Better To Meet Near The Center And Work Things Out

With President Clinton and his nemesis, the runaway Republican Congress, both out of town, the nation’s capital is taking a welcome breather before the inevitable September budget storm.

They have all earned a good vacation. So have we. Our eardrums need a rest.

Clinton went off to Wyoming looking surprisingly good, having suddenly gotten back into the game this summer with a series of forceful actions that reasserted his leadership.

The president tackled, with reason and moderation, broad conservative issues like family values and school prayer that he had previously ignored. He endorsed affirmative action, mounted an offensive against the tobacco industry, ended nuclear testing, vetoed a congressional effort to undermine the U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia and threatened to veto all legislation that would hurt Medicare or cut too much out of other federal spending.

His poll standings responded to his new assertiveness, giving him 47 percent approval ratings that are among the highest of his presidency.

Furthermore, the dog didn’t bark. The president escaped the political trap the Republicans thought they had set in those congressional hearings into the botched federal raid against the Branch Davidians near Waco and the White House mishandling of Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster’s papers after his suicide. Despite their advance ballyhoo about administration wrongdoing, the Republicans were unable to produce any new evidence indicating criminality or shocking impropriety by either the president or first lady.

Instead of exposing Clinton misdeeds, the GOP questioners exposed themselves as partisan, uninformed and in bed with unpleasant conspiracy cranks and the gun lobby.

Congress, in fact, suffered this summer from serious image problems on several fronts.

The initial GOP unity with which Speaker Newt Gingrich shoved through most items in the “Contract with America” is cracking. The Senate is taking its time to rework much of the legislation sent to it by the House. And GOP moderates are finally standing up against the conservative onslaught.

Gingrich, although he is the most powerful speaker in modern times, suffers from lower poll ratings than the president. A Vanity Fair article quoting a woman who claims she had oral sex with him while he was still married to his first wife creates a character issue not unlike Clinton’s own and undermines his pretense to moral superiority.

And the Senate is a mess. Republican presidential politics intrude into everything. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole can’t get a handle on what’s happening; so how can the rest of us?

Most of the substantive measures restructuring federal programs that are the mainstay of the GOP revolution have yet to reach Clinton’s desk. The gutting of regulatory protections and the sweeping welfare revisions are stalled in the Senate. The basic appropriations bills to keep the government functioning after Oct. 1 have yet to be passed, and Clinton threatens to veto those he finds too draconian.

Enormous fights lie ahead over programs that go to the very core of American well-being, especially Medicare, on which one seventh of the population depends for health care.

Even so, much has been accomplished. The differences in political priority between the executive and legislative branches have been sharply and permanently defined.

Republicans are determined to dump the nation’s problems on the states, give private industry a free hand and reduce taxes on the rich. Democrats still defend the role of the federal government in providing collective services and safeguards that help the middle class.

The voters will have distinct choices about the direction of the country in the next presidential election.

Congressional Republicans, however, are making the same mistake that Clinton did in advancing a wholesale overhaul of the health system last year. They are giving the country too much to swallow too quickly. The political system cannot immediately digest in comfort such a massive shakeup of policies and programs affecting millions of lives.

Once established, our treasured democracy has thrived through gradual evolution, not the drastic lurches and lunges of revolution. The course that Gingrich has set incorporates the untested, lopsided views of conservative theorists without adequate debate and deliberation on the consequences of such action. And already we see the signs of Republican pork replacing Democratic pork.

The polls all indicate the country is polarized on most major issues, divided and uncertain about the wisest course.

More discussion is needed to form a consensus to support or reject massive social and economic change. A federal budget will have to be cobbled together somehow, but the basic institutional restructuring that the GOP seeks ought to wait until the presidential campaign airs the competing arguments.

This is one time when it is in the national interest for both sides to run on the issues rather than a record.

xxxx