. "God changed my worldview not through thunder or a whirlwind," he later wrote, "but by . . . a repeated, resounding question in my brain: What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?" During this time, he met Susan Northway, who would become his second wife.

By 1973, he had resigned from the Communist Party and, once again, turned against everything he had earlier believed. "We asked ourselves which denomination represented the extreme opposite of the hard left," Susan recalls. "Then we looked in the phone book and found the Conservative Baptist Church. By the end of that summer of '76, we had come to Christ."

When he finally handed in his dissertation  hailing the anti-Communists instead of denouncing them  his teachers were stunned. "I couldn't accept it," says Cecil Eby, his professor at the time. "I felt like he had gone from being extremely partisan on one side to being extremely partisan on the other. It was baffling."

Jew, atheist, Communist, evangelical Christian  Olasky has been on quite a journey. Despite alienating his former comrades and family  I didn't tell my friends," his mother says now  Olasky pursued his new faith with the same zeal he had pursued his old ones. As if in penance for his heretical past, the one-time Marxist went to work for the public-affairs office at DuPont, where he cranked out endless speeches on capitalism.

Later, when he took a job teaching communications at the University of Texas and couldn't find a traditional enough congregation, he founded his own  a breakaway faction of the Presbyterian Church  with a handful of families. It wasn't, though, until 1989, while on leave and researching a new book on charities, that he stumbled upon what would become the cornerstone of his and, to a large extent, Bush's political philosophy.

n the stacks of the Library of Congress, Olasky found dusty texts on 19th-century philanthropists, men and women like Charles Brace, a writer and missionary who worked with abandoned children in New York. Rather than merely distributing handouts, they imposed demands and discipline on the poor, and in contrast to the current welfare state, in Olasky's view, provided the spiritual as well as material sustenance that shapes character.

To test his theories, Olasky dressed up as a beggar  complete with stocking cap and plastic bag  and visited several shelters in Washington, D.C. For two days, as he wandered from kitchen to kitchen, he received plenty of soup and bread. But no one, he says, ever asked him why he was there or helped him to help himself. Nor did anyone, even in the church-run charities, offer him the one thing he says he kept asking for: a Bible. "Most of these places," he says, outchurching the churches, "have forgotten that people have souls." In 1992, Olasky finally published his findings in "The Tragedy of American Compassion."

Initially the book went almost unnoticed, and those few who reviewed it decried it as "romantic," "shallow" and "bizarre"  the work of a "utopian" crank. But although most academics dismissed the book, a small coterie of Beltway conservatives began to circulate it privately. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett hailed it as the "most important book on welfare and social policy in a decade" and handed a copy to the new Republican Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich read it from cover to cover and liked it so much, he had it distributed to all the incoming freshmen. In his first address to the nation, Gingrich declared: "Our models are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marvin Olasky. We are going to redefine compassion and take it back."

Overnight, Olasky, the perennial convert, had seemingly converted an entire party. A small band of policy wonks and legislators  many of whom would go on to work for Bush  began calling themselves "compassionate conservatives." This little-known professor was suddenly a fixture on the television talk shows and in the back corridors of Congress. While slashing the welfare state, Olasky's disciples sought to unleash an outpouring of charitable works through Federal grants, tax credits and partnerships between church and state. These measures represented only the first step in what Olasky regarded as a revolution  turning the Government's responsibility to the poor over to private charities.

Yet despite all the lip service paid to compassionate conservative ideas, even these modest initiatives never materialized. Almost all of the proposals, which were sponsored by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana and had names like the Character Development Act, were killed before they even reached the floor  largely at the hands of the same Republicans who had wrapped themselves only months earlier in Olasky's language of compassion.

Far from helping the poor, his critics charged, Olasky had provided a smokescreen for guiltlessly cutting back the welfare state. Even Olasky compares what some Republicans did to the poor to pulling the knife out of the back of a person who had been mugged and then leaving him on the street to bleed. "You can't just say, You're fine  get up," he says. "You have to spend a lot of time patching the guy up." But to his critics, Olasky's outrage only seemed like evidence of his naivete.

