Two years ago, during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Paul Simon repeatedly needled his conservative party mates with the quip “I’m glad there’s a Republican Party, but one Republican Party is enough.”
Meanwhile Edgar, the Republican, wants to extend the temporary 1989 income tax surcharge in order to fund education adequately, especially in the state’s poorer school districts.
There is one race in which the Democrat and Republican are running true to form: the Senate contest between incumbent Paul Simon and Rockford-area congresswoman Lynn Martin. Simon’s reelection campaign has stuck fairly close to his cautious, apple-pie liberalism; the candidate calls for cuts in military spending and federal support for education, literacy, care of “crack” babies, social security, health care, child care, and other humanitarian causes with broad appeal.
This great transfer of wealth, Phillips argues, was largely a result of concerted federal policy: making the tax code much less progressive, cutting federal outlays to the poor and working class, deregulating businesses (from savings and loans to airlines and trucking), and tightening monetary policy (producing high interest rates). The wealth and income shifts “have hurt the bottom half of Americans by effects ranging from rural and small-town decay to urban crime, weakened families and lost economic opportunity for the unskilled,” Phillips writes.
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In the 90s, Phillips believes, there’s potential for a reaction against politicians and policies that favor the rich. For example, this fall in Minnesota, despite being outspent ten to one, a fiery anticorporate populist, Paul Wellstone, is on the verge of defeating a heretofore popular conservative Republican incumbent, Senator Rudy Boschwitz. Vermonters may choose independent socialist Bernie Sanders over moderate incumbent Republican congressman Peter Smith. Throughout the midwest, Democratic populists like Iowa senator Tom Harkin, Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, and Illinois congressman Lane Evans are apparently winning in fairly conservative areas with a left-populist critique of class inequities–against tax breaks for the rich, for example.
