Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 11

DETROIT FREE PRESSTHURSDAY, APRIL 16, 1987 1 1 A AreADubefteroff Supersalesman Biden storms the Iowa market Are the Marines put of step With us? helm, well-versed in the expectations game, says with a straight face that his man has to be "in the top three or four" in the Iowa voting to survive for the later primaries and caucuses. But Biden himself has no patience for that low-balling game. "I know I'm not supposed to raise expectations," he says, "but I think I can win Iowa. I'd like to come out first." Those are words that can give a campaign manager a stroke, but Biden the supersalesman says: "The most By JACK W. GERMOND and JULES WITCOVER Tribune Media Services Inc.

IOWA CITY In mock seriousness, Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stands before University of Iowa students and introduces himself. "I am," he intones, "one of the most important men in America." Then, after a second, he smiles, letting the students in on the joke. He tells them how his face is so well-known that a television crew recently mistook him for Peter Ueberroth, the commissioner of baseball. BEHIND the gags, there is little that is self-deprecating about Biden as he By RICHARD REEVES Universal Press Syndicate ST.

PAUL, Minn. The thought that young marines could let Soviet KGB agents prowl through the U.S. Embassy in Moscow is even more frightening here than in other places. The first marine arrested, 25-year-old assaults the Iowa electorate 1 1 months before the first Democratic delegate- selecting caucuses of 1988. Biden Is the supersalesman selling other voices Clayton Lonetree, is a local boy made bad, it seems.

"It depresses me, too, but it doesn't surprise me," said a professor of history at a nearby college. "I was a marine in the Korean ff. himself as the man who can get America to turn again to a sense of community, after the Reagan era of service to self. It is a hard sell. There is, in fact, an element of John F.

Kennedy's ask-not-what-your-coun-try-can-do-for-you admonition in the down," he continued. That, for me, was at least the beginning of an explanation of how U.S. Marines might be capable of betraying their country and doing it, extraordinarily, as a unit of two men or three men or more. TWO DAYS LATER I was in South Carolina, at another college. A profes- "It's not like the old days.

When we were draftees, the Army looked something like the society." This is a great danger. A democratic army must be, by definition, a diverse army. It must not have military men who march to a different drummer in war or peace, in embassies or the White House. It is not weakness but candidate-salesman's pitch. In talks here and at Clarke College in Dubuque, for example, Biden proposed requiring Reeves wari and now what the Corps does to people." It was I who was surprised.

Former marines don't usually talk that way. Most men who served in the Corps don't use the words "former" or "was." students to perform some community service in their senior year in return for school credits. Today's young, he said, are looking not for "MBAs and BMWs" but for a successful presidents in history have been the most optimistic." A measure of his own optimism is the fact that unlike most of the other new-generation candidates vying to be Hart's prime challenger, Biden does not have essentially an "Iowa strategy." That is, his planning, organization and resources are being deployed for other key state battlegrounds after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, assuming he will at least survive those two early tests. WHILE ALL the candidates are emphasizing their qualifications to seek the presidency, Biden hammers at electability. "Ask not only 'Are we good enough to lead the he said here, "but 'Can we I'm tired of losing." Biden's aggressive stump style he paces before audiences, gesturing, winking and going almost eyeball-to-eyeball with questioners already has convinced many Iowa Democrats that he generates the excitement their party needs in its standard-bearer.

But using electability as a selling point can be high-risk politics. John Glenn tried it here in 1984 and was demolished by his own argument when he finished as an also-ran in the caucuses. Biden, though, is not one to think negatively. "Look me over," he tells audiences. "If you like what you see, I'd like your help.

If not, vote for the other guy." As he says it, though, you get the sense that he is confident he has closed the sale. With the voting in Iowa still nearly a year away, Biden's optimism may be premature; but it appears to be a good part of the fuel that keeps his internal engine humming. His strategists hope it will be infectious, convincing Democratic voters that in a field of candidates not strikingly differentiated by positions on many issues, Biden has the spark to be a winner. call to public service, similar to the one his generation answered in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and in the movement to end American involvement in Vietnam. "We changed The Pentagon constantly boasts of the high quality of its volunteers.

