By Luke Breit

There is another Kansan, a plain-speaking man who told the truth, a lovely poet named William Stafford who died a few years ago, and I thought of him a bit as I listened to Bob Dole's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention.

As a writer -- and in fact as a former speechwriter -- I do not think it was as good a speech as many thought, although given the expectations one had for Bob Dole, it was perhaps a very good speech. At its best, it was a soaring speech of plain talk, it had moments of William Stafford, but Stafford never turned over his poems to a committee to write. Unfortunately, Dole did not trust himself enough -- or at least someone did not trust him enough -- to keep that speech out of the hands of a committee.

But let Bob Dole speak eloquently for himself:

...Do not think that I have forgotten whose moment this is above all. It is for the people of America that I stand here tonight, and by their generous leave. And as my voice echoes across darkness and desert, as it is heard over car radios on coastal roads, and as it travels above farmland and suburb, deep into the heart of cities that, from space, look tonight like strings of sparkling diamonds, I can tell you that I know whose moment this is: it is yours. It is yours entirely.

An eloquent comment, a poetic view of America. I thought, as I heard him speak, about how Americans of another age gathered around the radio as they do now the TV, except with the radio, with those voices coming across America out of the darkness, one's imagination could soar. I thought of entire pennant races being played out on the radio.

But Bob Dole was not on radio, he was on TV. And so, appropriately, he addressed his age. He said:

Age has its advantages. Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith, and confidence in action. And to those who say it was never so, that America has not been better, I say, you're wrong, and I know, because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.

Well, despite the fact that it wasn't really better for everybody, that's very nice. Who doesn't want an America where neighbor helps neighbor instead of neighbor shooting neighbor? Who doesn't want a time when one's children were safe, where doors were unlocked? But the thing about Bob Dole is that it's not in him to stay too nice and sentimental for long. Because while it's true, that vision of America he recalls for us, the one in which people come out after a fire to help a neighbor rebuild, those same people were never much tolerant of strangers and, more importantly, of strange and unusual ideas. And like his neighbors, he's really only into, it turns out, helping folks who are a lot like him:

What enabled us to accomplish this has little to do with the values of the present. After decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values. What have we reaped? What have we created? What do we have? What we have in the opinion of millions of Americans is crime and drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty, and the abandonment of children.

And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon this country - on which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village, that is, the collective, and thus, the state, to raise a child.

Well, here's where Bob Dole and I start to part company. Bob thinks that crime and drugs have led to illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty and the abandonment of children. Dole probably meant to include rock and roll in the mix.

But I think when Richard Nixon started to cut back on Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and Ronald Reagan escalated the cuts by trimming $90 billion from the corporate tax bill, that's when the real abdication of responsibility set in. That's when the schools really started to decline, when public housing subsidies virtually ended, when the homeless population began to explode, when hope began to evaporate from our poorest communities, urban and rural. Reagan cut corporate taxes promising that corporate America unleashed would solve America's problems. But for the most part, they didn't. They took the money and ran. And suddenly, America couldn't afford to do anything anymore, except fund a bloated defense industry.

If I could by magic restore to every child who lacks a father or a mother, that father or that mother, I would. And though I cannot, I would never turn my back on them, and I shall as president, promote measures that keep families whole.

That's nice, Bob, but you can't, not for this generation anyway. Maybe with a real commitment to urban inner city America -- a real commitment to the schools, to tax incentives for community-based hiring, to the restoration of hope in America's ghettos, you could. Meanwhile, we better put that village idea of Hillary's in play, because it's what's needed when families fail. And Bob, don't you think that the communities in those small towns you love to extoll provided a village that helped innoculate children with values? That the teachers in the small one-room schoolhouses provided glimpses of things beyond the flat plains that stirred some of those young imaginations and spirits? It's that village thing again, Bob.

Then came my favorite part of Dole's speech, the part where he repudiates two decades of Republican thinking, i.e., that the Republican party does not basically cater to greed. And so, he takes the Clinton campaign to task for their motto, "It's the economy, stupid." Dole says:

And in the last presidential election, in the last presidential election, you, the people, were gravely insulted. You were told that the material was not only the most important ... but, in fact, really the only (thing) that really mattered. I don't hold to that for a moment. No one can deny the importance of material well being. And in this regard it is time to recognize that we have surrendered too much of our economic liberty.

Somewhere, a grandmother couldn't afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a family couldn't afford that first home, because there was just not enough money to make that call, buy the book or pay the mortgage or, for that matter, to do many other things that one has the right and often the obligation to do. Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy. Are they taking care of you or are they taking care of themselves?

No, Bob, the reason that the grandmother can't call her grandaughter isn't because of a new tax program some Clinton staffer has dreamed up. It's the result of the deregulation of telephone services in which local callers subsidize the low long distance rates companies pay. It's the result of the corporations that have downsized hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. It's the result of junk bond kings who used the Reagan tax cuts to buy up the strongest companies and strip them of their assets, throwing thouands more out of work. It's all the handiwork of the Republican Party.

