Year Offers Chance for Both Parties to Forge Key Policy Breakthroughs

Like an unhappy couple hanging on until the kids go off to college, congressional Republicans and White House Democrats have to live with each other for at least a few more years.

After voters again divided power in 1996’s vote, both sides are promising to make the best of this enforced intimacy. But in truth, they are still trying to work out the etiquette of cohabitation. Key figures on both sides have spent so long throwing china, they’re dubious of even a modest lowering of hostilities.

Yet many in each party also recognize that 1997 offers opportunities for important breakthroughs on issues that have long divided them. Their success at seizing those opportunities may depend on the answers to four large questions that will shape the debate between--and within--the parties over the coming months. Here’s a look ahead:

Can the center hold?

In both of his presidential campaigns, President Clinton promised to break gridlock by building a bipartisan coalition for reform. His first term instead produced almost uninterrupted partisan warfare. One of the biggest questions looming over his second term is whether he can make any more progress at constructing a legislative coalition built on moderates from both sides.

It won’t be easy. Bipartisanship has become such an unnatural act that lately a small chorus of commentators has commenced a drumbeat questioning whether it’s a good idea at all.

Some of these arguments are worth hearing. Convergence between the two parties sometimes demonstrates only the narrowness of our political choices; when the two parties slide into the same place, it’s not infrequently because they’ve been symmetrically greased by a powerful interest. (For exhibit A, see the thoroughly bipartisan, entirely disastrous 1982 law deregulating the savings and loan industry.)

So bipartisanship is no guarantee of statesmanship. Nor is it reasonable to expect an increasingly conservative Republican Congress to reach agreement across the board with even an ideologically protean Democrat like Clinton.

The real question for 1997 is more precise. Can the two sides come together on the central fiscal issues confronting them: balancing the budget by early in the next century while protecting key social investments and reforming the major entitlement programs to prepare for the graying of the baby boom?

On those issues, the case for bipartisanship is much stronger. One argument is merely practical: Neither side has the votes to force through its own blueprint. In that sense, the choice is between cooperation and continued stalemate. But the flaws in the 1993 Clinton budget, and then the 1995 GOP fiscal proposal, suggest that a bipartisan budget is also likely to produce a better substantive balance than a plan drafted by one party alone.

Left to their own devices, Democrats wouldn’t meet the public demand for serious cuts in dubious programs; given free rein, Republicans have shown they would slice more than most Americans can stomach. Budget bipartisanship is thus as much a means as an end: It is only through the discipline of attracting centrist legislators from both parties that the two sides can construct a plan equitable enough to hold support from the nation’s center. The chance for a budget breakthrough this year may turn on how many in Congress have absorbed that lesson.

Will the two tracks collide?

All the early signs point toward a two-track spring in Washington. Along one track, Clinton and key Republicans are striking more conciliatory notes on policy. On the second track, the two sides are threatening mutual annihilation over ethics. Democrats are promising guerrilla warfare against Newt Gingrich (even if he survives reelection as House speaker Tuesday), while Republicans are combing through the fund-raising controversies swirling around Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Optimists believe that these parallel ethical vulnerabilities will encourage the two sides toward policy breakthroughs that could push scandal stories off Page One. Pessimists wonder how the two sides can shake hands on policy while exchanging punches over ethics.

Some Republicans are quietly warning that Clinton should expect less cooperation on the budget if House Democrats fulfill their threats to harry Gingrich. In an interview late last month, Clinton similarly said that if congressional inquiries into fund-raising are “even-handed,” investigation and negotiation can coexist; but, rattling sabers, he said he won’t let Republicans use “the budget negotiations as a cover to look respectable” if they “use the hearing process for grandstanding and to hurt as many people as they can.”

Looming over these tactical considerations is the broader impact of this Bosnia-like pattern of ethical attack and retaliation. Both Gingrich’s missteps and (even more so) the oozing Clinton/DNC money scandal demand more sunlight; yet it’s possible to concede the need for scrutiny and still question whether the use of ethical allegations as a weapon of partisan warfare has gone too far. If the real goal is purifying the political process, routinely decapitating the leaders of both parties doesn’t seem a promising path.

What’s left for the left?

With the common goal of repelling the GOP advance after 1994, liberals swallowed most of their doubts about Clinton’s tilts to the right. But this year, Clinton will likely have more difficulty holding liberals in line.

The left looks at Clinton’s priorities--balancing the budget, trimming entitlements, even expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement--and sees a stocking stuffed with coal. Already, two veteran liberal thinkers with close ties to organized labor--Jeff Faux and Robert Borosage--have called on liberals to “chart an independent course” as Clinton triangulates to the center.

Tensions will crystallize over the budget. Republicans let Clinton off easy last year by not bringing to a vote his budget--which contained cuts in domestic programs most liberals could not accept. But if Clinton moves toward a budget treaty with the GOP, conflict is inevitable. One key question: How much liberal defection will Clinton accept as the price of a deal?

Another key to watch: Which Democratic legislator will stake his claim as leader of the left by walking out of the budget talks and declaring that Clinton is sacrificing too much of the party’s heritage in search of an accord? Remember, Gingrich became the undisputed leader of House conservatives only when he walked out on George Bush’s tax-raising 1990 budget deal with the Democrats.

What’s the right fight?

Especially since the end of the Cold War, Republicans have steadily narrowed their message to a single theme: reducing the size and reach of the federal government. But to a degree that only a handful of shrewd conservative thinkers recognize, a balanced-budget deal could tremendously dilute that argument by essentially settling the size of government into the next century.

So forward-looking conservatives are already asking: What comes next? Some want to lean harder on social issues, like banning abortion, but party vote-counters eyeing an already cavernous gender gap are leery. Articulate and innovative civic conservatives clamor for a crusade to save the poor by replacing the welfare state with churches and charities. But, as Jack Kemp has discovered, rescuing the inner city isn’t a cause with mass appeal in the suburban-centered GOP. The flat tax has a broader conservative constituency, but Bob Dole’s campaign so perforated the purist version of the idea during last year’s primaries that even advocates acknowledge that they’ve been forced back into a long-term building mode.

Expect instead for conservatives to increasingly tout proposals to privatize Social Security by diverting part (or all) of the payroll tax into individual retirement-type accounts that workers would invest themselves in the stock market. Conservatives on a Social Security advisory committee will boost the notion in a report due out today.

Liberals generally hate the idea--Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) on Sunday termed it a “nonstarter”--and no one has answered how to cover the huge transition costs of shifting from the existing system, where today’s workers’ taxes pay the benefits for today’s retirees. If nothing else, a growing debate on privatization should provide plenty of evidence that, even in this putative age of the Vital Center, the two parties can still dust it up.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every Monday.