THE LAST THING any of us has a right to expect from politicians is a dignified silence, and this is true even in the face of a transcendent horror like the murder of schoolchildren. But the initial reaction to the Littleton shootings was unexpectedly promising. “I don’t know how you stop it,” said Pat Buchanan. “You can’t legislate love,” said George W. Bush. “The answer,” said Richard Gephardt, “won’t be found in state legislatures or the halls of Congress.” Even the president, the talkiest politician since William Jennings Bryan and a dedicated solutionist who can find a public-policy answer to any problem, was oddly subdued. In the immediate aftermath of the murders he merely offered anodyne assurances that our schools were still safe. (At the same time, he drew the lesson that such violence “could happen anywhere,” meaning presumably that our schools weren’t safe. But why quibble.)
Within 72 hours he and his fellow solutionists had righted themselves. The administration issued a bull with the ominous title: “The White House at Work: President Clinton: Actions to Help Keep Our Schools Safe.” Working, working, working, the president announced that the federal government would pay for the victims’ funerals and compensate parents for wages lost during their absence from work; pay for an additional 600 school police officers in a mysteriously selected 336 communities; spend $ 180 million to “promote comprehensive school safety strategies,” whatever those might be; and print up an extra 150,000 copies of the government’s pamphlet Early Warning Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools. So there it was: proof that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, the president can’t address with a budget appropriation, a “public-private partnership,” or a Third Way, New Democrat-style initiative that avoids the twin vices of Big Government and Republican laissez faire.
But this was only the beginning. By the weekend after the murders, the White House announced an event for the following Tuesday, at which the president would offer further solutions to the problem of evil. (These turned out to be a handful of gun control measures that he had proposed before Littleton.) The announcement panicked congressional Republicans, who were, as always, slower to mobilize, owing at least in part to those laissez-faire instincts that have made them infamous. Fortunately, Republican leaders had an event of their own already scheduled for that Tuesday. It was to be held at Ellen Glasgow Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, House Speaker Denny Hastert, Senate President pro tempore Strom Thurmond, and other congressional Republicans were to boom their recently-passed “Ed-Flex” bill. But now the event was hastily recast, to showcase instead the Republican response to the murders at Columbine High.
And that response would be . . . well . . . not more gun control, for reasons of philosophy and finance (the National Rifle Association gives the bulk of its campaign contributions to Republicans) . . . and a National Grief Counseling Initiative might smack of social engineering . . . and any additional budget appropriations for school cops or metal detectors or whatever might break agreed-upon budget caps. Republican staffers on Capitol Hill thus labored deep into the night to formulate a response that would end-run the president — out-Clinton Clinton, as it were. And so it was that the leaders of the Republican party lumbered last Tuesday into a packed assembly hall at Glasgow Middle School and announced the National Conference on Youth and Culture.
Reporters had been forewarned of the announcement and were out with their camera crews in force. The Glasgow students made of themselves a compliant audience, row after row of them slumped on risers and dressed in their baggy T-shirts and outsized jeans and blocky sneakers. A dozen or so were arrayed in a semi-circle at the back of the podium, behind the speakers, as props for the cameras. They wore that cheerful, contented look of utter vacancy we have come to expect from our teenagers. The Republicans took the stage and smiled at them and the kids smiled back, waving at the photographers, clowning for their pals. The Republicans didn’t seem to mind. After all, it is for them that the National Conference is going to be launched. For the children.
Despite the last-minute reconfiguring, the event, as it turned out, was mostly about the Ed-Flex bill. The Republicans spoke in order of rank — Reps. Davis of Virginia and Castle of Delaware, then Sen. Frist of Tennessee, then Hastert and Lott — and all of them offered condolences to the community of Littleton, taking pains to note that they themselves knew a large number of children personally, had indeed fathered children of their own, and in point of fact had once been children themselves. With these bona fides established, Hastert took the microphone to announce the initiative.
“We’re all aware of the situation in Colorado, and our hearts go out,” Hastert said. “You know, I taught for sixteen years. My wife has taught for 33 years. So we care about kids. We care about schools. And we hope that will never happen again.
“And there’s one thing we can do. Oh, we can bring in all the experts, telling us this philosophy will work or that one. But what we need to do is, we need to listen to kids. We need to listen to you. You know what works in education. You know what your needs are. And we need to take some time — all members of Congress, and I intend to do this — we need to go home and listen to you. And then to take that information and put together good legislation that will work for our kids.”
The kids applauded this. For this was the announcement — however sketchy — of the National Conference on Youth and Culture. Then Lott took the mike to fill in the details.
“My mother was a teacher — her whole life,” Lott said, by way of explaining why he, as majority leader of the United States Senate, felt competent to address issues of education, and why education was “issue number one in my heart.” He continued: “As we look to what has happened in Colorado, as we all have to examine ourselves, ask ourselves, Have we done enough, as teachers, as parents, administrators, we need a dialogue with our children. I call here today for a National Conference on Youth and Culture. We have got to ask ourselves, Can we do more? And we’re going to ask all our colleagues in the House and Senate to start a dialogue about this. Thank you very much.”
Thus the announcement. In the days that followed, Republican aides elaborated on the plan. The National Conference on Youth and Culture will consist of a series of 12 to 18 town meetings, televised if possible, and privately financed (those damn budget caps again). Even now the speaker and majority leader are working the phones, trying to line up a roster of “leaders” from the worlds of academia, business, entertainment, and political activism to lend their names to the effort, and maybe even appear at a town meeting or two. Asked specifically what these “dialogues” would look like, one aide pointed to the appearance by President Clinton with high school children the day after the Littleton shootings — a nationally televised roundtable that won the president plaudits for his sensitivity. It was a perfect Clinton event: several hours of talking, issuing finally in nothing of any consequence. “That’s the kind of thing Lott and Hastert would really like to do,” the aide said.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
