The Newark Advocate from Newark, Ohio • 4

The Advocate4A OPINION Monday, May 31, 1993 The Advocate Serving Licking County Publisher: Steven A. Studt Managing Editor: Erie B. Anderson City Editor: Dawn Pettit-West News Editor: Beth P. Black Advertising Manager: Ronald Frailly Classified Manager: Mike Fornataro Circulation Manager: James Nelson Accounting Manager: Ann Swartz (innt a) (W I CAM CUT BACK jSbJlyJAi AL ANtf MORE dgBtf; BARELY FEEDING 1 -mfiE' QMS Memorial Day time to remember Memorial Day is the official kickoff to the summer even though summer is not technically until later in June. The three-day weekend is a time to pull the grill out of the garage and dust it off.

It's the time to put up the badmitton game and repaint the picnic table. The holiday weekend is the time to prepare mounds of potato salad and to grill those hamburgers and hot dogs in fellowship with family and friends. But, while it's a time for fun, it's also a time for reflection. Memorial Day originally set as May 30, but changed legally to Monday many years ago was set aside to honor soldiers who have fallen in battle. Decoration Day, the forerunner of Memorial Day, began at the end of the Civil War.

The day was used to decorate the graves of soldiers with flowers and for parades of remembrance. Over the years, we have come to regard Memorial Day as a way to remember all those we love who are deceased. We should never fail, though, to remember the holiday's beginnings, taking a silent moment to thank all of those who have died in wars from the American Revolution to the Persian Gulf Conflict that have kept our nation free. As you're out decorating the tombstones of those you love, look around at the tombstones of soldiers with no flowers. Take one flower and leave it on the tombstone as a special remembrance.

Not everything depends on president GEORGE tafv WILL JTO WASHINGTON In 1878, when football was new on campus, Tommy Wilson, a Princeton undergraduate and informal football coach, wrote, "Everything depends upon the character of the captain and president (of the team)." Years later Wilson, then known by his middle name, Woodrow, would think of government the way he had thought of football. He said that when a president has the confidence of the country, "no other single force can withstand him." He can be "irresistible" in an office that can be "anything he has the sagacity and force to make it." A forthright critic of the separation of powers, Wilson revolutionized the presidential office, treating it not only as the engine of an activist central government, but as the nation's tutor "the moral, spiritual leader of the country," as a later Wilsonian, Walter Mondale, was to say. But today Bill Clinton is re duced to around-the-clock dicker- ing with a House of Representatives his party controls, and the House is less than half of his congressional problem. He is unhappily experiencing the marginalization of the presidency that began under his predecessor. Clinton is powerless to prevent the end of the Wilsonian tradition he aimed to revitalize.

William Leuchtenburg, an admiring biographer of Franklin Roosevelt, says that FDR, who saw himself as picking up Wil- nothing is difficult for the truly moral that, for example, the reason there are millions of people without health insurance is that until now no one has really cared. And it tells him that the Wilson, FDR and LBJ presidencies are models to be emulated today. However, a lesson of the first one-twelfth of Clinton's term is that "gridlock" (that overheated description of a normal, healthy outcome of our Constitution presidents not getting all they want) results not just from "divided government," the legislative and executive branches controlled by different parties. It also results from both branches being controlled by a divided party, which the Democratic Party is. Not only do many members of Clinton's party reject his agenda, they feel no particular need, moral or prudential, to defer to.

him. Peace is going to be hell for presidents, at least for those not reconciled to the restoration of what is, when viewed against the sweep of American history, normal: congressional supremacy. The players on the other side of the constitutional line from the president in the legislative branch, which is not supposed to be part of the president's team dispute Tommy Wilson's notion that everything depends on the president. George Will is a nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group. leaving him (almost literally) speechless.

Clinton, too, is a casualty of peace. He urgently needs the aura that surrounded presidents when the nation was in a permanent state of siege. Clinton, who has a breathtaking agenda for expanding federal supervision of American life, has reached the White House just as prerequisite for such an ambitious presidential program is fast draining away. That prerequisite is a national fixation on the presidency, and a predisposition to think there should be a national "agenda" and that the president should write it. Clinton may seem to be a miniaturized president, but that is because 60 years of emergencies from the stock market crash of October 1929 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 made most presidents seem larger than life-sized figures.

