ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 11, 1996 TAG: 9601110070
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
THE REPUBLICANS' strategy to force their own budget into law by shutting down the federal government failed because Republicans have been fudging the basic issue at stake in this large battle. They have done so to paper over their own differences.
For many Republicans, a balanced budget is not and never has been the real goal. What they care about far more is changing federal policy, shrinking government and cutting back on a particular list of programs. The balanced budget, advertised publicly as what the fight was about, was only a means to this end.
If you doubt this, just turn to the year-end issue of National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr., which says honestly and in plain language what many Republicans actually think but don't want to say. ``The balanced budget is more important as symbolism than as accounting,'' the magazine declared editorially. ``What matters now is that the government be clearly put on a path of reduced improvidence.''
The good conservatives at the National Review were positively scornful of their side for making the balanced budget so important. ``Republicans have stopped talking about the positive aspects of their program because they are so preoccupied with the essentially defensive message of `reducing the rate of growth' of government programs,'' the magazine declared. ``Balancing the budget is consuming every issue that comes near it.''
National Review's recipe was for the Republicans to give in to President Clinton on a lot of the numbers as long as conservatives in exchange win their big policy changes. There was nothing wrong with throwing another $70 billion at Medicare, the magazine's editors said, as long as Republicans preserved their medical savings accounts, which severely undercut Medicare and represent ``a radical departure from the Great Society model of government.'' Throw more money at Medicaid, they said, but don't let the White House preserve its ``entitlement status'' as the medical program of last resort for the poor. ``Ditto welfare,'' National review declared, getting rid of Aid to Families with Dependent Children being more important than saving money. And, oh yes, the only issue on which there should be ``intransigence,'' the magazine advised, is that Republicans should insist on their whole $245 billion tax cut.
Here is the clincher from this bellwether of conservative opinion. ``Their most important accomplishment this year,'' the magazine says of congressional Republicans, ``is not potentially balancing the budget - an elusive goal still nearly a decade away - but scrapping huge chunks of the federal entitlement state.''
What's important about National Review's declaration - beyond its admirable candor - is the enlightenment it offers about why the Republicans have had such a hard time coming up with a coherent and unified negotiating strategy, and why they have recently appeared to be in such disarray. It's not because the Republicans are stupid or inartful. It's because the balanced budget is, for some Republicans, the real goal, and for others a front for the underlying agenda.
There is every evidence that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici sees blotting up the red ink really as the purpose of this messy enterprise. One imagines that a Bob Dole unfettered by the need to win Republican presidential primaries would be far more outspoken in support of this view. (It was this old Bob Dole who wisely pushed to reopen the government.)
But many of the Republicans' demands actually make getting to balance much harder - the $245 billion tax cut being one big obstacle, the medical savings accounts another. Clinton and the Democrats would be hard-pressed to resist serious reductions in the growth of Medicaid if the Republicans weren't so intransigent about scrapping the whole program in favor of block grants. Democrats, in the Senate and in the White House at least, have already shown how far they'd be willing to sell out on welfare.
But the Republicans can't call the Democrats' bluff as long as they keep insisting on both a balanced budget in seven years and all their big policy changes.
Had Clinton caved in earlier, which is what many Republicans had reason to expect, they might not have confronted this choice. Now, they must decide whether to go the ideological way - the path described by National Review and defended openly by, among others, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas - or whether they're willing to give ground to force Clinton to agree to balance the books, as their leaders showed signs of doing Monday. If the Republicans keep fudging this choice, they will give Clinton more opportunities to attack without forcing him to make choices that could divide him from his own party, and divide the Democratic Party itself.
This budget debate has been confusing to the country because it has crisscrossed back and forth between questions about whether and how the budget should be balanced and arguments about what the whole point of the federal budget should be. If the Republicans confine themselves to pushing for a balanced budget, they can probably get pretty close. And they can leave the philosophical and policy questions for the fall campaign, which is a good place for them.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial page staff.
- The Washington Post
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