DESPERATELY SEARCHING FOR WILLIAM GLADSTONE

Conservative Republicans are on a desperate search for another William Gladstone, the Victorian Prime Minister of England who was elected four times by a nation worried about the extravagance of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, the original big spending conservative – long before America's Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Although Disraeli led the Conservative Party, he spent jillions colonizing India and titillating Queen Victoria with the title "Empress of India." Disraeli surprised his own party by buying up the private shares in the Suez Canal Zone project. Every time English voters grew to fear bankruptcy, they would vote out Disraeli and his Conservative Party and elect William Gladstone's Liberal Party, which would come in and set things right. Gladstone was so solid on finance that the world even named a suitcase after him. Like the Prime Minister, the Gladstone bag was wide, solid and extremely stable when placed on a train station platform.

The reason Republican conservatives are looking for another William Gladstone has to do with the August antics of House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who has not lived up to his name when it comes to spending the taxpayers' money.

In early August, a huge problem confronted Tom DeLay and his well-cowed House Republicans. The numbers gang in Washington announced that the Federal budget deficit was going to shrink from $412 billion to a mere $325 billion. While that seemed like good news to economists and people endowed with common sense, it sent chills through the ranks of the Republican leadership.

But the intrepid Tom DeLay was up to the task of saving the deficit. Within days he had whipped his followers into all kinds of new spending bills designed to restore the budget deficit to a level in keeping with the greatest power on earth. (Mr. DeLay's other great power resides elsewhere, busily engaged in the intelligent design of future congressmen.)

There was a huge $82 billion supplemental bill for helping out the tsunami victims and the uniformed American victims serving in Iraq. Another $1.5 billion was added for veterans' healthcare – a good thing and long overdue. Then there's a whopping $14 billion energy bill to bail out the oil industry, which is already reporting record earnings and profits. (Exxon is making so much money that it's busily buying its own stock back while reducing oil production by four percent.) Some of the energy bill's money even tilts at windmills and other unproductive energy gambits like ethanol, which requires 34 percent more energy to produce than it generates. (Once upon a time, farmers earned what their corn brought in on the open market. Then they got big subsidies. Now they get new markets on top of subsidies. It's no wonder corn farmers love turning hog food into oil.)

Add in a few other things, and Mr. DeLay's Republicans have generated a new spending package of $98 billion. If you include the debt service cost of $21 billion attached to the spending bundle, the total cost leaps to $119 billion. Which restores the deficit back over $420 billion. All of which means that the Grand Old Party will have lots of goodies to pass out in Congressional districts well in advance of the 2006 election season.

The projects found in the huge $286.5 billion transportation bill appear to have been proposed by those exempted from the recreational drug laws. A tidy sum is to be spent on a bridge in Alaska which goes from the mainland to a virtually uninhabited island. The state also received another $2.9 million to make a movie about state roads, something sure to excite Hollywood. Another neat chunk of money goes to the construction of recreational bike trails – a project bound to rediscover that people prefer cars to bikes. (Just ask the Chinese.) Virginia, a more sophisticated state than Alaska, won $600,000 to build equestrian trails. New York City, preferring to stick to cars, won $8 million to build a Harlem hospital garage and $4 million to fight graffiti. Fort Totten, New York, got $2.2 million to build a waterfront esplanade.

Crushing the barriers of logic and reasoning, DeLay's minions allocated transportation funds for museums. Warren, Ohio, gets $2.75 million for the National Packard Museum. The Henry Ford Museum gets $1.2 million - even though the Ford family and the Ford Foundation could easily pony up ten times that amount. There's even money left over for the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, New York.

Altogether, the transportation bill signed by President Bush is stuffed with over six thousand congressional "special requests" adding up to about $24 billion.

This is not just an attack on Mr. DeLay and his Republican followers. Remember that Senators Ted Kennedy and Hilary Clinton, Congressman Barney Frank and Maxine Waters and all the Democrats happily and enthusiastically joined Mr. DeLay in plundering of the federal treasury.

Next year when you are banging in and out of unrepaired potholes, think about how nice it must be riding those Virginia horse trails or gliding across a completely untraveled bridge in Alaska. Or whizzing across those fancy, pothole-free bike trails. Or sipping a cappuccino on the Fort Totten esplanade.

And when you get angry enough, join the search for a William Gladstone for your congressional district – and throw the current bum out.