Leave Off the Label

By Thomas Griffith

The first sign that the campaign has warmed up is an outbreak of invidious labeling. The Democrats are calling the Republicans the party of the rich, while Republicans are trying to prove the Democrats are the less godly. George Bush has a label for himself: "A conservative but not a nut." Nowadays newspaper columnists who comment on such matters also wearlabels, which is a bad idea whose time has come.

Blame it on the spectrum theory, which holds that columnists should be picked the way Noah filled his ark, with Irving specimens from every category. On the Gannett chain of 85 newspapers, "our policy is not to have a policy," John Quinn, its editorial director, says. But he urges his editors to pick columnists across a broad spectrum of views. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal, with the most rigidly polemical editorial page of any major paper, seeks to vary its Johnny-one-note tone by using some outside voices. Irving Kristol and Arthur Schlesinger are well-matched middleweights, but was Alexander Cockburn craftily picked for his left-wing pyrotechnics or as valid spokesman for a point of view?

Despite such contrived attempts at editorial balance, the spectrum among columnists does seem more brightly colored on the right. The dwindling band of liberal columnists, the liveliest of whom is Mary McGrory, frequently write like glum recyclers of views no longer in vogue. Right-wingers are apt to be more ardent proselyters, some using the eruditely disdainful style of arguing they learned on Bill Buckley's National Review.

George F. Will, the most talented of the lot, is going through a change of persona more than a change of views in his second career as tart questioner on ABC'S This Week with David Brinkley (where he is billed as plain George Will). "When you accept an institutional identification," he says, "that does change you." Still a Tory, or a "Scoop Jackson Republican," he is no longer so chummy with Reagan; his continued advocacy of higher taxes irritates Reagan, and Will says he gets invited to the White House "not that much" any more. Given television's need for quick judgments, Will saves his more closely reasoned or idiosyncratic views for his Washington Post and Newsweek columns. But will he end up George Will or George F. Will?

William Safire, a self-styled "libertarian conservative," is also out of favor at the White House. In a recent column he complained that though he had once been a "lonely Reagan booster," he has been denied any interviews with Reagan because Safire "from time to time was-in Mr. Reagan's words to a press aide-hostile to us." Partly out of shrewd instinct, partly out of puckish perversity, Safire cannot be counted in anyone's corner, but "when my right-wing confreres and pols depart from principle I feel particularly pained." His working motto is "Kick them when they're up." He recently defended Bert Lance when he was down. Safire used to write speeches for Richard Nixon, but the fact that Nixon has been lately taken up by liberals for his advocacy of detente, Safire says, provoked a column calling Nixon "soft on Communism."

Joseph Kraft is known as middle of the road in his views; about the worst taunt he hears from the right is that he is "elitist." Reagan's overheard remark about bombing the Russians really angered him. "On the subject of nuclear weapons, as on so many other matters, Ronald Reagan is a thoughtless President," he wrote. "A serious question is whether the country wants a thoughtful President.. . My own feeling is that the country is off on a new round of unbridled materialism. Greed, which is never far from the surface in American life, is making another comeback." Strong words; but right or wrong they gain force coming from someone who does not predictably occupy an assigned political frequency. Simplistic labels may be convenient to an editor, but they can only diminish a columnist, whose independent mind is his most valuable asset. Labeled columnists recall the days of partisan newspapers and subservient editors, those unmourned days when the editor of Andrew Jackson's party newspaper saw to it that a fresh pail of milk was left on the White House doorstep every morning, often carrying it himself.