Bill Clinton doesn't say, "It's the economy, stupid," because he believes that money is the only thing that matters in America -- he says it because he understands that until every American has a decent job with a livable wage and health benefits, it is hard for those families to partake in the other values of our country. People who can't find work can't put much food on their tables. People who are terrified about the future because they have had to trade in their union job for some $7 an hour fast-food position are sometimes the people who do desperate things, who leave their children or turn to alcohol and violence.

And then the man who has just told us that America isn't just about money and wealth, that man then proposes an across the board tax cut of 15 percent. Imagine, Bob Dole says:

It means you will have a president who will reduce taxes 15 percent across-the-board for every taxpayer in America. It will include a $500 per child tax credit for lower- and middle-income families. Taxes for a family of four making $35,000 would be reduced by more than half - 56 percent to be exact. And that's a big, big reduction. It means you'll have a president who will help small businesses - the businesses that create most new jobs - by reducing the capital gains tax rate by 50 percent. Cut it in half. It means you will have a president who will end the IRS as we know it.

What that phrase lacks in the soaring elements of the speech's beginning moments, it makes up for in cynicism. I will not dwell here on what every other writer in America has pointed out, that Dole's entire career until this minute has been a repudiation of easy fixes, but we should never forget that we've tried supply-side voo-doo economics before and it has placed the nation several trillions of dollars in debt.

Supply-side economics does do one thing its proponents claim: it puts a lot more money in the hands of corporations. What it does not do, and has never done, is put more money in the treasury of the United States. If we cut $6 billion over the next four years from the treasury, there are things we simply will not have, and for those of you who support the idea of such a tax break, I urge you to demand that they tell you what $6 billion in "fat" they plan to trim -- and it's clearly not going to be the military or prisons, the last two growth industries in the Republican view of government -- because some of the programs you like and need will be among them. And because ultimately taxpayers will not allow massive cuts in favorite programs, we will inevitably see a new round of skyrocketing U.S. debt, debt we will be placing squarely on the shoulders of the next generations.

Don't think just because Dole doesn't respect the current Administration, liberals and other groups of Americans, that he doesn't respect anything. Dole told us:

I save my respect for the Constitution, not for those who would ignore it, violate it, or replace it with conceptions of their own fancy. My administration will zealously protect civil and constitutional rights, while never forgetting that our own primary duty is protecting law-abiding citizens - everybody in this hall.

Wow. "Everybody in this hall." That would be Republicans. They seem to be the ones Dole considers law-abiding citizens. The rest of us, I presume from his exclusionary statement, are by our very consideration of another candidate, another Party, not law-abiding.

As I mentioned, Dole wants to cut a lot of things, but the military is not one of them:

On my first day in office, I will put America on a course that will end our vulnerability to missile attack and rebuild our armed forces. It is a course, it is a course President Clinton has refused to take. On my first day in office, I will put terrorists on notice: If you harm one American, you harm all Americans. And America will pursue you to the ends of the earth. In short, don't mess with us if you're not prepared to suffer the consequences.

And when I am president, every man and every woman in our Armed Forces will know the president is their commander in chief - not Boutros Boutros Ghali or any other U.N. secretary general.

By this point in the speech, any sense I had had of eloquence and grace, even if a trifle anachronistic, was long gone. It was the Republican Party as cheerleaders all over again. In fact, the football metaphor that was sure to come when Jack Kemp was selected as the VP was now in full swing, with the delegates screaming, "USA! USA! USA!" Any semblence this convention had to a real discussion about issues was gone now, it was just another football game, and just about as serious. Damned the age-old dream that nations could lose some of their nationalistic ego and become citizens of the world, a United Nations being to the globe what the United States was meant to be for the our part of the continent.

I'll leave you with the more eloquent and more truthful words of a better Kansan, and perhaps after all a better and more thoughtful American:

Tuned In Late One Night

by William Stafford

Listen - this is a faint station
Left alive in the universe.
I was left here to tell you a message
designed for your instruction or comfort,
but now that my world is gone I crave
expression pure as all the space
around me: I want to tell what is...

Remember? - we learned that still-face way,
to wait in election or meeting and then
to choose the side that wins, a leader
that lasted, a president that stayed in?
But some of us knew even then it was better
to lose if that was the way our chosen
side came out, in truth, at the end.

It's like this, truth is: it's looking out while everything
happens; being in a place of your own,
between your ears; and any person
you face will get the full encounter
of your self. When you hear any news
you ought to register delight or pain
depending on where you really live.

Now I am fading, with this ambition:
to read with my brights full on,
to write on a clear glass typewriter,
To listen with sympathy,
to speak like a child.