You’re feeling sorry for the Republican congressional leadership, aren’t you? Last week they rushed their beautiful football — the first legitimate budget-balancing plan in living memory — headlong into a few presidential vetoes. And it looks to you like they got knocked on their cans. The government “shutdown.” The Treasury Department was forced into bookkeeping maneuvers to pay its bills and keep entitlement money flowing. And Republicans, who have been dominating 1995 politics to an extent that makes them “responsible” for almost everything that happens in Washington, took the blame in public opinion polls.
The chickens are roosting. The conservative revolution is unpopular and sputtering. Right?
Nah. Save your pity. Congressional Democrats may soon need it. The spending battle’s fundamental partisan calculus hasn’t changed a bit. Presidential campaign politics still probably favor ultimate enactment of a 1996 budget very much like the one Hill Republicans are insisting on. And despite the polls, the current “train wreck” could actually help achieve that result.
Our “triangulating” president has, until recently at least, talked a phony middle path between “the extremes” of both congressional parties. He makes a great, exaggerated show of defending his own pet initiatives and decrying cuts in popular federal programs. At the same time, he endorses the Republican bottom line: fiscal balance through spending reductions, middle- class tax relief, and welfare and Medicare reform. In sum, Clinton betrays his party’s time-honored liberalism. It isn’t a winning platform anymore.
Had recent events not conspired to alter White House rhetoric, then, the budget process would have looked something like this:
The president would have signed a half-dozen or so of the 13 appropriations bills that fund most federal programs. He’d have first vetoed and then bargained on a few others, the better to protect some random billions. And one or two appropriations bills might yet be unresolved, which would suspend some programs. But not for long. Republicans do not care a whit about most such programs, after all. Mr. Clinton’s leverage there was always limited; time was a Republican advantage.
Time was not a Republican advantage on taxes and entitlements. Those programs never “shut down.” Even the federal debt ceiling can’t stop them; the ceiling was reached last week — and promptly eluded by government accountants, without so much as a burp from Wall Street. So Medicare, the central controversy here, was always going to be the last nut cracked. But White House and Republican Medicare proposals are not really all that far apart: $ 10 billion a year. However this dispute might finally have been settled and spun, we would have a Republican budget. And the Democratic New Deal would be entering its coda.
There’s been a scheduling interruption, as you know.
Congressional Republicans are behind in budget legislation. When the government’s spending authority lapsed at midnight Nov. 13 and the famous shut-down began, only three appropriations bills had been signed into law. One other had been vetoed. Nine hadn’t been sent to the White House at all. By now, President Clinton should be deeply implicated in domestic spending cutbacks. But he isn’t. And his argument against cutbacks generally has been strengthened as a result.
Then, too, that argument is louder than it would be had Clinton not committed a couple of amazing gaffes: acknowledging in public that he thought his 1993 tax increase was too large, and phoning columnist Ben Wattenberg to endorse tougher welfare reform. Those were two triangulations too many for embittered liberals in the president’s party. They finally broke into open revolt, forcing him to tack sharply left in his rhetoric.
And finally, there’ve been Republican debating blunders. The president has been handed excuses to oppose a balanced budget. Most notably, the GOP’s vetoed stopgap spending measure contained an unnecessary Medicare technicality that fairly begged for presidential demagoguery. By the middle of last week, after Speaker Gingrich let slip his annoyance over a snub on Air Force One, Republicans were looking a bit parochial and peevish, and their case for limited government was obscured.
Now what? Is White House triangulation out the window? Can the defense of the spending status quo succeed? Is a genuine, seven-year balanced budget dying?
Probably not. Don’t panic.
The last thing Bill Clinton wants to face in next year’s campaign is the accusation that he blocked a balanced budget to protect non-entitlement domestic spending. An ABC News/Ig/ashington Post poll last week showed almost half the country inclined to blame Republicans for a government shutdown. The same poll had more than half the country, a healthy 54-40 majority, saying that budget balance was more important than maintaining current levels of federal service. A zero deficit in seven years, without smoke and mirrors, is the GOP’s one non-negotiable demand. The president has never rejected it. On Oct. 19, in fact, he explicitly okayed it in theory — provided, of course, that it incorporates assumptions about future economic performance that would give him about $ 68 billion more to spend each year.
He’ll never get it all. But he doesn’t really need or want it all, either. Even if Republicans conceded everything on Medicare, again, it would “only” cost $ 10 billion. And the president’s very fondest budget dreams involve just a minuscule amount of additional cash. He wants to preserve his beloved AmeriCorps boondoggie. He wants some more education, welfare, and environmental money. Fine. Republicans should be careful not to go overboard – – baby steps in Clinton’s direction ought to be enough — -but a few billion here or there shouldn’t be a deal-killer. Those concessions can always be withdrawn in future years. It’ll be something to look forward to.
Welfare reform? In his post-Wattenberg retreat, the president has talked himself into a pretty tight box, and he may now be forced to veto a bill that three weeks ago he’d have loved to sign. In which case Republicans might not even bother attempting an override — so that their presidential nominee can spend next year scoring Clinton for having blocked an overwhelmingly popular, bipartisan initiative.
And the rest of domestic spending? Conventional wisdom has it that the current shutdown makes the entire Republican budget-cutting project appear hamfisted and “ideological.” Guess again. For example: There are 11,900 HUD employees nationwide. Last week, the Clinton administration itself declared 11,800 of them “non-essential” and sent them home. Details like that — the shutdown puts a giant magnifying glass on all of them — destroy the Democratic argument that Republican proposals will cut government to the bone. The shutdown has temporarily sliced far deeper into the federal carcass than anything contemplated in the Contract with America. And the worst of it seems to be inconvenienced tourists and passport applicants.
By the time this magazine reaches your hands, more than a quarter of last week’s 800,000 furloughed federal employees will have returned to work, and all will get back pay. Republicans will likely be passing limited legislation to reopen those few government off*ces that do matter to the general public. And the budget debate will have shifted back toward other discretionary programs, at HUD and elsewhere, that… well, have somehow never seemed less necessary.
President Clinton, therefore, may be tempted to drop his current uncompromising line much sooner than most observers expect. His Republican opponents have already recovered their bearings. Gingrich has them back on a strict balanced-budget message. And the president’s position will shortly devolve to this: He will be attempting to preserve higher spending levels for a series of federal programs on which only a small minority of Americans depends — by blocking all spending on those programs. It won’t make sense.
Anything can happen, of course. Apparently favorable instant polls are opium to a politician like Bill Clinton. He may actually have started to believe his own talking points. And the White House may yet conclude that it can dig in its Old Democratic heels and produce so much public disgust with gridlock that a Perot-style independent candidacy will siphon crucial support away from the eventual Republican nominee. But that’s a very big gamble. Campaign guru Dick Morris’s New Democrat strategy is still much the safer bet for Clinton. And the budget deal it requires — cosmetic, face-saving alterations to what will remain a very conservative, very Republican plan — is still within reach.
So don’t be too quick with sympathy for Republicans. Think of the poor Democrats. Sure, they’re momentarily gleeful in those minority caucus rooms on Capitol Hill. But there’s a better than even chance that liberalism is soon to suffer another triangulated Clinton betrayal. And this one will be a whopper.
David Tell, for the Editors