However, the office that Wilson thought potentially irresistible has always been much less powerful than it is prominent. Much of LBJ's domestic agenda failed because he was mistaken in believing that he personally could generate popular support for the sort of government activism that a huge event the Depression generated for FDR's activism. Clinton is floundering because his ideology tells him three false things. It tells him that 12 years of Republican "neglect" must constitute a crisis comparable to depression or war. It tells him that COMMENTS FROM OTHER EDITORS Here's how Ohio lawmakers voted son's fallen torch after 12 fallow Republican years, presented him- self "as the father to all the people." So did Lyndon Johnson, whose model was FDR.

And when President-elect Clinton met with Bill Moyers, who worked for Johnson, Clinton said, "He and I talked about the need to revitalize the office as an institution around which the American people can rally." Clinton assumes that Americans are, or should be and can be made to be, in a rallying 'round mood. But rallying 'round is what people do in emergencies, particularly wars. That is why contemporary liberals, with their collectivist agendas, seem perpetually nostalgic for wartime for Wilson's "war socialism" and -FDR's domestic mobilization during the Second World War. That nostalgia surfaces in metaphors, as in LBJ's "war on poverty." The end of the Cold War is one reason America now has its second consecutive president who is notably mismatched to his moment in office. George Bush prepared all his life to conduct the Cold War, only to have it end, of Vietnam nor America.

My friend Linda Halford, a former Army nurse who served two years in Vietnam, has believed this for over 23 years. She is not sure when this conviction crystallized during the tour of duty she remembers as "12 hours of death, seven days a week," but there was one episode that stands out in her memory. "I worked shifts from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and one night I was talking to this young man who was really messed up," she told me. "He was talking about growing up in a religious family where they told him it was against God's will to kill, and then we sent him there to kill.

I was trying to help him through some of this, and started to ask This Memorial Day, we face two choices myself, 'For what purpose is this 18-year-old boy going home a I think for years after the Vietnam War many of us struggled with our dual feelings of hating war itself while being grateful to the men and women who fought. This Memorial Day we stand again at the precipice of a conflict that the majority of American people don't understand any better than we understood Vietnam. The stories of atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina horrify us. Recently, on National Public Radio, I listened to an impassioned plea from a woman who had lived in Yugoslavia. She used the phrase "I demand" over and over, insisting that the leaders of By SARAH OVERS TREET I'm not sure to what I should attribute the growing feelings of gratitude and loss I feel each Memorial Day.

Perhaps hitting middle age, when we get some of the greatest opportunities of our lives, makes us understand what it is to lose it all before you even get started. The rows and rows of white gravestones in the national cemetery where I visit my friend's grave bother me more each year. My generation was the first in this country to protest modern war in the numbers and on the scale we did. We objected on the grounds that our government was making political decisions that were good for neither the people By Roll Call Report Syndicate WASHINGTON Here's how Ohio members of Congress were recorded on major roll call votes in the week ending May 28. HOUSE TROOPS IN SOMALIA: To reject, 127-299, an amendment to bring U.S.

forces home from Somalia by June 30. The House then passed a measure (SJ Res 45) authorizing American troops in Somalia for at least another year in keeping with the War Powers Act. About 5,000 GIs remain there under United Nations command, down from a peak deployment of 25,000 in 1992. A yes vote was to withdraw American troops from Somalia by June 30. Voting yes: Rob Portman, R-2, Michael Oxley, R-4, David Hob-son, R-7, Martin Hoke, R-10, Ralph Regula, R-16.

