The junior senator has an eye on the future--where America should be focused
SEN. GEORGE ALLEN'S detractors often charge him with
National politics magnify Mr. Allen's faults. He has rather blindly followed the president in his almost criminally inept prosecution of an optional war in Iraq. When, a few days ago, Mr. Bush's tune on the war changed, Mr. Allen sang along in the new key. It's now time, goes the witless Beltway locution, for Iraqis to "stand up" their military and police forces to defeat the insurgency. This smells like a sellout. Will Mr. Allen acquiesce in the cynical abandonment of an ally, now that fancy theorems and idees fixes have failed to get the job done, to worse terror and deeper chaos?
On the domestic side--again like Mr. Bush--Mr. Allen's laudable belief in the power of markets and entrepreneurship seems to exhaust his economic enthusiasm. There's little left over, once the commodores of commerce have been served, for the common seaman who must wait in real mortgage-and-tuition time for the rising tide to lift his dinghy.
But there's a brighter side to the George Allen story, which doesn't end with his successes (parole abolition, welfare reform, K-12 academic standards) as Virginia's governor during the 1990s. While in a body of 100--which must come to terms with a body of 435--it's sometimes hard to discern an individual senator's accomplishments, Mr. Allen's have not been negligible.
In 2003, for example, the senator steered $3.7 billion into research in nanotechnology--building machines on an atomic and molecular scale--on the conviction that it really is a small world after all, or soon will be, and the United States should be leading it. With America's industrial sector on the skids and many other jobs vulnerable to outsourcing, the nation needs a quantum high-tech boost to renewed prosperity. Nanotechnology could be it. Its best friend in Congress is George Allen.
Mr. Allen also captained Senate forces fighting to keep the taxers from molesting the Internet, while at the same time leading efforts to control e-mailed spam. Online America will cheer both initiatives. The target of scurrilities that have done everything but put the senator in a bedsheet, Mr. Allen--believe the record, not the rumor--tried manfully to direct $1.25 billion in grants to black colleges for computer and technology upgrades. In all of these activities the senator can take justified pride.
Finally, apart from any individual virtues he may possess, George Allen's warm body is needed to help Republicans maintain control of the Senate and install federal judges who will prevent and cure the disease of judicial activism that mocks elected government. If the GOP hangs onto the Senate on Nov. 7, it likely will be by a whisker. Friends of the Constitution can't afford to see Mr. Allen sheared off.
George Allen, to reiterate, falls short of perfection. In a couple of areas, he falls clean off the edge of the acceptable. Nor can he or his opponent, Jim Webb, wash his hands of what has at times been a truly detestable campaign of mutual character assassination. But under the ballot heading "U.S. Senate" on Nov. 7, you won't find the name Webster or Clay or Calhoun. You will find Allen, representing, here and now, the better record and the better choice for Virginia voters.