Reelecting Clinton: A Conservative Case

...Perhaps there's a perverse political lesson in that for the other side...

...that didn't happen either...

...if the Congress chooses to pass a budget with no funding for, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, he can't bring it back by using the veto...

...Would it be different with a Republican president and Congress...

...We know, say some of the most liberal Democrats, but losing Bill Clinton might not be so bad...

...After all, GOP leaders will think, these guys are on our side...

...Some observers trace that to his core belief that America has often acted from imperialist and exploitative motives in the past, and any unilateral U.S...

...Given Ronald Reagan's monumental victory over communism, it is certainly impossible to argue that his Republican administration failed in dealing with the major foreign policy question of its day...

...The numbers are familiar...

...Would a narrow reelection victory convince him once and for all to be a centrist Democrat...

...He's certainly not a conservative, nor is he a particularly predictable moderate...

...very few vetoes are overridden...

...Given the number of close decisions from the Supreme Court this year, that could tip the court against conservatives and give Clinton lasting influence over the course of jurisprudence...

...In Haiti, for example, Republicans predicted a bloodbath...

...Perhaps the new chief executive will really believe-and act on-the hard truth that you cannot succeed by trimming government programs but must instead rip them out by the roots...

...In many cases during the Reagan and Bush years, Democrats in Congress made no real attempt to override the president's veto...

...the other is the veto...

...But several observers believe a two-term Clinton might be able to name about 40 percent of the total judiciary by the time his eight years are up...

...The first thing to remember is that Republicans and conservatives did a rather awful job of it during the Reagan/Bush years...

...And interest on the debt rose from $53 billion in Carter's last year to $199 billion in Bush's...

...If domestic policy were the only issue at stake, a vote for Clinton would be easy...

...Cabinet officers fought to the last drop of blood against even minor cuts," Stockman wrote...

...Just give us the House back...

...Of course, if Republicans win the White House, there is no guarantee that more Scalias will be appointed to the court...

...Contrast the pace of change at HUD under Jack Kemp (non-existent) and HUD under Henry Cisneros with a Republican Congress on his back (significant...

...Given all this, conservatives face an unavoidable question: Is Clinton really so bad...

...But the first statement is wrong, and the uncomfortable truth is the second probably is, too...

...But a more important political reality will set in: A safely reelected, lame-duck Bill Clinton will surely move into the legacy mode...

...It doesn't matter that she's been bashed in every conservative journal of opinion...

...But that was then and this is now...

...There is no doubt that a Republican, any Republican, president would not share that assumption, and would thus take a comparatively dim view of taking orders from Boutros Boutros-Ghali...

...Start with the courts...

...If Bob Dole wants his chief of staff, Sheila Burke, in a critical position, he'll put her in a critical position-because she has been with him on the Long March and is personally loyal to him...

...But maybe a Republican president will keep the Republican Congress in line...

...While there is certainly a larger field of more experienced conservatives ready to take over the executive branch than there was in 1991, does anyone really think there won't be a few Richard (HHS) Schweikers or James (Energy Department) Edwardses the next time...

...it didn't happen...

...At the same time, out of necessity, he will have to further moderate his positions to avoid continued and devastating defeats at their hands...

...The president usually backed down...

...Even though the new Clinton administration allowed "mission creep" to set in, and 17 Americans died in a fight that shouldn't have happened as it did, the bottom line is George Bush got us into it, and Bill Clinton got us out...

...His presence has helped them achieve greater focus than they've had in years-and infinitely more power...

...Theoretically, quite a lot...

...Byron York is a writer and television producer in Washington, D.C...

...Winning would certainly be easier with a Republican in the White House, especially since nobody is predicting a veto-proof 288 Republican votes in the House next year...

...They will involve enormous, scorched-earth legislative fights...

...If doctrinaire Democrats would sacrifice their president, maybe Republicans should take another look at him...

...They would enjoy the benefit of having Clinton opposing them rhetorically while caving in to them legislatively...

...Change the subject to foreign policy-Clinton's biggest weakness-and things are not so clear-cut...

...just look at how the real liberals hate him...

...Now, with Congress on a roll and the GOP almost certain to pick up even more seats in both the House and Senate next year, maybe the best choice for conservatives would be to concentrate on their revolution free from the burdens of controlling the executive branch...

...Losing him, and leaving everyone at least nominally on the same side, would complicate the political landscape-and ultimately weaken the drive to reform the Federal government...

...Republican critics have jumped all over Clinton's policies for years and have ended up being wrong much of the time...

...Having Clinton, the perfect enemy, in the White House helps conservatives define themselves...

...It will be time to work on his place in history...

...And the political reality of Congressional oversight is that while lawmakers have a responsibility to oversee the workings of the executive branch, fealty to that responsibility fades when one's own party is in the White House...

