by Douglas Turner
Knight Ridder-Tribune
WASHINGTON — The war on terrorism has not grabbed the hearts and minds of America’s college crowd, that is, if you accept the findings of a poll by a Republican pollster for a GOP-backed action group.
One can infer from the survey that a large segment of collegians don’t hold the same passions for what are described as “American values” or “Western culture” that some important people here do. And most collegians don’t think they are worth fighting for as currently packaged. A large share, 37 percent, of the students polled would evade Selective Service call-up, or draft, to fight terrorism, and only 35 percent who were summoned would willingly go overseas to root out the thugs.
Values druid William J. Bennett is the chairman of a new organization created by Empower America, the ideological shop where former housing secretary Jack F. Kemp has a desk and telephone.
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Bennett’s new outfit, Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, commissioned the survey of 634 college students May 2-12 by Frank Luntz, who once did sampling for Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House.
Fully 79 percent of the students do not believe that Western culture is superior to Arab culture, Bennett told reporters in a briefing at which this survey was unveiled.
Only 25 percent of the students said the values of this country were better than those of other nations. Bennett said he and his cohorts in AVOT were going out on a “mission band” to Columbia University and other campuses to set the record straight about values and terrorism, and I suppose whip up a little war fever for the Bush administration and other Republican officeholders in the bargain.
Before striking out for the University of California at Berkeley, another campus he mentioned, Bennett might want to drop by the White House to suggest that President Bush retune his message on the conflict.
Bush might end some students’ confusion about values by abandoning his doctrine of moral equivalency between the perpetrators and victims of wanton murder, as in the case of Israel and its neighbors.
Some college students would like to hear more from Bush about why he continues to cozy up to Saudi Arabian and other South Asian dictatorships whose people are awash in poverty and misery, and why he fails to specifically condemn Saudi-sponsored incubators of Islamic extremism. Bennett and Luntz lamented that less than half of the students knew the name of our secretary of state, less than a third knew who the secretary of defense is, and less than a fifth knew what Condoleezza Rice does for a living.
But it might better be asked why busy college students even would want to know. Few students could be blamed for seeing Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Bush’s national security adviser through the same Washington prism.
Some looking through that lens see a White House taking a feather duster to the privileged crooks who sank Enron, a president who’s offering safe harbor to air polluters, a White House whose minions on the Federal Elections Commission are dismantling campaign finance reform and a Congress bent on cutting welfare benefits while buttressing tax cuts for the rich, and amputating Social Security’s legs. Bennett and Luntz conceded their research should probe deeper into students’ understanding of American and Western values.
Values? What values? Not much is left of values after the 35-year party this nation’s legal, academic, corporate, religious and governmental institutions threw for themselves.
The result is that a large majority of students is turned off, and tuned out. Again. Good. Maybe they’re looking right now in the best place for values: Inside.
Douglas Turner is the Washington bureau chief of the Buffalo News. Readers may write to him at 1141 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.
