GOP Should Be Talking Up a Beatty Race

If there’s any litmus test for Republican conservatives this year, it should be their support for Warren Beatty to seek the Democratic nomination for president.

Seriously.

America would benefit from a debate between mainline conservatism and Beatty’s ultraliberalism to illustrate the stark differences between the two political parties. Voters could determine policy directions for the new year and new century.

Republicans need Warren Beatty because the political advantages are manifest. Goofs like Al Gore and bores like Bill Bradley can’t possibly provide the same flavorful, wacky liberal extremes that Beatty would. Bulworth would be the real deal.

Political pundits can thank the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action for dangling this tempting political morsel. A few weeks back, these proto-socialist throwbacks honored Beatty at their Eleanor Roosevelt Awards dinner.

The popular actor drew 750 adult groupies and 150 media gapers to sway to the rhythms of his political philosophy. He didn’t let them down. Beatty boasted (without risk in that audience) of being an old-time, unrepentant, unreconstructed, tax-and-spend, bleeding-heart, die-hard liberal Democrat.

Never mind that many of us think that there is no other kind. But I digress.

Beatty blasted away at the “centrist ways” of the Democratic Party and its slavish embrace of a prosperity that ignores the plight of those “left behind.” His passion was palpable, notwithstanding the obvious fact that Beatty--at a few million bucks per screening--hardly qualifies as left behind.

He claimed that the current political process was cancerous to our democracy and that the patient is “in mortal danger of dying on the table.” He further denounced the “plutocrats” who he predicted would stifle the dialogue, a clear reference to squishes in his party who are not “old-time bleeding heart” etc., etc.

This is a candidacy Americans, especially Republicans, deserve.

Republicans yearn for Democrats--say, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Dianne Feinstein for starters--to opine where they stand on Beatty’s positions. Do they agree or disagree that Washington doesn’t spend enough, that people are taxed too little and that government is really too small?

They can relax. It’s quite unlikely that Beatty will run. He observed as much himself during his Eleanor Roosevelt remarks: “I have the great luxury of not having a career as a politician, and I can still say what I want to say.”

But America deserves better. We want not only this ideological debate, but we want the debater to match the boldness of his views and not merely hold the coat of the combatant. There are many issues Beatty could address. Outside the size of government, for example, there is the question of drug legalization. A positive answer would give new meaning to his film “Splendor in the Grass.”

Would Beatty be willing to make public his tax returns like every other hapless politician must? After all, his ADA speech decried an increasingly expanding disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor. Voters would want to know just how generous Beatty is with his wealth, whether or not he takes advantage of tax shelters, or whether any unreported “in-kind” financial benefits flow to him through movie studios.

And then there’s the issue of the homeless. Beatty attacked the New York Times for reporting 50 articles on the homeless in 1988 and only 10 in 1998, even though the numbers of homeless were the same each year. (Just a hunch: Would the current lack of interest by the media have anything to do with the difference between Reagan being president in 1988 and Clinton being there now?)

Not a few people would want to know just how many of those cold and homeless have been invited into the cozy comfort of the Beatty Bunch’s upscale digs.

In 1968, Bobby Kennedy waited for Gene McCarthy to take out Lyndon Johnson before he decided to get into the race, prompting New York Post columnist Murray Kempton to write that McCarthy did the dirty work while Kennedy “came down from the hills to shoot the wounded.”

Warren Beatty is obviously intelligent, articulate and possessed of sufficient resources to promote the principles he embraces. He should emulate McCarthy and not let someone else fight his political battles for him.

America would benefit from more worth and less bull.