The handcuffed republicans

...If we do a better job getting the message out," he said on This Week, "if we can say it in a way that the media will actually cover it, which didn't happen, you know, I think we can win the battle with it...

...That is the box they have placed themselves in: They have little or no maneuvering room...

...They have to isolate their own criticisms of Clinton, come together as a party, and read off the same sheet day in and day out...

...A plan to cut the funding of a federal agency as part of a larger appropriations bill...

...In essence, they handcuffed themselves to Bill Clinton to make his much-discussed desire for a "place in history" contingent on them...

...The answer clearly is, Yes, if he can...

...That was the moment at which the Republican victory in 1994 began to take shape...

...Clinton has made it clear, through his conduct on the disaster-relief bill, that if he sees a political opportunity opening up on the budget-deal horizon, he will take it...

...Perhaps, but that would be uncharacteristic of the president...

...He has wriggled himself out of the various strait-jackets the GOP has attempted to wrap around him since the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, and now he has slipped free of the handcuffs...

...But now he has shown that he learned a different lesson from the government shutdown...

...I think he's getting a little bit of a bum rap right now...

...The deafening echo you hear is of George Bush, circa 1992...

...That's welfare," Newt Gingrich said at a news conference, and besides the fact that it's true, it also hits Clinton in the soft Democratic underbelly...

...Bush and his men were also convinced that his consistent inability to get over 40 percent in the polls was really due to a failure of "getting the message out" in large measure because the media refused to "actually cover it...

...This put Clinton in the remarkable position of complaining that money wasn't getting to the victims quickly enough—"Americans in need should not have to endure this unnecessary delay...

...There are two possible explanations...

...The Republican plan is, to be kind, a jury-rigged thing carved from 15 years' worth of good but often contradictory conservative public-policy ideas about the appropriate role of government...

...But Clinton is now on record with a jury-rigged mess of his own, carved from 15 years' worth of bad neoliberal public-policy ideas about ways of helping the poor and the education-starved...

...Because the question that is being asked by Republicans all over Capitol Hill in the wake of Clinton's veto and the stripping of the no-shutdown provision from the disaster-aid bill he did sign, is this: Is he going to do it to us again...

...As their hopes for a crippling blow to the Clinton presidency first from the Whitewater scandals and then from the Asian-money scandals continued to go unfulfilled, they knew they had to deal with a president who has shown a marked lack of good faith in dealing with them—or with anyone, for that matter...

...If the Lott-Gingrich Congress continues on its present path, November 1998 could end the Republican revolution for good...

...By agreeing to tax cuts in the outline of the balanced-budget deal, Clinton altered the dynamic of the discussion in his favor for the first time in his presidency...

...I think he heard two things in Lott's voice: a petulant acknowledgment of Clinton's primacy in American politics, and a dawning realization of just how bad things may be for the Republicans on Capitol Hill in the coming months...

...This makes Clinton the ideal critic of the Republican tax plan, just as it will make him the ideal critic of every Republican appropriations bill that he will have to sign in order to make the balanced-budget deal a reality...

...That's probably a lot nicer than some of the things he could have said," the president told the Wall Street Journal a few days later...

...Only by acting disciplined and tough can they acquire discipline and toughness...

...So, in 1997, Republican leaders decided to take a different tack...

...Ever since, Republicans have suffered from a Beltway version of post-traumatic stress disorder—every time they think of making a move, they flash back to the mounting despair and fear they felt as the nation turned against them even though they knew, and Clinton knew, that the shutdown was his fault...

...Why shouldn't he...

...The GOP thought the lesson was that they needed to deal with Clinton by bringing him close...

...In the late fall of 1995, Bill Clinton vetoed appropriations bill after appropriations bill, thus shutting the government down—and the Republicans got blamed for it...

...Indeed, the very fact that Clinton reacted so violently to the no-shutdown provision is probably what brought Trent Lott's ire to the fore...

...And because the very nature of pro-growth tax cuts is that they favor those who pay more in taxes, the Republican plan does skew toward the very well-off and the rich...

...By making the Republicans appear divided, partisan, mingy, and opportunistic on the disaster-relief bill, Clinton has set the stage for a replay of late 1995...

...First, it could be he understands that Lott made himself look bad and that, by being gracious, Clinton can appear the better man...

...after the shutdown, Republicans began to fear him...

...When it came to legislation on disaster aid, the GOP managed to take two responsible legislative notions—one to prevent another government shutdown and another to bar the use of sampling in the 2000 census—and make them appear cravenly partisan...

...In the summer of 1993, Bill Clinton's vaunted economic stimulus package collapsed and the Democratic party in the House began dissolving into the sorts of recriminations and backbiting we've seen from Republicans in the last few weeks...

...And he seems to have decided that the tax-cut package the Republicans send him will present that precise political opportunity...

...It is therefore worth wondering why he was so generous about Lott's outburst...

...In other words, Clinton and the Democrats won every which way...

...What battle were they trying to win, exactly...

...They spent most of 1995 treating the president with contempt...

...It is hard to overstate the crisis of Republican confidence created by the 1995 shutdown strategy...

...He thinks he's got to have it his way or no way"—Bill Clinton took remarkably little offense...

...Republicans spent three years beating Clinton up for reneging on his promise of a middle-class tax cut, and those attacks surely had something to do with the overwhelming mandate they received in the 1994 congressional elections...

...eastern on Sundays...

...They can rightly say they are being betrayed and walk away from the deal, which would allow Clinton to say the Republican party has decided to hold partisanship higher than a balanced budget...

...And anyway, the census was by far the lesser of the two riders that led Clinton to veto the bill...