...While vowing to search for common ground, he will constantly denounce the right-wingers who have taken control of Washington...

...And the cost has been much lower than, say, the loss of 243 American lives in a misbegotten mission in Lebanon...

...The plain fact is that Congress can defeat the president over the long run, particularly where spending is involved...

...Or privatizing Social Security...

...The president's inner circle is politically loyal to him...

...Would a President Dole, who fights as hard as anyone for money for his voters in Kansas, passionately argue for killing programs that would affect his voters across the country...

...It is unclear whether he'll make good on his recent threats to veto more...

...When confronted with these ghastly numbers today, the conventional Republican wisdom is twofold: It was the Democratic Congress's fault, and things will be different when we have a Republican president and a Republican Congress...

...The annual deficit rose from $74 billion to $255 billion...

...It simply strains credulity to believe Republicans will be as vocal and as aggressive when their own party is running the agencies...

...Still, Stockman, like many Reaganites, continued to believe the administration was on the right path...

...It was reported recently that Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary grabbed $400,000 from the department's nuclear regulatory funds to pay for security for her extensive travels...

...And he relies on them, regardless of what the ideologues in his own party say...

...How was it I didn't realize," he wrote later, "that if the administration couldn't turn down something like UDAG, it wasn't about to cut all the less ideologically obnoxious programs necessary to balance the budget...

...Ronald Reagan vetoed or pocket-vetoed 78 bills...

...They couldn't even kill Urban Development Action Grants, which Stockman called "perhaps the most ideologically offensive and wasteful bit of federal spending on the block...

...They simply passed another bill, sometimes altered slightly from the original, and dared the president to veto it again...

...Or he might remain sluggish and leave a huge backlog of vacancies to his successor...

...Reelecting Clinton: a Conservative Case By Byron York There's been talk among Jesse Jackson supporters that a run for president in 1996 would be a great way for Jackson to help the Democratic Party-not by winning but by energizing borderline Congressional districts and helping Democrats take the House of Representatives back...

...George Bush did it 44 times...

...He barely held any hearings at all during the two years of united government...

...They predicted hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants flooding Florida...

...But there's still a case to be made...

...While it is relatively easy-although still not politically possible at this time-to kill the NEA with one blow, what about remaking Medicare...

...But vetoes don't tell the whole story...

...Democrat John Conyers, pretty energetic when it came to investigating Republican administrations as chairman of what was then called the House Government Operations Committee, seemed to lose his investigative fervor when a Democrat moved into the White House...

...He was using the same arguments back then that they are using now, and he was filled with the energy of an ambitious back-bencher...

...Besides, if they choose, Republicans can have a significant voice, even a dominant one, from Capitol Hill...

...This plain political reality would be exacerbated by the people in the White House inner circle...

...But if the GOP does make significant gains in '96, and a reelected Clinton suffers the traditional midterm losses in '98, the Republican Congress would be virtually invincible on any issue, even without reaching 288...

...Given the political nature of high-level appointments, the answer has to be that there will...

...One small example...

...But most believe that the presence of a Republican Congress-filled with determined government-cutters-will keep the Republican executive in line...

...Like their predecessors, they'll fight to protect their turf-and be hoodwinked by the permanent bureaucracies in their departments...

...That is hard to picture...

...There will always be Darmans...

...It's possible that a kind of productive antagonism like that between Congress and HUD will spread throughout the departments...

...In the end, Clinton got rid of Haitian goon Raoul Cedras, and he did it cleanly...

...Some GOP strategists concede that top Republicans, once appointed to that long-sought job in the cabinet, might lose their zeal to abolish their departments...

...So a one-term Clinton missed the chance to remake the federal courts...

...Unquestionably, a second Clinton term poses two potentially damaging downsides for conservatives...

...Congress, a Democratic Congress, voted to nudge Clinton along on Somalia...

...Would that continue in a second Clinton term...

...And from now until November 1996, Senate Republicans have no reason to move quickly on any of his appointments...

...How much control could the Republicans exercise...

...They couldn't kill Export-Import Bank subsidies to giant corporations...

...Most of Clinton's failings can be attributed, at least in part, to his weakness for multilateralism-or, to put it less flatteringly, his penchant for hiding behind the United Nations and subordinating American interests to the UN...

...Those who still want to blame Democrats for the failures of the Reagan administration should re-read David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics...

...They couldn't kill the Department of Education...

...Harry Truman, the last Democratic president who had to deal with a Republican House (although just for one term), vetoed or pocket-vetoed 250 bills...

...Still, the veto could prove a serious threat on the biggest issues...

