Subject: A Woman of Substance Date: Published: 7/15/92 (148 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. A Woman of Substance ---- By Daniel Henninger Jay Leno is fond of recalling the tough audiences he had to perform in front of on the long road to stardom. Sure, there were the TV gigs for Johnny, but there were also nights spent pitching material in backroad beer halls and joints the comedians call toilets. Well, if you thought those were tough venues, you should try performing on opening night of a national political convention. There is no tougher audience. No one listens. The delegates, hundreds of them, talk straight through the deep thoughts pouring out of the loudspeakers behind the podium. Well, maybe Barbara Boxer wasn't expressing very deep thoughts Monday night, but the delegates don't discriminate. They babbled through Bill Bradley's heavy philosophical treatise, too. (Fighting fire with fire, Sen. Bradley's unusual solution to the delegates' din was to just keep on delivering his speech, right through the applause.) Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, a traditionalist, just pumped up the volume and shouted his speech. And no matter who talked, the Brown delegates, the largest kindergarten class ever assembled, kept chanting, "Let Jerry speak!" Then came the night's final keynote speaker, Barbara Jordan. On the toughest night of the week, Ms. Jordan gave what surely must be one of the most remarkable speeches delivered at a recent Democratic convention. When she began to talk, the hall quieted, and save for the applause, it stayed quiet. A good thing too, for Barbara Jordan came to New York to say things to the Democrats that a lot of them probably would have preferred not to hear. Bear in mind that Barbara Jordan, from Texas, is a card-carrying liberal. She came to Congress in 1973 at the age of 36. A year later, amid the Watergate scandals, she gained attention as a member of the Judiciary Committee with a strong speech denouncing Richard Nixon's presidency. Six years later a neurological disease confined her to a wheelchair. She has spent the years since teaching at the University of Texas in Austin. As was noted in an editorial on this page Monday, Ms. Jordan is one of a small group of Democrats, a group that seems to be gaining adherents, who've been thinking hard about the future of their party. But what distinguished Ms. Jordan's address to the delegates is that rather than merely pitch "change," she made them look at their past. They applauded mightily for much of what she said and, as we'll note, only politely for some ideas that are still too tough to embrace. This "change," she said, seems to be "very rhetorically oriented." What it required was "substance." And Barbara Jordan, a woman of substance, gave them precisely that. "The idea that America today will be better tomorrow has become destabilized," she said. This is true, and for the reasons she described: The jobs we're losing currently aren't being replaced by new employment. This had been the crucial difference between the economic transformation of the Reagan years and the experience of the Bush presidency. Entrepreneurship has stalled. "Why not," she asked, "change from a party with a reputation of tax-and-spend to one with a reputation of investment and growth? Change. Change. A growth economy is must." Has Barbara Jordan been communing with Jack Kemp? In similar Kempian fashion, she said, "A Democratic president would promote principles, programs, policies, which help us help ourselves." The applause for that was tepid. This may have more to do with the fact that most of the delegates are white and middle class, and whether one may publicly applaud such notions is uncertain. Indeed, over the past five years or so, the Democratic Party has become a welter of political confusions. Academic feminists argue among themselves over the meaning of their movement. Gay activists on the East Coast want the state to discover a cure for AIDS; West Coast activists want market forces to find the cure. In depressed black neighborhoods, notably here in New York and L. A., activists foment animosity toward Korean grocers who've brought commerce back to the neighborhoods. On these matters, Ms. Jordan was profoundly and succinctly eloquent: "We are one, we Americans. We are one. And we reject any intruder who seeks to divide us on the basis of race and color. We honor cultural identity. We always have and we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights. "Xenophobia has no place in the Democratic Party. We seek to unite people, not to divide them. As we seek to unite people, we reject both white racism and black racism. This party will not tolerate bigotry under any guise. Our strength in this country is rooted in our diversity. Our history bears witness to that fact. E Pluribus Unum -- it was a good idea when our country was founded, and it's a good idea today. From many, one. That still identifies us." She's right, and her words got strong applause. But one wonders how many Democrats in positions of prominence -- politicians, university presidents, editors, producers, stand-up comics -- have the courage to support her. For its proponents, separatism has become psychotherapy, a force often stronger than mere politics. In fact, the closer Ms. Jordan got to politics, the quieter the applause. Here is possibly the least-applauded statement of truth in her address: "We must frankly acknowledge our complicity in the creation of the unconscionable budget deficit, acknowledge our complicity and recognize, painful though it may be, that in order to seriously address the budget deficit, we must address the question of entitlements also. That's not easy. That's not easy, but we have to do it." You could spend the next two days asking every last person inside Madison Square Garden whether the Democrats would ever acknowledge their complicity in driving the budget deficit with entitlements spending, and none -- none -- would say yes. But in a single sentence, Barbara Jordan summed up to her party why she said, "we have to do it." The party has to do it, she told them, because "we must leave this convention with a determination to convince the American people to trust us, the Democrats, to govern again." Trust. It's the bottom line for this party: They say they're changing, but will voters buy it? On the basis of recent history, it's going to take a whole lot of trust. It would be easier to believe if the Barbara Jordans were running the show. It was ironic that while Ms. Jordan made the case for the rise of women in politics using a neat quote from Tocqueville, a hero for conservatives, most of the other women speaking have sounded terribly conventional, not much different from the men. One of the automatic applause lines at this convention is, "They just don't get it." "They," of course, is "them" -- men, Republicans, Clarence Thomas supporters. It's a pretty arrogant line. Barbara Jordan didn't use it. But she used her time to tell Democrats something they needed to hear. If it doesn't work out for the Democrats in November, none of them should act confused. On Monday night, like it or not, they got it -- with clarity and with eloquence. --- Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]