Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Columnist E.J. Dionne: Political counterparts join hands to support AmeriCorps

THE POLITICIAN'S version of acute memory loss involves forgetting everything except your grudges. So when two politicians put aside grudges for a cause, you have to take a close look at the cause.

This story concerns Harris Wofford, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who is now chief executive officer of the Corporation for National Service, and the Republican who oh-so-narrowly defeated him in his 1994 campaign for re-election, Sen. Rick Santorum.

The race was bitter, and Santorum did something that Wofford did not expect: He made an issue of Wofford's sponsorship of legislation establishing President Clinton's AmeriCorps program. It has sent over 100,000 volunteers into America's neighborhoods to build housing, help kids and senior citizens, fight crime and do scores of other good things.

How, Wofford wondered, could anyone say anything bad about such a fine idea? Santorum managed. Wofford remembers Santorum's devastating line against AmeriCorps this way: It was a program "for hippy kids to stand around a campfire to hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' at taxpayers' expense."

With a laugh, Santorum offers only a partial denial. "I never said anything about hippies," he insists.

When Wofford lost, he took an appointment from Clinton to head the corporation which oversees the AmeriCorps program. Wofford, a veteran of the civil rights movement who helped bring President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. together, holds an entirely unfashionable view. He thinks that human beings are ennobled when they give of themselves to others and that democracy is strengthened when people of different classes and races join together to solve problems.

As head of the corporation, Wofford's dream is to transform AmeriCorps -- which needs to be reauthorized by Congress this year -- from a pet Clinton project into a permanent part of the national landscape. "The political challenge," he said in an interview, "is to get national service reauthorized in a way that shows it's beyond politics, that it's like the Peace Corps and goes beyond one administration."

Doing that means reaching out to Republicans, and one of the Republicans he singled out for attention was Rick Santorum. An entirely unlikely choice, you might think, except that Santorum has his own passion: the idea that there is such a thing as "compassionate conservatism." Santorum argues that solving the problems of the poorest Americans means strengthening community groups, including religious groups, that battle those problems every day.

Wofford's pitch is simple: AmeriCorps is not some bureaucratic monstrosity, let alone a redoubt for Kumbaya fans. Two-thirds of its money passes through the governors to local community groups. The rest goes to traditional nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross.

What AmeriCorps does is to strengthen the very institutions Santorum loves, especially those that focus on the problems of children and the poor.

Rather than apologize for his old position, he credits Wofford for pushing AmeriCorps in the right direction -- to "get these people out of government service and put them into these small nonprofits where they're facilitators in the community, not bureaucrats with an agenda."

Another conservative who has altered his view of AmeriCorps is Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, a presidential candidate. "I have to concede I've seen some positive things in some very desperate situations that involve AmeriCorps," Kasich says.

With this sort of support, Wofford may get his wish for an AmeriCorps with a long future. And he'll even grant Santorum a point. On a visit to a youth conservation project in the High Sierras in California, he found himself sitting around a campfire with AmeriCorps volunteers. Yes, he says, "They gave me a rousing Kumbaya."

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