If the quality is constantly improving why are recruiting officers under investigation all across the country? the face of America and so can you," he told the Clarke audience. ing after another, why are recruiting officers under investigation all across the country? IN MINNEAPOLIS, St. Paul's twin city across the Mississippi River, it has just been discovered that 58 Army recruiting officers and enlisted men have been changing high school grades, forging diplomas and concealing criminal records of volunteers to meet and exceed monthly quotas of warm bodies. Something similar has apparently been going on in Detroit except that this time it is Marine Corps recruiters who are under investigation for fabricating high school transcripts to get their quota of good men. Good men or bad, the all-volunteer military has been a bad idea from the beginning.

As a matter of principle, and in matters of principle, you can't trust mercenaries even your own. President Nixon thought up the idea of a paid army as a trick to stop potential draftees from protesting service in the Vietnam war. To begin with, making all soldiering a competitive free-market career is too expensive compared with the room-and-board wages of draftees, but that is not the crucial objection. What matters' most is the maintenance of a civilian military in sync with the security concerns, national values and annoying idiosyncracies of free civilian America. BIDEN ALSO suggested that JFK's inaugural declaration, that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans," is applicable again.

In fact, of all the declared and prospective Democratic presidential candidates, only one Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill. is "MAYBE I'm different because I wasn't a volunteer," the professor said. "I was drafted in the years the Marines couldn't get enough volunteers. What I saw and didn't like was an institution that consciously set out to 1 convince its men that they were differ- ent from other people.

Marines are taught to think they're better than ordinary Americans. "It works. What the Marines did was separate unformed young men from everything and everybody else. They made kids believe that everyone outside the Corps was different. Soon they had contempt for outsiders.

They felt superior to civilians. They were hostile to civilian rules." "It's a logical step, crazy but logical, to lose all perspective and become part of your own closed world where out's side rules and values have no meaning, or are completely turned upside older than 50. Biden is 44. In a crowded field of new-genera sor told me that his son was in the Army a volunteer, of course, in our new all-volunteer military. "How's it going?" I asked.

"There are problems," the professor said. "He has to be very careful not to say what he thinks about a lot of things. The Army is so homogeneous now that everyone seems to think the same way. A different opinion gets you in trouble. Political talk is out for him just being from a Democratic family can set you apart.

strength to be protected by men and women who drill in the same determined out-of-step cadence as America Itself. The idea from the beginning was to be protected by our own determination and not to have to be protected against our own military. Serious questions must also be raised about our new military, even though the Pentagon constantly boasts of the high quality of its volunteers. If the quality is constantly improving, as we are told in one congressional hear- tion candidates, most are hoping to use the Iowa caucuses to emulate the 1984 Iowa performance of this season's Democratic front-runner, Gary Hart. That is, they hope to capitalize on their low standings in the polls and conse quent low expectations to spring a surprise on Feb.

8, Iowa caucus night. Biden state manager, David wu- Israel: The heart of our attitudes only of liberation from slavery. If there is a victory over death In the Passover idea, it lies in the survival of the Jewish I IS people as a people in spite of persistent ii mm mm mr. By NORMAN PODHORETZ ii Norm America Syndicate Inc. WHEN THE Jewish festival of Pass-; 'over comes, as it just has, the Christian holiday of Easter is never more than few days behind.

The reason, of course, is that it was during Passover week nearly 2,000 years ago that the drama celebrated at Eas For Women 5'4" and Under 1 2ggf efforts to wipe them out. "In every generation," says a key passage in the Haggadah, the special prayer book that is read at the Seder, "they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One Blessed be He saves us from their hand." Even after being exiled from the land of Israel to which they had been delivered from bondage in Egypt, the Jews defied all historical probabilities and went on living as a people. In all those centuries of exile, they ended the Seder with the cry, "Next year in ter unfolded. In our secularized and ecumenical1 age, the issue that arose then is no longer as salient or burning as it used to be, but in disguised form it has found a new outlet in the debates over the state of Israel. A Seder table set with pieces from the 18th and 19th Centuries Podhoretz Ease is the keyword WORLD OF DIFFERENCE for weekend relaxing.

