Is Warren Beatty the Last Real Democrat?

by Randolph T. Holhut

Texas Gov. George W. Bush is the epitome of the empty suit. He's had his path through life greased by the millionaire friends of his father. If his name was something other than Bush and his father were not a former president, would anyone in the GOP be taking him seriously?

Al Gore is a senator's son who grew up living a life of privilege. His unctuous defense of President Clinton and his "accomplishments" in office only serve to point out the vacuum at his moral center. He may feel he's entitled to the Democratic nomination, but as a pale imitation of the worst Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, he's certainly not worthy.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms may have pushed the world closer to a deadly conflagration after they engineered the Senate's vote to reject the nuclear test ban treaty. Thanks to a GOP leadership more interested in sticking it to President Clinton than in doing anything in the public interest, they are dictating the terms of government.

Virtually every member of Congress is in the tank to special interests, and Congress is writing laws to make sure that those special interests get fair value for their dollars. That's a big reason why campaign finance reform will likely never happen.

The list of calumnies large and small committed by the folks who hold the highest offices in our land in large. The hypocrisy of people in politics is boundless. And the corporate press has the nerve to criticize Beatty as being a fool?

Beatty knows he's not going to be elected president, and he probably isn't going to run anyway. But Beatty is trying to represent what Sen. Paul Wellstone once referred to as "The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

There are many of us who look at what Clinton, Gore and the rest of the "New Democrats" have done to the party. It turned the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson into the party of the bond market and defense contractors.

Beatty has a long record a being an old-fashioned New Deal Democrat. You can dismiss him as a vain and starry-eyed dilettante. But you can't deny the points he's trying to bring up -- the hard truths that only an outsider can raise.

In a recent column, Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News performed a valuable service by reprinting some selections from a speech that Beatty gave a few weeks ago in Beverly Hills, Calif. Read it, and then tell me if you still think Beatty is a fool...

"How can we not have heard from either Democratic candidate a serious objection to the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party proudly advertising our economic expansion as 'a boom of unparalleled prosperity for the nation' when 60 percent of our people are doing no better in 1999 than in 1989?

"How can we gloat about prosperity when the poverty level hasn't changed? Or when child poverty is four times that of Western Europe? And extreme child poverty has gone up 26 percent in the past year? And in the richest city in the country, outside this hotel, one out of three children lives in poverty and homicide is still the largest single cause of death for children under age 18...

"The disparity of wealth between rich and poor is higher than ever. The poorest fifth of Americans have less than they had in 1977, and the rich have 43 percent more. The pay of the average corporate chief executive office has gone from 42 times to 412 times as much of the average worker. A study of four Northwestern states shows half the available jobs don't pay a livable wage. And there were 64 percent more layoffs in '98 than the year before. The richest 2.7 million Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 100 million. ...

"Without hearing liberal Democrats, you won't hear about these unrepresented people. You'll hear about the unprecedented prosperity of globalization. Why? Because these unrepresented people make no campaign contributions. ...

"Getting the money to win makes decent politicians do indecent things. But billion-dollar subsidies and tax breaks, the pork barrel and corporate welfare are only the smaller tumors. There are bigger ones. Our taxpayers are bailing out thieves in Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and other countries and at the same time bailing out major American financial houses who refuse to face the consequences of their bad investments overseas. What we are in danger of experiencing is a slow-motion coup d'etat of big money's interests over the public interest... ."

You won't hear Al Gore or Bill Bradley make a speech like that. And Trent Lott or Jesse Helms would sooner scarf down a can of Red Devil Lye than utter any of these words. And the political wise-guys and spinmeisters would lock their candidates in a room and beat them silly if they ever said any of these things in public.

There's a reason why voter turnouts have been plummeting over the past three decades. People see that politics is a sham, that politicians are corrupt liars who sell their constituents out at the first opportunity, that few of them ever have the interest of the average person at heart.

But Beatty isn't saying anything radical or outrageous. These are the truths that are glossed over every day by politicians of both parties and are ignored by their lapdogs in the corporate press. And few in public life have enough courage to say them anymore, out of fear of being considered unelectable.

You can diss the messenger, but certainly not the message. If Gore or Bradley had the courage to break away from the tepid centrism of the current Democratic Party, maybe they might get people excited. Until then, we'll have to settle for a "movie star" to tell us the things no one else has the guts to say.