FDR scorned, the FEC starves.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Franklin Roosevelt memorial; Federal Election Commission's lack of funding - Column

When I first saw the new FDR memorial, I thought, some rightwinger is going to have a field day with this. Sure enough, Pat Buchanan erupted in the pages of The Washington Times: "To watch self-styled `conservatives' vie with one another in bending the knee at the shrine of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is to appreciate the rot at the core of a once-great movement."

Buchanan, in whose addled mind the Cold War rages on, is still mad at FDR about Yalta. And he sees the New Deal as a dangerous slide toward socialism. He is honked off that Republicans in Washington participated in dedicating a memorial to a President whose "regime was shot through with communist spies and traitors."

But you don't have to have rabies to agree with Buchanan that there's something amiss about the recent canonization of FDR. At the dedication, President Clinton and members of Congress came together to pay homage to a man whose legacy they are busily destroying. It was a little surreal. And then there's the memorial's monstrously ugly design.

It is, as a conservative talk-radio host put it, "the first P.C. memorial." Forget the controversy about whether or not to put FDR in a wheelchair. (There's only one tiny little wheel visible on the back of his chair. You have to crawl around behind the statue to see it.) The whole memorial is so inclusive as to lack any focus at all. The date on which FDR came down with polio is memorialized, in what looks like a concession to the disabled. But so is just about every other historical event during the course of Roosevelt's life. Statues by George Segal show people standing in bread lines, an anonymous Depression-era civilian listening to a fireside chat, and an impoverished rural couple. There's a frieze of a funeral cortege with some anonymous mourners and an anonymous dead person, near the giant words carved in stone: "I Hate War." There's even a replica of a dam with water flowing over it, called the "TVA Cascade," in honor of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The overall effect is of a historical theme park--as if war and bread lines were quaint relics of the past, instead of the seething modern problems they are.

I was still moved by those famous lines: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, illclad, ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

But it's a long way from that rousing idealism to three...