Dejected and dispirited, Olasky returned to Austin, where he, like Charles Brace in the 1800's, waged his solitary crusade. He helped found the New Start program through his church; he worked with Labor Integrity Faith Thrift (LIFT), which eased people off welfare, and with his wife he ran a crisis center for pregnant women. Their house, which overlooked the Shinoak Valley, soon overflowed with good works. At one point, Olasky showed up with a homeless woman he found living in a car. Later, he adopted a 3-week-old black child, telling his family, "God adopts all of us." It was as if he were single-handedly trying to prove the viability of his own theories.

In 1993, Olasky got a phone message from George W. Bush asking to meet. By this time, Bush, who was running for Governor of Texas, had also "recommitted his life to Christ." Both men prayed daily and had a visceral sense of their own sins. While Bush had drunk too heavily in the 1980's, Olasky had divorced his first wife  an act that contrasted markedly with his later Christian writings about family values. Both also concealed the details of their transgressions: while Bush has dodged the drug question, Olasky had  until a family member accidentally mentioned it to me  carefully hidden his divorce from the press. After an hourlong meeting with Bush, Olasky was sure he had found a new messenger for his ideas. But Bush didn't call again for two years.

Then in 1995  six months after Bush was swept into office  state employees of Texas threatened to close down Teen Challenge, a drug program centered on religious conversion, ostensibly because it had violated safety codes. Some 300 supporters of the organization  holding signs that read "Because of Jesus I Am No Longer a Debt to the State of Texas"  staged a small rally at the Alamo, the Lone Star symbol of defiance.

In the dual role of advocate and journalist, Olasky showed up with pen in hand. "It was real hot, and we were both sweating," recalls the Rev. James Heurich, executive director of Teen Challenge of South Texas. "He was just smiling and grinning at me, and I had the sense that this was fun for him. But I didn't think anything was going to come of it. Next thing I know, we're in The Wall Street Journal."

Governor Bush, caught in one of the first crises of his administration, tried to turn the confrontation into a political opportunity. Seeking out Olasky for guidance, he quickly set up a task force, which recommended unraveling the state's regulatory grip over faith-based groups. Despite charges that he was violating the separation between church and state, Bush enacted a spate of legislation that promoted religious drug-treatment centers, prison ministries and church-run day-care centers. The legislation didn't allocate more money for the poor so much as redirect it to faith-based programs by removing regulations that stood in their way  allowing Bush to win accolades with the religious right and at the same time to avoid spending more money on social services. Olasky, the congenital true believer, became a Bush convert. "I don't think this is just rhetoric," he says.

he conversion seems to be mutual. By this summer, Bush had not only made Olasky the head of his policy subcommittee on religion but also embraced broad strokes of Olasky's vision. In addition, he anointed Stephen Goldsmith, the Mayor of Indianapolis, who has already implemented key elements of Olasky's policies, his top domestic adviser for the campaign. Goldsmith, who told me he wishes he had written Olasky's book, quickly became the author's main conduit to the Governor. And at a small church in Indianapolis in July, Bush called for more faith-based programs that practice "severe mercy," approvingly citing Teen Challenge's maxim, "If you don't work, you don't eat."

Bush then rattled off various proposals to promote charities, including $8 billion worth of tax credits and other incentives. The emphasis, however, was as much on the power of faith as on the power of new programs. "Sometimes our greatest hope is not found in reform," he said. "It is found in redemption."

"Did you hear the speech?" Olasky asked me afterward. "This is effective compassion." But this religious component is also what Olasky's critics find so terrifying. Even Bush's aides take pains to distance their candidate from Olasky's proselytizing. "Marvin is an evangelical Christian, and Bush is an evangelical Christian," says John J. Dilulio, one of Bush's informal advisers. "But Bush does not believe that every faith-based program is about religious conversion." Many of the programs that the Governor supports, however, are on a proselytizing mission. Heurich at Teen Challenge sums up the secret of his success in two words: Jesus Christ. And Olasky's ultimate goal is not simply to help the poor through private or nonprofit charities but also to push religion  specifically evangelical Christianity  deep into the public sphere.

When I ask Olasky if people should be afraid of widespread conversions under a compassionate-conservative order, he says they will face a utilitarian choice. "Are you willing to put up with these religious practices that you feel very uncomfortable with but nevertheless you see the success of? Or would you rather end those practices and see more assaults, rapes, drug use and homicides?"

At one point, as we are driving around in his car, Olasky even attempts to convert me. "I don't want to be pushy," he says, but "there's a good church you should go to" in Washington. He also recommends I read "Christianity Is Jewish" and join an on-line Bible study for journalists. His mother later tells me, "If I converted, it would make Marvin happy."

ndeed, on close inspection, many of Bush's "armies of compassion" resemble tiny battalions of Marvin Olasky's. This summer, Olasky set out on a poverty tour with his 14-year-old son to study the first seeds of his brave new world. Traveling from the ghettos of Houston to Philadelphia with his Bible and his maps laid out on his dashboard, he encountered ex-cons, drug addicts and gang members who had committed their lives to Christ.

When I catch up with him in Indianapolis, he and his son are visiting a small warehouse that has been converted into a gymnastics school for inner-city children. The program's director, the Rev. Tim Streett, talks about his own conversion after his father was shot in front of him as a boy. In the background, two kids jump in their bare feet on a trampoline to the beat of a Christian rock song: "Let us pray, let us pray . . . every moment of the day."

That same afternoon, at a small two-story school financed in part by city grants, Ermil Thompson, a frail 68-year-old woman, tells Olasky that in 1990 she had a vision from God to transform the building into a refuge for children from Satan. "Lord bless you," Olasky says, pumping her hand.

Such people are reminiscent of the missionaries from the end of the 19th century. Dedicated and devout, they possess the rare energy and drive to run such programs, where the pay is poor and the prestige is worse. "Our most successful people," says Goldsmith, "are zealots in the good sense of the word."

Yet if Streett and Thompson represent the "quiet river of goodness and kindness" that Bush will need to supplement the welfare state, they also present the most difficult and delicate issue for the Bush campaign: how do you promote faith-based healers  these so-called zealots  without allowing them to proselytize their faith?

In Indianapolis, there is actually evidence of the increasingly blurred line between church and state. "I encourage them to play a shell game," says Bill Stanczykiewicz, who until recently was in charge of running Goldsmith's initiatives. When we arrive at Village House, which offers a summer program that the Mayor's office has assisted with thousands of dollars in grants, students are hanging signs in brightly colored crayon that read, "Listen to Jesus."

Olasky's eyes initially brighten with excitement, then narrow, as he contemplates the reaction of city officials and private donors. "I hope that doesn't make them go ballistic," he says. "Don't worry," says the program director, the Rev. Ann Henning-Byfield, "they'll be down by the time they come by."

oldsmith, like Bush, insists that under compassionate conservative policies, no one will be forced into a faith-based program. There will always be options  and many of the charities like Big Brothers/Big Sisters will have no faith component at all. But if religion is the most provocative element of Bush's vision, critics say its bigger challenge is more worldly: there simply aren't enough Marvin Olaskys out there to replace Uncle Sam.

Even Bush acknowledges on the stump that Government cannot be completely replaced by charities, and his aides say his administration would conduct only a kind of grand experiment  a four-year trial period to see which programs actually work best: the state's, the private sector's or a combination of the two. But many fear that any experiment at all that depends on the altruism of local individuals will mean, as Dianne Stewart of the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Texas puts it, a "step back even further from a safety net for the poor."

Modern American life doesn't leave much time for sainthood. Colin Powell's volunteer summit has not produced the philanthropic outpouring that many expected. According to Investment Sector, the percentage of American adults who volunteer has actually declined since the late 1980's. And despite the robust economy, corporate giving is down.

"If everyone was like Olasky," says Representative Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican, "he would be right: we wouldn't need government." But if everyone isn't, who will man Bush's armies of compassion?

Table of Contents September 12, 1999

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