Why the conservative revolution failed.

"You now work from the first of January to May just to pay your taxes so that the party of government can satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less admirable than what they would do with it. ... 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. ... Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy." The words are Bob Dole's (actually, they're Mark Halperin's, but Dole said them in his acceptance speech in San Diego). They are the key to understanding why the Republican Revolution, which seemed so unstoppable only a year ago, has stopped.

Dole's speech tried to put over, one more time, the fiction that the federal government takes away your hard-earned money and spends most of it on things that only social workers want. Supply-side economics, with its promise that tax cuts would pay for themselves, may have given conservatives the courage to be irresponsible. But what sold the public on conservatism was the images of vast armies of bureaucrats and of welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

Conservatives were able to get away with such stories for one main reason: They could always blame their failure to slay Big Government on the Democrats who controlled Congress. Then they suddenly found themselves in control--and the fig leaf was gone. Spinmeisters of the right are already saying that this election was all about tactics--that if only Dole were a better campaigner, if only Clinton hadn't shamelessly veered right, if only Gingrich hadn't thrown a tantrum on Air Force One, the conservative wave would have rolled on. And they insist that this looming defeat is only a temporary setback. But the truth is that the political appeal of radical conservatism has always been based on a fundamentally untrue vision of what the federal government is and does.

To get an idea of the gap between conservative mythology and reality, let's look at the best book published in America. It's called The Statistical Abstract of the United States, and if more people would get into the habit of checking it, our politics would be utterly transformed.

The StatisticalAbstract makes it quite easy to get a realistic picture of where your tax dollar goes. For example, here is a list of 10 major federal programs. The number after the colon indicates each program's percentage of fiscal 1994 spending:

Social Security: 21.6

Defense: 18.9

Interest on the debt: 13.7

Medicare: 9.7

Medicaid: 5.8