Conservatism After the Budget Battle
the weekly Standard Conservatism After the Budget Battle It was nice while it lasted. The GOP owned sole bragging rights to credibility on the balanced budget. It was a hugely popular goal and...
...President Clinton would not...
...But are there more than a few thousand people in the entire country who could understand exactly why...
...1, 2001, to find some more money in the budget to reach balance...
...The numbers mislead, each side proclaims...
...That question had worked to Democratic disadvantage by margins of three- and four-to-one...
...Seven years and CBO" has been the loudest Republican demand since November, and it has, however narrowly, been met by the White House...
...Swallowing hard and forging a deal would help Republican congressional candidates in the fall...
...Alternatively, Speaker Gingrich and Senator Dole might attempt to engineer a more favorable compromise with congressional Democrats...
...Simple: It meant support for an end to federal deficits by 2002, a goal Democrats and liberals opposed...
...But that deal would disappoint conservative policy principle and help Clinton's reelection chances, too...
...But that first Clinton budget featured $200-billion annual deficits into the next century...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...The newspapers are dutifully printing boxed charts purporting to show how "far" the president has "moved" toward the GOP since his original spending request for fiscal year 1996...
...The credit the White House claims for good-faith budget bargaining these past few months is wholly undeserved...
...The issues that move the electorate are still the natural province of the GOP Seize the year...
...It vanished on Saturday night, January 6, when President Clinton played his trump card: a budget plan, certified by the Congressional Budget Office, that gets to zero (in theory) in seven years...
...That might once have worked-before the president submitted a balanced budget...
...Wait, wait, conservatives will say: no fair...
...As the budget battle stands, the president and Congress are divided by policy differences that involve less than 1 percent of total federal spending...
...Or so we're supposed to believe...
...And his middle-class tax cut, which is stingy to begin with, expires one month before election day in the year 2000, as if the laws of politics might somehow magically be suspended in the future...
...What did it mean to be a conservative in national politics for most of the past year...
...President Clinton is gleefully waving around a letter from CBO director June O'Neill that proves it...
...Nor has he offered a budget that can with justice be mentioned in the same breath as the admirably sturdy and serious Republican plan...
...even if the votes are there to pass such a bill, there's no chance this odd coalition could successfully override a Clinton veto...
...He hasn't "moved" an inch...
...At least that's what you'd expect and hope the Republican party's overarching, relentlessly promoted message to be...
...Pollster Fred Steeper told us, in the wake of the 1994 election, that cultural conservatism was the Republican revolution's primary cause...
...This will force whoever is president on Jan...
...So the Clinton budget is something of a political scam...
...Conservatism means to replace this ubiquitous federal presence in American life with a revivified private sphere, by returning some significant portion of current government authority (and tax dollars) to individual citizens...
...Except that Clinton's version of this budget preserves existing federal commitments to the elderly, the poor, the young, and God's green earth, while the GOP proposal relaxes those commitments in favor of more generous tax relief for families and job-creating businesses...
...Take away the loaded rhetoric, and that's essentially true...
...Until the year 2002, Clinton proposes to squeeze only the tiniest droplets of necessary cash from the entitlement programs that are spending themselves and the country into insolvency...
...And they're right...
...Poof...
...The GOP had better dust off the meatier, limited-government conservatism it has submerged in months of budget horse trading and remind the country-and itself-why Bill Clinton shouldn't be reelected in November, whatever the budget outcome might be...
...This leaves Republicans and conservatives with limited options in the short term...
...A troublesome development, indeed, for Republicans and conservatives...
...Any way you cut it, getting to zero, green-eyeshade style, has suddenly and dramatically receded in importance for the rest of this year...
...This is an unlikely scenario...
...And they're right...
...those policy differences are "profound" and "fundamental...
...Most of the savings with which the Clinton budget is scheduled to totter over the finish line will be achieved all at once, at the very last moment...
...The Republican plan would "block-grant" Medicaid, incorporate medical savings accounts into the Medicare program, and open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration...
...He is willing to accept none of the major structural reforms required to salvage those programs-or ensure overall federal fiscal health-much beyond that date...
...And to deal with it, Republicans need to shift the focus of their energy away from number-drenched budgeteering and toward, instead, a presidential campaign in which ideological conservatism might (and should) still carry the day...
...Nor can CBO pronounce with confidence on the implications of a current spending proposal for fiscal balance 15 or 20 years from now...
...And the sooner they do it, the better...
...It was a hugely popular goal and issue...
...Or at least, that's the story Clinton will tell- and it's a story he can back up using the same rhetoric as the Republicans: seven years, CBO-certified...
...By the standards he now, belatedly, demands to be judged by-perfect balance in seven years-the president has only just come to the table...
...For all practical purposes, that clear, easily explicable partisan and ideological distinction has disappeared...
...It is not the job of the Congressional Budget Office-which is now, at the GOP's insistence, the final arbiter of such matters-to determine how well a given budget comports with political reality...
...Democrats are still unwilling to "fundamentally change" the commitment of the federal government to anything that has ever been identified as a social or economic problem- which is why the federal government continues to maintain its commitment, in crude and counterproductive fashion, to all such problems...
...Just like Newt's...
...This is not the stuff of a stirring national election...
...At his press conference last week, the president said he was unwilling "to fundamentally change the commitment of the Medicare program to the health of senior citizens" or "to fundamentally change the commitment of the Medicaid program to senior citizens, to poor children, to the disabled...
...Then, too (don't tell anyone), it was a convenient roof under which to shelter and tinker with that broader agenda until Republicans were ready to unveil it in the full light of day...
...A third option is to refuse a deal, on grounds that wimpy half-measures would fatally wound the momentum of further conservative reform in the future...
...So the basic question-balanced budget, yes or no?-is now obsolete...
...It was an apt shorthand slogan for limited-government conservatism...
...the GOP would have kept its promise and balanced the budget...
...Time's a-wastin...
...None of them is all that attractive...
...That doesn't matter...
...And it means to continue that effort whether or not there's a balanced budget along still realistically achievable lines in the next few months...
...But now, instead, it might just as likely help delay that future, by making Clinton look good in contrast to the Republican "ideological intransigence" he is sure to mention at every whistlestop...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 18
