AT A WASHINGTON STRATEGY SESSION for conservatives last week, Paul Weyri ch was pounding the table about the disasters attendant upon the Republic shoul d a lobbying reform defr to right-wing hearts fail in Congress. The next day, L amar Alexander came to the Cato Inst itute to declare that the Republican revolution had run aground. Across the nation, conservative activists feared lest Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser run for president.
All these hands were being wrung the week that the Senate passed welfare reform by a vote of 87 to 12. In the House of Representatives, Republicans were off to a good start in what looked to be thtoughest fight of the revolution — Medicare reform. The effort to pare Medicare reverses the 30- year momentum of Great Society entitlement programs, just as the welfare bill undoes a 60-year-old framework for poverty programs. Surely if there was a week to step back find count some blessings, this was it.
It’s said that bull markets climb a wall of worry. The Republican revolution has to scale a fortress of anxiety. No wonder the country has little sense that things are changing in Washington.
On Friday, Sept. 22, by the time the House Ways and Means Committee began its one-day hearing on Medicare, it was clear the major lobbying organizations were willing to live with the Republican plan. They seem to have accepted the deals that Gingrich, in a spirit of compromise, has offered them. The American Medical Association is getting malpractice reform. The American Association of Retired Persons can continue to sell insurance, and may be able to peddle more still. Conservatives are getting medical savings accounts. Hospitals are getting antitrust waivers. Maybe everybody isn’t happy, but they are mollified.
Even so, the hearing was beastly for committee chairman Bill Archer. To reduce their exposure to enemy fire, the Republicans decided to hold only this one hearing on the plan, and determined it would last only one day — and all this without even releasing a copy of their bill. Ranking Democrat Sam Gibbons wasn’t lunging at Republican neckties, as he had earlier in the week, but he was smoldering mad that there was nothing for him to pick apart. He didn’t get the chance to call the Republicans a bunch of Hitlers, as he had on Wednesday, because fellow Democratic Rep. Pete Stark beat him to the punch by likening the proceedings to Nazi trials. Charlie Rangel of New York bombarded Archer with sarcastic questions: Where’s the bill? Has the Congressional Budget Office yet determined what kind of savings the bill will generate?
When Archer gets angry his eyes dart back and forth as if he were watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match. But he sat there and took it. The Republican diffculty in establishing a positive mood was captured during the testimony of Roland King, former chief actuary for the Health Care Financing Administration. As he was endorsing the GOP effort, a group of old people wearing “Shame” tee- shirts stood up, shepherded by a young woman in a business suit who was simultaneously offering to arrange media interviews with them. The Democrats had rows of old ladies screaming about death. They held a mock hearing al fresco on the Capitol grounds to demand more hearings inside, where it’s air conditioned. The Republicans steered attention back to their actuary, reeling out numbers so dull they made your teeth hurt.
Amazingly, the dullness is working. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times released a poll showing that 60 percent of Americans favor across-the-board increases in monthly premiums. Only 11 percent agree with Sam Gibbons that the program is financially sound. (Gibbons said Friday that Medicare Was so sound Congress should be throwing champagne celebrations.)
But there is little outright good cheer in conservative ranks. Part of the anxiety stems from differing senses of how fragile the Republican revolution is. On one side are those who fear that Republican power is a rose, beautiful but doomed to withe. Others consider it a sapling that will grow bigger add stronger. More Washington conservatives are thinking flower rather than tree, and so they are a little manic.
Along with that comes a hair-trigger sensitivity to deviationism, a penchant for seeing each setback as a failure instead of just a delay, and a tendency to get gloomy over tactical retreats and while paying scant attention to strategic victories. Consider the welfare bill. Many conservatives in the Senate are low because in the last three weeks they had to malke one concession after another to GOP moderates. But the final law, which will probably be close to thSenate bill, is a world-historical change from the current system.
It is true that Republicans endure something akin to what Mike Schmidt experienced at the hands of Philadelphia sportswriters: the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it the nxt day. But as all baseball fans know, and conservatives might do well to recall, Mike Schmidt kept slugging for 18 years.
by David Brooks