Moss green coordinates by Linda Allard for Jerusalem." Throughout those centuries, Christians of every stripe were convinced that the Jews had been driven out of Jerusalem In the first place because of their stubborn and sinful rejection of Jesus (for whose crucifixion they were held responsible) and their correlative refusal to commit religious suicide by converting to Christianity. It followed that as long as they insisted on ing Jewish, they would be condemned to wander from one place of exile to another, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, but never at ease or at home and certainly not in Zion. At bottom, that is why to this day so many believing Christians are less than happy about the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the ancient land of Israel. THUS, the Catholic Church may have officially declared that the Jewish people are not responsible for the crucifixion, but the Vatican still withholds formal recognition from the state of. Israel.

Thus, too, most of the mainstream Protestant groups manifest an animus against Israel so great that it cannot be explained or justified by "A World of Difference" It a yearlong effort to fight discrimination co-tponsored by the Anil-Defamation League of B'nal B'rllh, the Free Preu, WDIV-TV and the Civil Rights Task Force of Metropolian Detroit. Ellen Tracy set the mood. Silk crepe de chine woodblock print bigshirt. Petite sizes P-S-M, $152. Cotton poplin pants with Because of inconsistencies in the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, scholars have had trouble with the exact chronology, and various theolog-1 ical considerations have complicated i matters even further.

We know for i certain, though, that Jesus himself and all his disciples were still Jews and still regarded themselves as bound by Jew-' ish law. (The break with Jewish law began only in the next generation, with St. Paul.) We know that the Last Supper Was a "paschal meal" the original form of today's Passover Seder. We know that Jesus was crucified some time during the week of Passover, possibly on the first day of the festival. We know that for several centuries thereafter, Easter was actually called Christian Passover.

THE DIFFERENCES between Passover and Easter, however, are greater and more radical than the similarities. One might even say that the differences are proportional to the similarities. It all started with the 10 plagues that the Bible says God visited upon Egypt before an obdurate pharaoh would agree to liberate his Israelite slaves. The 10th and most terrible of these plagues was the slaying of all the first-born sons of the Egyptians. Before proceeding to do this, however, God instructed that each Israelite household kill a lamb and smear its blood upon the doorposts; seeing thissign, He would "pass over" the house and the Israelites' own first-born sons would be spared.

Every year on the anniversary of this awesome event, Jews were com trouser-pleat front. Sizes 2P to 12P, $106. if hi i'A Seder was developed as a symbolic substitute. In the Christian scheme of things, the Passover story was incorporated and then mystically re-enacted in the story of the Passion, with Jesus playing the role of the paschal lamb. In a hymn by Martin Luther (which Johann Sebastian Bach used as the text of one of his most famous cantatas), this mystical Christian transformation of Passover is expressed in vividly explicit terms: "Here is the true Passover Lamb, God has commanded it, High upon the Cross' shaft It has been roasted in ardent love, The blood marks our door Luther, echoing St.

Paul, is equally explicit about the meaning of this re-staged Passover drama. Under the old (Jewish) dispensation, he writes, "Nobody could overcome Death." But since the resurrection of the crucified Jesus on Easter Sunday, Death has lost "his rights and his power" over all whose doors are symbolically marked by the blood of Christ. As God passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, so Death will now "pass over" the houses of all faithful Christians. FOR ITS PART, Passover commemorates something rather more modest than liberation from death; it speaks political factors alone. Even the fundamentalist Protestants who enthusiastically support Israel regard it as only a temporary milestone on the way to the Second Coming of Christ and the eventual conversion of the Jews.

Such attitudes affect non-believers of Christian background as well. Conversely, the reasons why even non-believing and highly assimilated Jews often find themselves intensely concerned about Israel also go deeper than the language of contemporary politics can reach or even begin to express. In short, Easter, which in effect proclaims the supersession of the Jewish people, is the ultimate source of the contemporary Christian uneasiness over Israel, while Passover, with its insistence on resisting those who "in every generation rise up to destroy us," is the source of the Jewish commitment to Israel even in so secularized and ecumenical an age as our own. Jacobsons We welcome Jacobson's Charge Card or The American Express1 Card. manded to sacrifice a commemorative lamb and to roast it and feast upon it.

So they did until their expulsion from the land of Israel and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. made animal sacrifice obsolete. At that point, the Shop until 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday Until 6 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday.