A YEAR AGO EVERYONE — Republican and Democrat — was predicting that by now President Clinton would be relegated to irrelevance and on his way to unemployment. Instead, the Republican Congress has been stalled by a very-far- from-irrelevant Clinton, and the Republican presidential nominee trails the president by up to 15 points in the polls. What went wrong?
An emerging consensus among Republicans and conservatives has already fingered the culprit: It’s all Congress’s fault. What went wrong, this consensus says, was that the Republican majority wasted too much time trying to cut the federal budget. Rather than sounding broad, uplifting themes like economic growth and moral renewal — themes that could elect a Republican president in 1996 — the Republicans in Congress bored and frightened the public by threatening to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and other spending programs.
From a narrowly political point of view, this blame-Congress analysis may well be right. Had Congress contented itself with passing a big tax cut, slashing welfare payments to unwed mothers, installing the V-chip, and curtailing immigration, Republicans today might well enjoy higher popularity ratings. If politics is a game, then the strategy of the Republicans in Congress probably was every bit as much in error as the critics say.
But what if politics isn’t a game? What if a political victory is not just a convenient jumping-off point for winning further political victories, but an opportunity actually to put one’s professed beliefs into practice? Having been entrusted with political power by the people, could the congressional Republicans in conscience have continued to spend the people’s money at the pace that President Clinton wanted to spend it? Could they have averted their eyes from the explosive growth of the two big health-care programs? What exactly do critics of the Congress think it should have done?
We hear a great many warnings against the dangers of “mere budget-balancing. ” We’ve developed an entire vocabulary of abuse for congressional Republicans who took their responsibility for the public purse seriously. They have a ” green-eyeshade mentality.” They practice “root-canal economics.” They’re forgetting that “values matter most.”
But the budget is not just a book of tedious figures. It is not a collection of accounting rules. The budget of the United States government is the place where political ideas are transformed into material fact. Are you worried that economic growth is slowing down? Tax rates cannot stay low so long as pension and health costs are increasing at a pace of nearly 10 percent a year. Are you concerned that too many Americans are quitting work to scrounge a living from welfare? Much of the blame goes to the casual way in which the Social Security Administration splashes disability benefits about. Do you dislike bilingual education? There’s a line in the budget that helps keep it in existence.
So long as the Republicans leave Tip O’Neill’s budget alone, they’ll be running Tip O’Neill’s government-and defending Tip O’Neill’s values. The budget get is every bit as much a moral document as William J. Bennett’s Book of Virtues. Every time Congress takes a dollar from someone’s pay packet to pass on to somebody else, it is making a moral decision. So long as Republicans remained in the minority in Congress, complaining about those moral decisions may have been the most they could do. But for a year and a half, they have possessed the power to do something more than complain. To suggest that they refrain from using that power in hope of winning the next election is worse than opportunistic — it is a betrayal of the electorate’s trust.
The truth of the matter is that Congress gress never faced a choice between cutting spending and addressing social decay. The alternative didn’t exist. Nobody has a convincing, comprehensive plan for addressing America’s social problems. What Congress can do, though, is eliminate the incentives that Congress itself has created for self-destructive tive and antisocial behavior. It can stop taxing work-effort so heavily and subsidizing non-work so generously; it can return much more of the responsibility for our personal well-being to our own individual hands; it can eliminate perverse programs.
The real choice for Congress never lay between cutting spending and solving the problems of unwed motherhood, crime, and cultural degradation. The real choice lay between cutting spending and talking about the problems of unwed motherhood, crime, and cultural decline while timidly leaving the bloated carcass of Big Government untouched.
Conservative critics of the Republican congressional majority should bear in mind how modest the budget cuts voted by the House of Representatives and then the whole Congress actually were. A balanced budget in seven years hardly amounts to a draconian imposition of discipline. If even the modest incremental move toward restraining government that was attempted in 1995-96 was too much, if acting as soon as the Republicans had gained a majority in two houses es of Congress was premature, one has to wonder: How little ought to have been done? How long should the Republicans have waited? Until after the next presidential election? But elections are staged every 24 months in the United States: If you delay until it’s politically safe to take decisive and necessary action, action will never be taken.
And it may well be that this wait-until-after-1996 mentality bears more of the guilt for the Republicans’ present troubles than any of the alleged excesses of Kasich and company. Pat Buchanan’s disquieting success in the Republican primaries was fueled less by protectionism than by disillusionment. While Lamar Alexander ran strongest among those primary voters who thought that the Republicans in Congress had “gone too far,” Buchanan fared best among those who complained that they had not “gone far enough.” Buchanan ran particularly well among young voters: In New Hampshire, he got 31 percent of the vote of those younger than 29; Dole, just 18 percent. Among young conservatives, Buchanan was the only Republican igniting any real enthusiasm.
Why? Surely not because these kids are responding to the dark undercurrents of Buchananism. Perhaps it’s because Buchanan remembered what the pundits who condemn the Republican Congress are forgetting: that conservatism in welfare- state America must be an audacious politics, a politics of large possibilities, and not just a delicate tinkering with a status quo that conservatives condemn, but don’t dare to reject.
by David Frum
