JOHN SUNUNU, THEN PRESIDENT BUSH’S White House chief of staff, commented famously back in the spring of 1991 that Congress needn’t pass anything at all for the next 18 months. Everything was set for Bush’s reelection. He’d won Desert Storm and enacted several significant pieces of legislation (the Americans with Disabilities Act, the clean-air revisions), enough to guarantee a second term. What made Sununu’s remark so famous, of course, was how wrong he was. Yet now, Republican leaders in Congress may make the same mistake, thinking the budget deal is enough to ensure that the GOP holds the House and Senate in 1998. Take up big-time conservative issues and risk a public fight with President Clinton? Forget it. Asked if Republicans need a bolder agenda, House majority leader Dick Armey replied: “Balancing the budget and getting the first tax cut in 16 years — I don’t consider these particularly timid things.”
The idea behind the do-little strategy is that the budget deal, coupled with a strong economy, ensures a pro-incumbent environment next year. That, in turn, means Republicans would keep control of the House (now 228-206) and Senate (55-45). Republican leaders are convinced the budget deal is a winner because it emphasizes GOP themes — a balanced budget and tax cuts — while taking an issue on which the party is vulnerable, Medicare, off the table. More sparring with President Clinton might ruin the upbeat atmosphere. Besides, the president is enormously popular and would have the upper hand in most fights anyway. Thus, the GOP scenario this fall is to pass appropriations bills, ignore most other issues, and leave town by early November. Only one House Republican leader, Jennifer Dunn of Washington, has objected. What about next year? Republicans may present a reprise of Clinton in 1996, pursuing only a handful of small issues.
This is a perilous strategy. It gives the political initiative to Clinton and the Democrats. They will be free to fill the issue vacuum with proposals on health care, the environment, and education, all issues on which the GOP is playing catch-up. Yes, Clinton could overreach, as he did in 1994 with his statist health-care plan. But that’s unlikely. The evidence from his reelection is that Clinton is reconciled to a safer, incremental approach. Also, by yielding the initiative, Republicans would forgo a national election in 1998 on GOP issues. Instead, the differences between Republicans and Democrats on those popular issues — taxes, spending, size of government — would be blurred, thanks to the budget deal. A GOP dissenter, David Mcintosh of Indiana, insists: “Every time the Republican party has decided not to have a national election with clear-cut differences between ourselves and Democrats, we lose badly.”
The biggest problem for Republicans in relying on the budget deal is the party’s conservative base. The budget accord is reasonably popular with most voting blocs across the country but not with Republican base voters. They believe too much was given up to Clinton and too little gained. And the GOP base is critically important in what is likely to be a low-turnout election next year. Republican senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, calls it a “base election.” Even in a pro-incumbent environment, Republicans could lose the House if unmotivated Republicans fail to vote. At the least, the party would fail to achieve the 4- or-5-seat gain in the Senate and 20-seat pickup in the House normal in an off- year election.
Having worked so hard to arrange the budget deal, Republican leaders now overestimate its political benefits. True, it instantly produced a more favorable public attitude toward Congress. Almost any deal between the president and Capitol Hill would have done that. It lifted Clinton’s popularity. And it removed the issue Republican leaders fear the most, Medicare, from political debate in 1998. But continuing to extol the budget deal (“a dream come true,” says Rep. John Kasich) merely irritates conservatives. “We need to stop using that kind of language,” says Dunn, vice chair of the House GOP Conference. In truth, the deal didn’t generate the advantage for Republican members of Congress that GOP leaders had expected. The opposite occurred. In a national poll last month, voters said they preferred Democratic congressional candidates by 51-40 percent. A more recent Republican survey gave Democrats a 40-36 percent advantage.
Slowly, says a House member, “it’s dawning on the leadership” that more must be offered to voters, especially Republican voters, than the budget deal. “There’s a general belief among Republicans that it’s a beginning, certainly not an end.” House speaker Newt Gingrich, who’d been focusing on issues for the presidential race in 2000, is now engaged in crafting a 1998 agenda. Armey and Rep. Chris Cox of California, chairman of the House GOP Policy Committee, have polled members on issues to push next year. The top issue: tax cuts. In fact, the first 70 members to respond to a Cox questionnaire all cited tax cuts. Cox himself sent a memo to GOP members to “illuminate just how much remains to be done to correct the accumulated fiscal-policy errors of 40 years of Democratic Congresses.” Even with Republicans now in charge, he noted, “federal taxes this year will be 20 percent of GDP, the highest since World War II [and] the federal deficit will rise to $ 57 billion next year, up $ 23 billion.”
Should Republican leaders balk at a more aggressive agenda, House and Senate members may force one on them. Mcintosh says Republicans need to ” drive the wedge” between themselves and Democrats on tax cuts, affirmative action, and regulatory and legal reform. Already, Gingrich is talking privately about a large tax cut next year, not mere tinkering with the tax code. And he’s become more amenable to an assault on racial and gender preferences. For that, however, Gingrich would have to overcome his fear of taking on Clinton again. As recently as last week, Republican leaders were arguing against even modest changes in spending bills because they might provoke a presidential veto and government shutdown. GOP rebels — Mcintosh, Mark Souder of Indiana, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, plus others — pressed ahead anyway with conservative amendments. Ten amendments were voted on. On all 10, two-thirds of the Republican members voted with the rebels, a signal GOP leaders would be crazy to ignore.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
