ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 19, 1995 TAG: 9512190053
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
WHAT A surprise. The White House is blaming - who else? - Republicans for the second partial shutdown of the federal government in just over a month. The GOP congressional leadership is blaming - who else? - the Democrats.
A good portion of the public, meantime, blames both parties for their failure to produce a budget plan or a stopgap measure to keep government running while the bargaining continues.
In fact, the blame for this mess is wider than Washington, and a determination to move beyond the blame game is in any case overdue.
Clinton has been rejecting GOP proposals with good cause. The latest spending bills he vetoed, for example, included a 21 percent cut at the Environmental Protection Agency; a green light for developers to have their way with public lands; and the elimination of AmeriCorps, Clinton's community service program.
"It is wrong for the Congress to shut the government down just to make a political point a week before Christmas," he said.
And yet, as we were reminded by the scene of Clinton's lament (among the elementary-school students surrounding him, we almost expected to see Tiny Tim himself, on crutches), Republicans aren't the only ones making political points.
Clinton, indeed, has been making points far more successfully than the GOP, which finds itself predictably and deservedly cast in the role of Scrooge. At this point, the president is more to blame than Republicans for the budget impasse - not because of his refusal to budge on legislative principle, but because of his refusal to bargain in good faith.
As Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, pointed out in a meeting with this newspaper's editorial board Monday, Clinton agreed to balance the budget in seven years, based on Congressional Budget Office fiscal projections.
Those projections are squishy and iffy, especially in the outyears; but they offer a common reference point for negotiations, an amount that needs to be agreed on before it can be divided.
Had Clinton lived up to his deal, a budget compromise would probably be at hand, especially given Republicans' desperation to stop their slide in public-approval ratings. Instead, the president is insisting on rosier fiscal projections - both to reduce the need for further spending cuts and, presumably, to prolong his successful exploitation of fears about the GOP's Medicare proposals.
There is much to commend in Clinton's discovery of his spine, particularly in his defense of Medicaid and his criticisms of the redistributive consequences of the GOP plan, which takes from the poor to benefit the well-off.
There is only one excuse, though, for refusing to accept common negotiating assumptions, especially if the intent is to extend demagoging on Medicare. The excuse is that the strategy has been working, politically, for the president.
Our elected representatives should put aside their blame game and make a deal providing some semblance of protection for the poor, the environment and investments in the nation's future. But, meantime, citizens of all political stripes ought to be asking themselves: Why does demagoguery work?
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