Washington Adrift
CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER
Second Thoughts WASHINGTON ADRIFT By Christopher Clausen Call it a leadership vacuum, paralysis, gridlock, or whatever you like, but the United States government is drifting as it hasn't...
...A long series of events, from the 0. J. Simpson trials to the ravings of Louis Farrakhan to changes in the welfare law, has made it clear that black and white Americans still view many aspects of the world differently...
...The problem is that the government already does a lot, and much of what it does isn't helping...
...Now is the time to solve some venerable problems, but the paralysis of government makes it almost impossible to do so...
...Elite pundits on Sunday morning will sometimes add that politicians have never been popular in America, that Washington is both less partisan and more honest (at least in personal finances) than it was in Abe Lincoln's time, and that people who can't tell you the names of their own Senators haven't earned the right to be cynical...
...After all, the deficit has gone down, inflation has stayed down, and our biggest competitors have been suffering recessions...
...A week later the Dalai Lama finally received the same kind of brief, semiofficial audience...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich floats weightlessly into the stratosphere like a gas balloon with a broken string, while Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott lumbers about the earth in search of some action to justify his journalistic title of the most powerful man in Washington...
...Money in this case means not the actual greenbacks themselves, which are apolitical, but the influence of whatever nefarious person or group donated them...
...China...
...Ideological flexibility may sometimes be a good thing, but it's impossible to lead for long without having some sense of direction...
...Congress hems and haws about tax cuts...
...One of the attractive things about Clinton, in his Democratic Leadership Council days, was his skepticism about the government's dividing its citizens up by race and sex coupled with genuine concern for Americans who had suffered from discrimination...
...Whether he was, deep down, an old-fashioned big-government liberal or a New South New Democrat, we would finally know the truth, and the truth would make him (if not us) free...
...The balance-of-payments deficit remains huge, but that's a sign of affluence...
...The upper parts of some major icebergs are already visible on the horizon...
...Having done so, he could also raise problems of poverty with much higher credibility...
...Actually, they're not...
...The phenomenon of bad politicians driving out good because the public lost interest in making the distinction has a sad history...
...The President is the leader of the free world, a man everybody is supposed to look up to...
...Insolvency...
...Whether these are anything more than hollow gestures remains to be seen...
...Here are a few examples...
...whether for good or evil is not yet clear...
...It would be comforting to think the Administration has discreetly made its Chinese counterparts aware that no American President could tolerate the retaking of the island by force, but saving trouble later by being unambiguous sooner has not been a hallmark of recent American diplomacy...
...As I said here recently ("Munich in Beijing," NL, March 24), how to deal with the present regime in China may constitute the greatest foreign policy challenge since the beginning of the Cold War...
...The Administration takes credit for the boom...
...Instead the President struck poses about voluntarism, or pretended that the Internet would solve the problems of education, while Congress debated whether Speaker Gingrich had made the right decision about how he intended to pay the $300,000 fine imposed on him...
...Both parties seem burnt out at the moment...
...a state of affairs that may be revolutionizing the law from outside the normal legislative process...
...The dangers here are, first, that people who distrust all politicians will take even less trouble to inform themselves...
...It may sound as though Democrats and Republicans, the White House and the Congress, Clinton and Gingrich are equally responsible for the present malaise...
...The Presidency has far more power, prestige, and therefore responsibility than any other individual or institution...
...that paralysis in the Federal government is something the public should be thankful for...
...But it's precisely at such times that big crises tend to build up unnoticed...
...Any night of the week you can hear commentators bemoan the "cynicism" that voters (or in most cases now nonvoters) feel toward government...
...The belief that everyone in government is a crook gives real crooks a free pass...
...Lee went away, as so many Clinton guests do, convinced the President agreed entirely with his way of thinking...
...They might have a point if such large parts of the controversies mentioned above weren't about existing government actions, and consequently unresolvable without further action of some sort...
...Since the fears of both sides are well-grounded, such issues as the justice and efficacy of the host of programs that cluster under the name of affirmative action are left to the courts, or to popular referenda...
...Second Thoughts WASHINGTON ADRIFT By Christopher Clausen Call it a leadership vacuum, paralysis, gridlock, or whatever you like, but the United States government is drifting as it hasn't drifted since the last two years of the Eisenhower Administration...
...There should be much more attention devoted to where we go from here...
...Usually the implication is that the fundraising practices of both parties justify the cynicism, and that what we need to "restore trust" is to eliminate the baleful influence of money in politics...
...Race" ??”mostly meaning the troubles of black Americans...
...But the habits of a lifetime are hard to break...
...The less government does, the better...
...is an obsession with American intellectuals and newspeople...
...Rome itself may not be burning yet, but too many people are fiddling...
...Congress shows no sign of picking up the slack...
...Still, cable TV and talk radio magnify hugely whatever distresses were around in Lincoln's day, and polls indicate that public distrust of government is uncomfortably high for a democracy...
...The Speaker of the House is a poi, a man of the back rooms who is supposed to keep 435 turbulent legislators in line...
...one could plausibly argue that the government should do nothing...
...Many people hoped that once he had waged his last campaign, President Clinton would at last show what he stood for, andreally stand up for it...
...Of course, it's just possible that in spite of everything, Medicare will get the help it needs, or that the much-publicized budget compromise between the White House and Congress will really bring us to balance in 2002...
...Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright will attend the July 1 ceremony in which Britain hands Hong Kong over to China, apparently in order to insure that everything is done according to John Stuart Mill...
...What the government should do about it is debatable...
...Many conservatives would say ??”in fact, have said...
...During the next recession we may rue the fact that in flush times the budget was not balanced, no lasting solution to Medicare's difficulties was enacted, and little was done to reduce the size of the underclass...
...Welfare has now been "reformed...
...Once he became President, the need to maintain his base and keep Jesse Jackson out of the 1996 primaries turned him into a lockstep defender of all preference programs that the courts had not actually overturned, and even some that they had...
...cutting taxes, banning "'partialbirth" abortion, extinguishing the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Foreign affairs are primarily the responsibility of the Executive branch, which at the moment seems hopelessly confused on the subject...
...a more organized Ross Perot, say, or an up-to-date Huey Long...
...Even in the heyday of Congressional government a century ago, no President ever dreamed of one day becoming Speaker...
...Second, when some buccaneer from outside the political system promises to clean things up in military or corporate style by abandoning the discredited rituals of democracy...
...Beleaguered by the worst scandals since Watergate, the Clinton Administration devotes itself to public-relations exercises like crusading against tobacco while waiting tensely for a whole shipload of other shoes to drop...
...Race, poverty and related issues...
...Perhaps only Clinton, with his empathy for blacks, could have done away with the divisive, discriminatory forms of affirmative action while putting the whole debate about economic justice on a stronger footing...
...without ever building up enough momentum to accomplish anything...
...After the unexpectedly sharp criticisms of Vice President Al Gore's recent shilly-shallying in Beijing, the White House tried to reposition itself rhetorically by agreeing to let Martin Lee, chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party and a minor b??te noire to the Communists, spend 25 minutes with President Clinton...
...Here it's hard to avoid stepping on more clich?©s...
...All of this is unfortunate because it deprives us of an honest, focused debate about a whole range of issues...
...there may not be muchresistance...
...One of the clich?©s of political history is that only Richard Nixon, with his antiCommunist credentials, could have gone to China...
...Public alienation from the political system...
...A Democratic President who was willing to examine forthrightly the ethnic and sexual quotas the government has devised in the last 30 years would perform an enormous public service on a poisonous issue...
...Because he chose instead to "triangulate" by refusing to touch most preference programs while signing Republican welfare reform, the whole congeries of issues for which "race" stands is in worse shape than when he took office...
...In short, the country is waiting, without quite knowing it, for new leadership...
...Plenty of other issues will get worse the longer they're neglected, but maybe war, revolution and economic collapse are enough for one column...
...The trouble is, nobody likes being called either a racist (the conservative fear) or a big-spending do-gooder (the liberal fear...
...With the economy booming, everyone except Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and a few investment analysts has stopped worrying about the national debt, the effect of inflation on retired people, the challenge of competitiveness in a global market, and other burning economic issues of three or four years ago...
...More likely, whatever version finally passes will finesse the biggest difficulties and, like Clinton's original budget proposal, postpone most of the spending cuts until everybody involved has left town...
...Meanwhile, politicians protect themselves with a phony bipartisanship...
...Commentators who write about this state of affairs usually add that, fortunately, there aren't any big crises demanding more energetic attention...
...At the opposite end of the Mall, the Republicans in Congress stumble from one issue to another...
...In the fifth spring of his Administration, Clinton seems no more committed to any basic principles than he did in the first...
...Once it has Hong Kong, the next renewal of its most-favored-nation status, and admission to the World Trade Organization under its belt, Beijing will turn its attention to Taiwan...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 8