...But doing so would mean challenging nearly every Clinton appointee sent to Capitol Hill, and even the most fired-up strict constructionist might have trouble with that...

...The "No New Darmans" pledge now being circulated by activist Grover Norquist is clever but unworkable...

...for him, all those programs affect some constituent group or another...

...Time after time, the conservative president's cabinet secretaries maneuvered to keep their programs untouched, their budgets high and their power undiminished...

...He's not really anything, and with Republicans setting the agenda, he has been reduced to an often pathetic me-too-ism...

...Even a cursory look at his record shows he is not a dogmatic liberal...

...action is likely to continue that shameful tradition...

...Of course the downside is that by doing so he would virtually guarantee the election of a Republican president...

...Or would it give him confidence to return to his most liberal impulses-or perhaps more accurately, his wife's- and come up with some new Great Leap Forward program like health care reform...

...Congress overrode nine...

...And what about those departments that should be eliminated...

...The last seems the best bet...

...Whether that would result in better policy is another thing...

...The budget of the Department of Health and Human Services went from $76 billion to $283 billion in the same time...

...And with Republicans in charge of Congress, he will most likely choose the role of Bulwark Against Extremism...

...That means Laurence Tribe is out of the question, but only at the cost of more Stephen Breyer...

...More realistically, Republican opposition would be reserved for Clinton's most egregious choices...

...Any government watchdog should be just as uneasy about the prospect of Republicans controlling both branches...

...As for the Federal courts, Clinton got a slow start appointing appeals court judges...

...Look at some of today's most pressing foreign policy issues and ask whether today's Republicans would outclass Clinton...

...If Clinton is reelected and proves particularly combative in a second term, it might still be relatively easy for Congress to have its way with him...

...And with its constitutional mandate to raise and equip the armed forces, it can ensure that American military forces remain adequate to the needs of national security...

...Congress overrode just 12 of those...

...What a wonderful thing that would be for Republicans...

...Even though the Senate can limit his choices, the president still gets to pick the judges...

...a president simply has to have loyalty in his inner circle...

...Consider a few realities that will hold regardless of which Republican occupies the Oval Office...

...But having Republicans running HUD, Commerce, and Education might actually make them harder to kill...

...What would a President Gramm, who denounces pork but says he wants his share to go to Texas, do when his constituency is the entire nation...

...In the meantime, the Republican Congress is forcing real reforms on the Democratic-controlled executive branch...

...The Agriculture Department grew from $35 billion to $63 billion...

...Unlike any member of Congress, the president is elected nationally...

...They'll have to know that doing so might damage their party in the White House...

...Of course he did not bring democracy to Haiti, but who believes Republicans-or anybody- could do that...

...The reforms might well quicken in a second Clinton term...

...Maybe there's a conservative case for Clinton in '96...

...Federal expenditures for welfare and income security programs (excluding Social Security) rose from $86 billion in the last year of Jimmy Carter to $207 billion in the last year of George Bush...

...Of course, with a Republican in the White House, the '98 losses would likely go the other way...

...he was overridden just once...

...All Republican members have to do is take a lesson from the Democrats...

...When a Republican agency does something stupid and wasteful, will a Republican Congress come down on it as heavily as if the transgressors were Democrats...

...They watch polls constantly, they think short-term, they're scared of anything that causes his popularity to dip...

...The young budget director of 1981 would be quite at home with the Republican class in the House today...

...Now for the veto...

...Perhaps we'd start hearing a lot about getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, and less talk of reducing government...

...The inescapable fact is that Clinton has been very, very good for conservatives...

...But his book is a tale of one defeat after another...

...Remember David Souter...

...Even though it's true that the Congress is not particularly well suited to making foreign policy, it can effectively limit what the president does...

...Then there's Somalia...

...Republicans should ask themselves whether they really want that to happen...

...Of Ed Meese, Michael Deaver, James Baker, and their ilk, Stockman wrote, "the White House itself had surrendered to the political necessities of the welfare state early on...

...On the surface, it seems like a potent presidential weapon...

...On Bosnia, the most pressing foreign policy issue of the day, at this point one can simply say that Clinton appears to be learning...

...Look at the main goal of conservatives-reducing the size, expense, and intrusiveness of government- and ask whether it would be furthered or hindered by having a Republican in the White House...

...The Republican Congress is rightfully up in arms...

...He can only act on what they send him...

...Or would he continue to stumble around, hoping to gain some short-term advantage in whatever issue presents itself...

...One is the issue of the Supreme Court and the judiciary in general...

...So far Bill Clinton has vetoed two bills...

...there will no doubt be quite a lot of change at the top of the agencies, and it seems likely the only people Clinton will be able to find who want the jobs and who could be confirmed by a Republican Senate will be moderate in the first place...