A Republican perspective.

As the fledgling Republican majority in Congress decides where to take America's issue agenda after "The Contract," it makes sense to follow the time-honored advice of years gone past: "Go West, young man!" Republicans must seize an issue on which most Americans are uninformed - administration of the Federal government's vast holdings of public lands in the Western states - and make it relevant and vital for everyone.

In a nutshell, the federal government controls more than one-fourth of the nation's land. In several western states, the government is virtually imperious. Uncle Sam owns more than 40 percent of all land in eight states, including more than 50 percent of California and more than 80 percent of Nevada.

For Westerners, this is a local control and personal economic issue. County commissioners don't want to surrender their land-use powers to the U.S. Forest Service. Ranchers want to keep grazing fees reasonable. Miners want access to government-owned minerals without being gouged for royalty payments. Loggers want access to forest resources without burdensome and prohibitive environmental regulations.

Explosive Issues

As events behind the Oklahoma City bombing reveal, some of the same passions that energized Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators are causing Westerners to coalesce into dissident groups ready to engage in a shooting battle with the feds, if necessary, over these issues.

But for many Americans east of the Pecos, these concerns of Westerners seem trivial at best or greedy at worst. Only the much-publicized shutdown of logging to save endangered owl populations seems to have crept into the national consciousness. And even that issue generates more joke material for Leno and Letterman than fodder for white-papers from conservative think-tanks located within the Beltway.

What Republicans need to do is recast the western public lands issue in a different role. America needs to see that when our government owns one-quarter of our nation's land, more is at stake than the mortgage payments of a few Coos Bay loggers or the cattle feed bills of some Arizona cowboys. In short, we must sell the message that "public lands are us," that all of us could benefit from a more enlightened, free market-based policy - that is to say, a more Republican policy - toward federal land, one of our greatest financial assets.

We can start down this road by emphasizing that Western land management is another example of elitist federal intrusion into something it knows almost nothing about. This is a simple message, but it can be a very powerful one. It explains, for the most part, why Colorado's U.S. Sen. Ben "Nighthorse" Campbell, a pro-choice Native-American, defected to the Republican Party. (Democratic opposition to a balanced federal budget was only the last straw for Ben.)

When Clintonites back East kept trying to "reform" grazing fees charged to ranchers using public land, Campbell once responded on Capitol Hill that "the problem with this place is too many people talk when not one of them knows what the hell they're talking about." He also barbed Clintonites in the Interior department with a letter saying, "It seems clear to me that there are still people in . . . (Interior) . . . who continue their crusade to push through public land reforms that fit their own elitist vision of the world, ignoring my and other elected representatives' constitutional responsibility to set policies governing our natural resources."

Republicans must establish in Easterners' minds a tighter linkage between Federal obtrusiveness in the West and a host of other populist issues that prove the central government is too big and too powerful and must be cut down to size. An even more powerful strategy would be to make western lands a pocketbook issue with importance for all Americans. Republicans must point out that policies proposed by the Clinton Administration would have cost taxpayers millions on account of damage to the cattle, forestry, and mining industries, had these policies been enacted.

The taxpayers employed by these industries would have had much less to contribute in taxes to Uncle Sam. Furthermore, increased retail prices for beef, lamb, and wood products would have touched virtually all of us.

To some extent, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and a few other Republicans in Congress have already tried to reposition the Western lands issues in this way, in an attempt to interest the non-Westerner. But almost none of our party leaders have taken the next step that would surely make this issue an important one to every single American, no matter where they live.

To do this, we'd have to get serious about a return to the 19th century policies of conveying public lands to private parties to encourage commerce and economic development. In that era, anyone who promised to improve and maintain a spread could go West and get title to 160 acres of federal land.

However, we could dispose of tens of millions of acres and help solve our budget crisis in Washington at the same time. Imagine offering welfare recipients in the Eastern inner cities the title to 100 acres of Western land in exchange for their irrevocable renunciation of their welfare entitlement. I'll bet a bunch would take it and become new pioneers.

Next time Republicans start looking for a way to express a bold new vision for reinventing government, let's tell them to go West.

David Hill is president of Hill Research Consultants, a national GOP polling firm based in The Woodlands, Texas.