DEMOCRAT AGENDA

The just-concluded Democratic National Convention is said by most national pundits to have been a success. Indeed, judged by the thin standards that prevail in today's debased political discourse -- opinion polls, focus groups -- it may well have been. Was there a single memorable speech, a single memorable turn of phrase or figure of speech?

Some sentimentalists might leap to cite Vice President Gore's story about the 1984 death of his sister from lung cancer. If they were sincerely moved by his recitation, though, they would have to remain blissfully ignorant of the vice president's remarks to a group of North Carolina tobacco farmers four years after her death: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I dug in it. I sprayed it. I've chopped it, I've shredded it, I spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it." It would appear the vice president's conversion to the ranks of tobacco scourges is of more recent -- and politically inspired -- vintage.

Many pundits managed to find the president's acceptance speech impressive. It was an exhaustive laundry list of Clinton's proposals to expand the therapeutic nanny state. Is there alleged to be an unmet health need? Clinton has a program. Or two. Or three. Are our children failing to learn to read? This president is ready to spend billions. For exactly what purpose? To hire a million new tutors so each child will be a competent reader by the end of the third grade.

Pardon us, but when did teaching reading become a responsibility of the federal government? And why aren't parents, for all the taxes they lay out, receiving iron-clad guarantees that their children will exit the first -- not the third -- grade with demonstrated reading competency? The delegates, one-fourth of whom are members of teachers unions, wildly applauded all this nonsense, heedless of the stunning irony and what it says about our schools.

The Clinton presidential term began with Joycelyn Elders and gays in the military. It is ending, eyes cast on the November election, with one rightward move after another. The Clinton-led Democratic Party is thus better understood as a gigantic disguise act, working overtime to conceal its true identity until, once again safely past the electorate, its members can set about plundering the public treasury yet again.