Voting no: David Mann, D-l, Tony Hall, D-3, Paul Gillmor, R-5, Ted Strickland, D-6, John Boehner, R-8, Louis Stokes, D-11, John Kasich, R-12, Sherrod Brown, D-13, Tom Sawyer, D-14, Deborah Pryce, R-15, James Traficant, D-l 7, Douglas Apple-gate, D-18, Eric Fingerhut, D-19. Not voting: Marcy Kaptur, D- 9. DEFENSE SPENDING: To reject, 188-244, an amendment deleting $1.2 billion in deficit military spending from a 1 .8 billion appropriations bill (HR 2118) for fiscal 1993. The amendment sought to force the Pentagon to get the money from other defense accounts. The funding consists mainly of $750 million for operations in Somalia, $295 million for civilian medical insurance claims and $100 million for Air Force patrols over southern Iraq.

A yes vote was to put the disputed military spending on a pay-as-you-go basis. Voting yes: Mann, Portman, Gillmor, Strickland, Boehner, Hoke, Kasich, Sherrod Brown, Pryce, Fingerhut. Voting no: Tony Hall, Oxley, Hobson, Kaptur, Stokes, Sawyer, Regula, Traficant, Apple-gate. Not voting: None. JOBS BILL: To pass, 287-140, a bill to spend $920 million immediately on creating summer jobs for city youth, launching public works projects and ninng more police at the state and lo cal level.

The "son-of-stimulus" measure (HR 2244) was a reduced version of the $19 billion White House-sponsored jobs measure that filibustering Republicans recently killed in the Senate. This stimulus bill does not worsen the deficit because it is paid for by cuts elsewhere in the budget. A yes vote was to pass the bill. Voting yes: Mann, Tony Hall, Gillmor, Strickland, Kaptur, Hoke, Stokes, Sherrod Brown, Sawyer, Traficant, Applegate, Fingerhut. Voting no: Portman, Oxley, Hobson, Boehner, Kasich, Pryce, Regula.

Not voting: None. NEW PROGRAM: To reject, 176-251, an amendment to strip the jobs and infrastructure bill (above) of $80 million for piloting a new program to qualify disadvantaged persons 17-to-30 for the job market, providing them with training, educational instruction and a $100 weekly stipend for meals, transportation and attending to personal needs. The program is designed to help people break free from welfare. It drew criticism because it was brought to the floor without having been approved by any House committee. A yes vote opposed including a pilot program for disadvantaged young adults in the Clinton Administration's $920 million jobs bill.

Voting yes: Portman, Oxley, Gillmor, Hobson, Boehner, Hoke, Kasich, Pryce, Regula. Voting no: Mann, Tony Hall, Strickland, Kaptur, Stokes, Sherrod Brown, Sawyer, Traficant, Applegate, Fingerhut. Not voting: None. SENATE TO CONFIRM ACHTEN-BERG: The Senate confirmed, 58-31, Roberta Achtenberg as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's assistant secretary for open housing and equal opportunity. Achtenberg, a lesbian, is a civil rights attorney and has been a San Francisco County supervisor.

She drew Senate criticism for having used her county post to fight Bay Area Boy Scouts over their refusal to accept homosexual scoutmasters. A yes vote was to confirm Roberta Achtenberg. Ohio: John Glenn, voted yes. Howard Metzenbaum, voted yes. the world and everyone within the sound of her voice go to Bosnia and rescue her friends.

Two decades ago, I heard women whose voices sounded just like hers use the same verb, demanding that we, stop sending their sons to be maimed and killed in Vietnam. I respect what Linda Halford believes because she has walked the walk before talking the talk. She supports exhausting every negotiating and sanctioning ploy before sending troops. Someday, I hope to be as resolved. This Memorial Day, I am still torn.

Sarah Overstreet writes for Newspaper Enterprise Association. "It's still not clear who should be protected, the people or the peacekeepers. If only the U.N. peacekeepers are to be protected, then it would be better if they stayed at home it's safer." German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe on a plan for sending several thousand more soldiers into Bosnia. "It's disgusting the smell, the haze.

Every time you go into a bar and there's people smoking, it's just like you're smoking." College student Mike Fortman on smokeless bars. "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" Genesis 3:1 I P0 VtXJ HAVE ANY 1 z-4 IPEA WHAT THAT -aSP ai 111 1 1, jjl Tj.