HOUSE REPUBLICAN WHIP TOM DELAY recently sent House committee chairman a simple message: Act boldly. DeLay had a particular episode in mind. In April, President Clinton had threatened to veto a supplemental spending bill because it lacked money for the International Monetary Fund. Go ahead, Republicans responded, veto it. Clinton hastily backed down and agreed to sign the bill.
Thus, DeLay told the chairman, there’s no reason for queasiness. Pass the most conservative bills possible, he said, and if need be, we’ll tinker with them later to win approval on the House floor. At a meeting of GOP leaders on May 5, speaker Newt Gingrich made a similar point. He insisted “there’s no turning back” from confrontation with Clinton. “Not one inch” he added.
What’s new here is the absence of fear. The terror that Clinton struck in the hearts of congressional Republicans after the ill-fated government shutdown in 1995 is gone. For more than two years, they were obsessed with Clinton’s ability to counterpunch. Would he try to isolate them as extremists, brand them as bad people without compassion? Would he try to pilfer their issues? These questions scarcely come up anymore. Instead, Republicans are sending bills to Clinton with the message “Take it or leave it” attached. Chairman Jesse Helms of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Clinton has one chance for funds to pay United Nations dues: sign a measure that includes an anti-abortion provision. In a letter to Clinton, House appropriations chairman Bob Livingston echoed Helms.
The best test of Clinton’s authority is whether he’s able to punish Republicans for such intransigence. At the moment, he’s not. His presidential- performance rating remains high despite the simmering scandals. But it no longer translates into political clout. “There never seems to be a price to pay for opposing Clinton on a legislative item,” says a GOP congressional strategist discovered this firsthand in April when they killed Clinton’s education proposals and passed their own. Was there any public backlash? Not a peep, says Republican Connie Mack of Florida. Better yet, the president now may sign a measure, championed by GOP senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia, to create education IRAs that parents could use for public- or private-school expenses. Clinton blocked the IRAs in 1997 and threatened a veto this year. But Coverdell got Democratic senator Bob Torricelli to intercede in early May directly with Clinton, who is reconsidering.
Exactly how much Clinton has been weakened by the sex scandal is a subject of considerable discussion on Capitol Hill. GOP senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania believes the president has lost both his moral and his political authority. Livingston isn’t so sure. Democratic representative Gary Condit of California says Clinton still has the ability to advance issues that ” resonate across the country” — if he finds the appropriate centrists positions. But Condit concedes that, post-Monica, this is harder. “It’s difficult for him since he’s bombarded every day with attacks.”
That’s not the only reason, however. The scandal has sharply limited Clinton’s maneuverability, always an important component of his political strength. Given the critical need to hold onto his base of support among liberal Democrats in Congress, the president isn’t free to move to the right and compromise with Republicans. What would happen, for instance, if he put together a new anti-teen-smoking bill that brought the tobacco companies on board? Republicans admit they’d be unable to block it. The question is, how would key Clinton allies like Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on chairman Dan Burton’s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, react? Not favorably, for sure. Or how would feminists, a key Democratic constituency, respond if Clinton signed the U.N. legislation that also cuts funds for “family planning” groups promoting abortion rights abroad? Angrily, no doubt. Indeed, how would Hillary Rodham Clinton react if the president suggested privately he might sign such a bill? Strongly enough to stop him from doing so, I’d bet.
But the most important thing the sex scandal has cost Clinton is his rhetorical advantage over Republicans. A minimum-wage hike, extending Medicare to folks as young as 55, even adding more child-care benefits — these major Clinton agenda items have all but vanished, and Clinton has not been able to revive them with speeches or photo ops. “On child care, he can’t attack us because we’ll just laugh at his idea of child care, looking after the White House interns,” says a GOP leadership aide. Managed-care reform, also part of Clinton’s agenda, is dicier for Republicans, but not because of the president. It’s likely to pass in watered-down form. What’s driving it, though, is public dissatisfaction with HMOs, not White House support.
Clinton’s prospects for regaining his political influence are negligible. He’s mired in the same spot Republicans were in the spring of 1995. After wowing everyone with the Contract With America, Republicans lost momentum following the Oklahoma City bombing and a little-remembered but consequential Clinton speech. On April 5, 1995, the president delivered what became known among White House aides as the “pile of vetoes” speech. He said he didn’t want to accumulate vetoes, and so he spelled out what issues were priorities and where he’d compromise with Republicans. He came off as presidential, moderate, and reasonable. This time, Clinton is the one who dazzled Washington with a string of initiatives announced last winter — then ran out of gas. Could he uncork another “pile of vetoes” speech? I’d be surprised. He and his staff don’t have time to figure out where Clinton should stand firm and where he should cave. They’re too distracted putting out daily fires and planning foreign trips intended in part to draw attention away from the scandal. Worse for Clinton, if he did make such a speech, few would take it seriously.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
