What The Elephant Forgot
A friend of mine recently ran for office on the ticket of a right-of-center political party. He'd call me late at night, after finishing a hard day of campaigning, and burst into a self-mocking parody of the speeches he had been embarrassing himself by making from dawn to dusk. "Let me say how sickened I am by the evils of child abuse! I yield to no one in my condemnation of the illegal trade in puppies! We must move ahead, while leaving nobody behind!"
My friend is a British Conservative, but he could just as well have been running for Congress as a Republican. The vapid, empty politics he was ridiculing has become almost the official credo of Congressional Republicans. The party's politics today careers wildly from feel-good mini-policies a la Dick Morris (the cigarette tax increase) to vast but empty gestures (the repeal of the Internal Revenue Code).
Four years ago, the Republicans won a major Congressional victory by promising large and important reforms in the operation of the Federal Government. Four years later, they are hoping to hold onto their majority by refraining from doing anything at all.
Psychologists have observed that if you apply electric shocks to a dog at random intervals, it falls into a condition called learned helplessness. It decides it's going to be punished whatever it does and ends up lying on the floor and whimpering.
Something like that seems to have happened to the Republicans. They appear disoriented. They trample on their professed principles, discarding (for example) their alleged commitment to federalism by knuckling under to the President's poll-driven scheme to force all states to adopt the same drunken-driving rules. They meekly accept the gutting of the work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform law and abjectly assent to huge Presidential spending proposals.
Worse, they are dreaming up equally bloated spending programs of their own, like the colossal highway bill, which would leave scarcely a blade of grass in the lower 48 states unpaved. (Where are the environmentalists when we need them?)
By heroic effort, the Republicans narrowly avoided losing the House in 1996. Having won, they no longer seem to have any idea what to do with their victory.
This is sad, because very soon they are likely to have an opportunity to do a lot. The Clinton Presidency is badly damaged -- much more badly damaged than polls alone reveal.
This is a President who did not address the nation from the Oval Office during the Iraq crisis, who doesn't dare take questions from the press and who lives in dread of the evidence gathered by the independent counsel's office. Just as a weakened Richard Nixon offered his Democratic opponents national health insurance in 1974 if only they would relent on Watergate, this President too may soon be asking his opponents, "What can I do for you?"
Sometime between now and then, the Republicans need to work out an answer.
The right answer, or answers, must be bold without appearing reckless. In 1995, the Republicans wounded themselves with a program that sounded radical (to the alarm of some voters) without producing much in the way of political change. The task for 1998 is the opposite: to assemble a program that advances Republican principles while reassuring voters of the party's moderation and good sense. There are dozens of possible elements of such a program. But here
is one that might form the basis for all the others.
In his 1996 campaign, President Clinton claimed that the Government was the smallest it had been in 30 years. But the Federal tax burden as a share of gross domestic product will in the coming fiscal year exceed 20 percent for the first time since 1945. The figure was less than 18 percent when Mr. Clinton took office. The Tax Foundation, a Washington research organization, points out that tax burdens on middle-class families have returned to within whispering
distance of their 1981 peaks.
Mr. Clinton defeated Bob Dole by convincing Americans that any tax cut would require unacceptably large spending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and in education and environmental programs. But now, with the budget balanced, Republicans might be able to put their case in a new way.
In the 1999 fiscal year, the Federal Government expects to spend $6,443 for each of the 269 million people living in the United States. In 1996, President Clinton convinced Americans that the Federal Government should spend no less. Why, then, can't Republicans try to convince Americans that the Federal Government should spend no more? What if the Republicans made no net increase in per-person Federal spending their central negotiating demand? You could even fit it on a bumper sticker "$6,443 -- and not a penny more."
With the budget balanced and the economy growing, a per-person spending limit would quickly reverse the relentless growth in Government. Should the economy continue to chug along at the 4 1/2 percent predicted by the President's budget, a per-person spending limit would shrink the Government's overall tax claim to some 16 1/2 percent over the next five fiscal years. That would make about $330 billion available to return to the people in the form of grand tax
cuts, and all without nicking a single dollar from any existing Federal program.
Spin-meisters like Frank Luntz argue that Republicans should avoid harsh words like "cut" and "control" when referring to Government programs and instead say "preserve" or "protect." Somewhere along the way, however, what began as advice about communications metamorphosed into injunctions on policy. Not only did Republicans avoid talking about spending control; they ceased practicing it. Unfortunately, despite the spin-meisters -- despite Mr. Clinton's famous concession that "the era of big government is over" -- the battle over the size and scope of the Government remains the central divide of modern politics.
Republican leaders in Congress show little patience with external critics who do not have to face voters, who are not under attack by the President as "extremists" and who urge the Republicans to gird for another round of seemingly hopeless combat. But today's accommodationist strategy also exacts its price, and the feebleness and drift that we see in today's Republican Party are only the first installment.
There is a middle way between suicide and surrender, and the balanced budget gives Republicans a chance to explore it. They should put the spin-meisters back in their place: figuring out new and attractive ways to explain conservative principles, rather than figuring out new and attractive substitutes for those principles.
The Republican task now is to stand for something bigger and better than highway spending. Republicans must prove to the voters that as fervently as they oppose the illegal trade in puppies (and of course they yield to no one in their opposition to that!), they actually have some idea of what they intend to do with the trust the people have reposed in them.
Originally published in the Financial Post.