10B
Wednesday, January 11, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Newt Gingrich rolls with punches
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich's troops say one of the things they like best about him is the way he handles his mistakes. The House speaker is getting lots of practice at that as he adjusts to his new job.
Gingrich may have set a world record for speed in quashing an embarrassment with his firing Monday night of Christina Jeffrey, a political ally he had hand-picked to be House historian. She herself was history a few hours after Gingrich learned she'd been at the center of a 1880s furor over the Holocaust.
There were no months of mulling, agonizing or negative headlines. Instead, there was the clean break that is becoming a Gingrich hallmark. But
will the glitches become hallmarks as well?
Since the election that catapulted him to the speakership, Gingrich has made inflammatory remarks and pledged to tone down his style; promised an early vote on a school-prayer amendment to the Constitution then thought better of it; tempered one of the GOP's harsher welfare proposals; and, under intense political pressure, rejected a $4.5 million book advance he had fully intended to accept.
House Majority Leader Dick Arney, R-Texas, called the string of mini-controversies "minor distractions that haven't interfered with anybody's ability to work." Other supporters are equally unfazed.
If something goes wrong, said Rep.
Robert Walker, R-Pa., a key Gingrich adviser, "There's no sense trying to figure out a way to cover up on it. It's time to get it corrected and get on with our mission."
"That's New, and that' s what I like about him," said moderate Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn. "When he makes a mistake, he owns up to it and he changes it. It' s very reassuring because it means that if you're the butt of his mistake, he listens to you."
Republicans generally seem willing to accept Gingrich's foibles in exchange for his ability to plan, strategize and make things happen. "These were qualities the preceding speaker completely lacked," Johnson said bluntly of Democrat Thomas Foley of Washington.
Few politicians make the leap that
Gingrich did, from assistant minority leader to House speaker, second in the line of presidential succession. Some view the bumps in the road so far as inevitable given Gingrich's jump in status, his ambitious plans and his thinking-out-loud personality.
Some critics suggest Gingrich has displayed not inexperience or exuberance but insensitivity and a political ear.
Democrats were objecting to Jeffrey's appointment even before they knew she'd once written that a course on the Holocaust should not receive federal money because it did not give enough weight to the views of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. They criticized her partisan connections to Gingrich and her view that campaign contributors should not have to disclose their contributions.
Biographer watches Reagan's mind falter to Alzheimer's
The Associated Press
NEW YORK—As he slides into the mists of Alzheimer's disease, former President Ronald Reagan no longer recognizes old friends and once referred to a set of books as trees, his biographer said.
"About six months ago, he stopped recognizing me. Now I no longer recognize him," Edmund Morris wrote in the Jan. 16 issue of The New Yorker magazine.
Morris wrote: "For all the willingness with which he showed me his framed photographs, his jelly bean jar, and his view of the Hollywood Hills. I did not feel his presence beside me, only his absence."
At one point, Morris commented on a display of lead soldiers on a shelf and Reagan said, "He — We — we had to make space, uh — move those trees." Morris finally realized that Reagan was referring to a red-bound set of his own presidential papers, relegated to the shelf beneath the soldiers.
Job training programs may not work
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Half of the 163 federal job training programs fail to track whether participants actually find work, congressional investigators said Tuesday as Republicans opened hearings aimed at reforming the programs.
Congress never has paid much attention to results after passing job training programs that stretch back 50 years to the New Deal, said Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the new chairwoman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.
"Like barnacles collecting on the bottom of a ship, we have added training program upon training program, without ever taking the time to look back and see whether what we've done actually works," said Kaebaum, R-Kan.
In a report released before the panel's hearing, the General Accounting Office recommended major reforms and consolidation of job training programs,
which now sprawl across 15 federal agencies including the Defense and Justice departments.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, said some $20 billion in employment assistance is provided each year, but 50 percent of program administrators could not tell the GAO whether clients were finding jobs. Only 11 percent conducted studies to learn if their programs were effective.
But the GAO found extensive duplication, inefficiency and waste that often frustrates both people seeking jobs and employers looking for workers.
"Despite spending billions of dollars each year, most federal agencies do not know if their programs are really helping people jobs," said Clarence C. Crawford, GAO associate director for education and employment issues.
Kassebaum said her goal in the hearings is to shine "an honest light" on the
patchwork of programs to determine if some could be eliminated or combined with others.
"If a program cannot show it is providing those who need jobs with meaningful employment, then we should seriously ask ourselves whether or not it should be kept," she said.
The first of three days of hearings came as President Clinton proposed a new program to issue job training grants to unemployed and low-income people. The money could come from "dozens of different training programs," the president said.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who chaired the committee before the Republican takeover of Congress, applauded Kasshemua for taking on the job training issue but cautioned against any consolidation that encroached on education programs.
Kennedy said the GAO report had listed 163 different training programs by including some education programs.
"This is an area where we can do better. We don't want to substitute a bureaucracy, or a series of bureaucracies, for another bureaucracy." Kennedy said. "We want to make sure we are considering training programs. I hope we would consider education in its context."
A Seattle woman who went through eight different job training programs while trying to get off welfare for 16 years told the committee she never was asked to learn a skill, only taught to fill out job applications and look for work.
Now, after proper training and some remedial math and reading courses, she can operate a fork lift and is learning computers on the job.
I naive no doubt that I will never need to draw welfare again," Ernestine Dunn told the panel. "I only regret that it took so long to get here."
Discontinued contraceptive does not meet safety rules
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — The maker of the Today Sponge, once the most popular over-the-counter contraceptive for women, is discontinuing the product because it can not meet stringent new government safety rules.
Whitehall-Robins Healthcare, which voluntarily suspended production of the sponges last year, said yesterday that it would cost too much to upgrade its manufacturing plant to meet the rules. Whitehall is the world's only maker of contraceptive sponges.
The Food and Drug Administration last year said it found unacceptably high bacteria levels in water and air at the plant in Hammonton, N.J., where the sponges
were made.
The sponge's market share of all female contraceptives, including prescription products like the pill, peaked at around 2 percent, Whitehall said.
Despite that small number, the sponge had an important niche, said Beth Frederick, representative for Alan Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization in New York.
"For women who had problems with hormonal methods, or weren't in a position to use a condom or had difficulty with an IUD or no physician, it had a lot of advantages," she said. "It was over-the-counter and it was women-controlled and limiting choice is never a good thing."
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