Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 13, 1993 TAG: 9309120245
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It is a mystery to me how a pair of votes that a single switch could have canceled could be considered a ``victory'' in anything but the most technical sense.
In the House, the president's bill carried by 218-216, but had he lost so much as a vote the outcome would have been a tie and the cause thus lost. In the Senate the vote was a dead heat, 50-50, and only the tie-breaker cast by Vice President Al Gore carried the day. Nor, had either house failed to carry for Clinton, would the bill have become law.
Clinton may call that the end of gridlock, but I don't. What clearly emerged from the budget fight, instead, was that the United States is now in the grip of at least three gridlocks, and that all three, unless someone knows something the rest of us don't, threaten to make further national government impotent.
The first and still most obvious gridlock is the one between the national political parties in Congress. No president since Eisenhower, perhaps excepting Lyndon Johnson, has been able to break it for any purposes other than national emergencies.
The growing independence of congressmen and senators from the parties they nominally represent (their unwillingness to name their party affiliations in campaign literature is the clue) increasingly encourages their independence, in turn, from the presidents of even their own parties. The power of incumbency, demonstrated again and again, with few exceptions, makes it probable that they can hold seats for as long as they wish to. ``Town meetings'' with constituents, as well as constituent service in dealing with the federal bureaucracy, reinforce this indifference to party claims.
Nor, it must be added, does the growing polarization of the parties into warring camps of irreconcilable ideologies assist the cause of bipartisanship. The capture of the Republican Party by its religious right and the allegiance of the Democrats to a multitude of interests pleading special - and often contradictory - causes furthers the gridlock.
A second gridlock, between the president and Congress itself, is an outgrowth of the first. The parties not only butt stubbornly against each other but against a White House staff that - whether Democratic or Republican - it sees as inexperienced, uninformed and monolithic.
President Bush had spectacular problems in dealing with Congress despite having given repeated placatory signals to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. President Clinton, displaying an arrogance that nearly proved to be his downfall, openly agreed to spurn Republican support. Nor can he punish, as Lyndon Johnson did without mercy, his opponents; he has shown, time and again, that his threats are meaningless.
But perhaps the most fundamental gridlock of all is the gridlock between American government and the people it claims to represent. While voters may well have believed they voted to effect ``change'' last fall, it is now clear that they actually want change only if it does not touch them.
The intransigence of the oil states, the areas threatened by reductions in military spending, the doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs - all made it clear, in the hundreds of thousands of letters and calls they made to the White House and to individual congressmen and senators, that they were unwilling to make any sacrifices whatever to bring down the nation's deficit.
Legislators, intimidated by voters' wrath, were scarcely encouraged to be brave. Clinton, eye ever on the polls, compromised away what little was left of his original deficit-reduction plan; and though he deserves credit for being the first national leader in memory to make deficit reduction a keystone of his tenure, he shows also that he runs when opposed.
``Gridlock breaking?'' What does Clinton think he's talking about?
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB