Flash and filigree.

• Position: Bill Clinton's economic plan - Editorial

Writing in The Washington Post late in February, Thomas B. Edsall observed, "President Clinton has wrapped in the rhetoric of moderation an economic program that is, in fact, designed to overturn the anti-government ideology that underpinned the conservative revolution of the early 1980S."

Say what?

That remarkable bit of analysis demonstrates once again the validity of the old saw that beauty--and, for that matter, ugliness--is in the eye of the beholder. From our vantage point, Bill Clinton's economic program--wrapped in the language of conventional liberalism--is conservative by almost any standard except the atavistic one that prevailed in the Washington of the early 1980s. The predictable jeers from the Republican Right should mislead no one. The Clinton plan is a set of feeble halfway measures.

What adds insult to the injury of Clinton's timid undertakings is the rhetoric in which they are cloaked The President luxuriates in talk about "fundamental change," but what is most dramatic about his program is how little change it entails.

[Paragraph] His top-of-the-line proposal to increase the tax rates for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, if fully enacted, will leave those rates lower than they were halfway through Ronald Reagan's first term--and less than half what they were in the Nixon Administration.

[Paragraph] His all-out commitment (in words) to the effective and admirable Head Start preschool program is matched by a commitment to full funding--in 1999.

[Paragraph] His plan to boost the taxes paid by relatively well-off Social Security recipients "looks like the next step in a plan to chip away at Social Security from the top and turn it into a means-tested welfare program," as Doug Henwood pointed out in Left Business Observer.

[Paragraph] His modest cuts in military spending--which surprised even some boosters of the Pentagon, who were braced for much more substantial decreases--ignore the fact that the Cold War is over and perpetuate some monstrously expensive weapons systems for which no conceivable rationale exists.

[Paragraph] His proposals for job-creation and economic stimulation--members of the Administration seem unsure whether they amount to $30 billion or $40 billion or $50 billion--don't begin to deal with the needs of an economy that is recovering sluggishly, if at all, from the Bush recession. "A good stimulus package can probably get 200,000 to 500,000 jobs," says Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos...