Right, Tough Talk Is Not Enough

One need not have suffered the terrifying experience of violent crime or the heartbreak of seeing a friend or relative ravaged by drug abuse to understand just how wrenching these two social problems are.

Indeed, touching as they do our common need to be secure not only in our persons but also in the aspirations we hold for our children and loved ones, the questions posed by drugs and crime are precisely the sort of issues on which people have a right to look to their government for answers and leadership. Even so, it is hard not to be at least a little distressed about the sort of leadership President Bush seems to be offering during his current political tour of California.

When it comes to the President’s credibility on crime, for example, it is difficult to forget that Bush owes his occupancy of the White House, at least in part, to a misrepresentation of the infamous Willie Horton’s prison furlough. When the President speaks about “unshackling” our prisons, police and courts, as he did Thursday during a tour of a new maximum-security jail in Saugus, it is difficult to grasp precisely what he has in mind at a time when prisons everywhere are overflowing and the courts at all levels virtually are gridlocked with pending criminal cases.

And when Bush talks about drugs, as he will today at a rally in Santa Ana, it is hard not to recall that his Administration’s priorities dictate that 70 cents of every federal dollar expended on the problem will go to law-enforcement efforts of dubious efficacy, while only 30 cents will be spent on the sort of education and treatment programs that can halt a troubled youngster’s drug problem somewhere short of prison gates.

Finally, it is impossible not to note that the new 2,064-bed facility the President visited Thursday and the anti-drug rally he will address today are the products of purely local initiatives. Self-help, of course, is a thing to be applauded always and everywhere. But some of Bush’s insistence that “tough talk is not enough” obscures the fact that talk is about all Washington has to offer on these questions nowadays. Years of federal paralysis on the budget and taxes have deprived our national government of the ability to mount the education, employment and health programs that would begin to alleviate the causes rather than deal, all too late, with the consequences of crime.