...Literally...

...Clinton likes being attacked about as much as anybody does, which is to say, not at all...

...If you thought the spring was bad for Republicans, wait until the summer...

...Or one of the appropriations bills...

...This puts them in an equally uncomfortable position, because if they cave in to him on taxes, then what will happen with each individual appropriations bill...

...The box they are trapped in is the budget deal itself...

...No, it didn't...

...They got the bill they wanted and made Republicans look unfeeling and uninterested in doing the nation's good work even as they voted for a bill without the shutdown and census provisions...

...Clinton wants lower-income Americans with children to get cash from the government for their children even if their household pays nothing in taxes...

...What was the Republican "message...

...And worse for the amour propre of the Republican leadership, Clinton made them look astoundingly incompetent...

...When liberal Democrats used to attack the GOP for a tax-cut plan favoring the rich, they could be dismissed because they didn't believe in tax cuts for anybody...

...it has long been his habit to John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard and a regular on CNN's "Reliable Sources," airing at 10:30 a.m...

...Or they can accede to Clinton...

...They sought to link their party's political fate to the president's...

...The president is not a spoiled brat...

...Indeed, he has had the unique pleasure of standing by and watching as Lott and his fellow Republicans, still in those handcuffs, placed themselves in a locked box and had the box thrown into the Potomac, all without a clue as to how to escape before the air runs out...

...The important rider was the one preventing another government shutdown, and the Republicans wanted it not because they wanted to "win the battle" but because they want some insurance against a collapse of the balanced-budget deal they struck with Bill Clinton just weeks ago...

...At the end of last week, Newt Gingrich and Republican National Committee chairman James Nicholson unveiled what could be the first successful counterattack against the Clinton tax plan and the way it handles the $500-per-child tax credit...

...Were they trying to prove that the Republican majority, like Democrats of the past, could force the president of an opposing party to sign things into law he disapproved of by attaching them to major legislation he desperately wanted...

...The Republicans have maneuvered themselves into a junior partnership with the president of the United States, but there might be a way out...

...The theory of the Republican let's-chain-ourselves-to-Clinton strategy was that if he were to do so, he would void the budget deal and have to suffer the consequences...

...If they do this, and make Clinton's strategy against them riskier and costlier, then he may be more accommodating...

...He will spend the summer threatening the GOP with 1995 again and again...

...Until every one of them is signed, they will have to face the president down in a staring contest, and since they have blinked in every such contest since Bob Dole ended the shutdown at the beginning of 1996, there's no reason to think they won't blink now—especially since Clinton can, yet again, hold the government shutdown over them like the sword of Damocles...

...He is that rarest of all birds, a Democrat with a substantial tax-cut package, and though there is every reason to be suspicious of his ideological commitment to tax-cutting, there is no gainsaying the fact that he has a plan on the table...

...And what will the Republicans do, faced with this act...

...The Handcuffed Republicans By John Podhoretz After Senate majority leader Trent Lott took the occasion of his appearance on ABC's This Week to issue one of the more pointed criticisms ever aimed at a president of the United States—"He acts like a spoiled brat...

...So the discussion becomes which tax cuts are best for the country...

...But just as George Bush really had no "message," neither did Trent Lott in the course of the disaster-relief bill...

...The shutdown saved Clinton's political career, made him look like a statesman, and brought Republican revolutionary fervor to an abrupt and depressing end...

...Lott issued the standard Republican mea culpa...

...And since a final agreement would take the federal budget off the negotiating table for the rest of the Clinton presidency, they would never again have to face Clinton down over an appropriations bill...

...Rather, it turns a tax cut into a direct government cash payment...

...respond to Republican criticisms with withering sarcasm...

...He is a political contortionist at the very peak of his powers, and the price of dealing with him poorly in 1997 could be higher than Republicans now imagine...

...And because the nature of his tax cuts is about "targeting" (i.e., handing out) money to specific kinds, classes, and ages of people, it does not skew toward the rich...

...But now Clinton is for tax cuts, just as the Republicans are for tax cuts...

...He won't stand for it...

...Did the question of how to conduct the 2000 census really have to be resolved at this moment...

...After all, nothing is more depressing for a politician who fancies himself a good poker player than getting wiped out at the table...

...even as he vetoed the legislation that would have gotten the money to them quickly...

...But there's a deeper reason for Clinton's magnanimity...

...Instead of fighting Clinton, they would join him...

...By confronting the president directly, they came close to losing their majority...

...What if he were to decide to veto the Republican tax bill...

...But Bill Clinton is the Houdini of American politics...

...Irresponsible, unworkable, unfair...

...They'd better come a lot closer to his if he is going to sign...

...Clinton may have overreached here, and the Republican assault may land some blows and shake up the political dynamic—but only if the GOP is as relentless about it as the Democrats were in hammering home the image of a Republican party keeping victims of the Red River flood homeless and hungry...

...This does not lower taxes...

...There is chaos on Capitol Hill because the Republicans behave chaotically, shifting strategies and themes and attacks every few days and doing far too much at once...

...Their tax cuts...

...They seem to have forgotten that they spent weeks negotiating over the appropriations bills back in 1995 and kept finding that the president would tell them one thing in private and then send his people out to contradict him in public...

...This is very tricky for Republicans, and very uncomplicated for Clinton...

...Throughout the spring, almost everything the Republicans have tried to do on Capitol Hill has gone wrong...

...the balanced-budget deal would give Clinton and the Republicans a common goal, promise them a common triumph, and force them to face equal blame were the deal to fall apart...

...That is to pursue a strategy of simplicity...