Time For Playing Games Long Over

Still fighting the last war, Bob Dole glowered at the television camera Tuesday night and rasped that the U.S. government has been “hijacked by liberals.”

Minutes earlier, Dole’s fellow soldiers had sat on their hands through a rousing speech that signaled their triumph in the war against liberalism. “The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton proclaimed. Item by item he ran through a State of the Union address that could, for the most part, bring a GOP presidential nominating convention roaring to its feet. But a Democrat was talking, so all the Republicans could do was splutter about stolen lines and gripe that Clinton doesn’t walk the conservative walk as authentically as they do.

The wiser response came Wednesday morning. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he hoped Congress and the president soon could agree on an incremental approach to further reductions in the federal deficit. In the background, Wall Street authorities talked seriously, and ominously, about downgrading the nation’s credit rating unless the politicians suspend their election-year posturing and get to work.

It’s time, way past time, for a settlement of the federal budget standoff.

If Congress and Clinton would suspend the partisan games, they could make real progress in the conservative direction that Clinton accurately senses the public wants to go. Don’t scoff. There’s plenty of room for accord. Clinton is and always was a southern Democrat, conservative by the standards of northeastern bleeding-heart, government-union liberalism. That’s how he campaigned in 1992 and that’s how, in some ways though not all, he has governed. It is true, as he noted, that on his watch the federal deficit and payroll have shrunk and that the U.S. economy is doing reasonably well. It also is true, as his speech reflected, that just as Americans won’t support extremes of the left they won’t support extremes of the right, such as loopholes for environmental predators, that made the GOP’s earlier budget drafts unsignable.

Furthermore it is not necessary, nor is it important, for Clinton and Congress to write a budget-balancing script through 2002. Seven years out, revenue and spending projections are an exercise in political fantasy. What counts are the spending and taxation plans for the next few years.

Clinton noted that he and congressional Republicans agree on a number of spending and tax ideas that could build on the successful deficit-reduction strategies of 1993. As he argued and as Gingrich now seems to be saying as well, the two sides ought to seize their common ground for the good of the nation.

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