Dole Tireless, Courageous As Deficit Fighter

First of two parts

It was time to pay the bill for the first half of the 1980s, and Republicans were running for cover.

Sen. John East of North Carolina lingered in a men’s room. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York hid in a colleague’s office.

Back in the Senate stood the man with the bill, Republican Bob Dole of Kansas. In his first major initiative as the Senate majority leader in 1985, Dole was risking his dreams of the White House and asking his colleagues to risk their careers to curb the soaring federal deficit.

It wasn’t the first or the last time. Facing down the federal budget deficit throughout the 1980s, Dole showed something all too uncommon in politicians: courage.

While other lawmakers cringed at the prospect of cutting popular spending or raising taxes to stop the runaway federal deficits, Dole proposed both. He paid a price then, losing his party control of the Senate in 1986 and his own White House bid in 1988, and he is paying a price now, as President Clinton airs ads attacking Dole for voting for tax increases in the past.

But unlike Clinton, who earlier this year said he might have raised taxes too much in 1993 to curb the deficit, Dole has never apologized for his record of fighting the deficit.

“It was a rare profile in political courage,” said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota and author of a book on the 1980s budget fights, “A Decade of Deficits.” “He was ahead of the curve in understanding what was coming and needed to be done.”

Dole’s anti-deficit record suggests something about how he might govern as president. Once faced with a problem he considers serious, Dole can emerge as a forceful and decisive leader who will forsake the politically safe course in favor of what he thinks is the right one.

In his campaign, he now says he could cut taxes and balance the budget. Democrats charge that his tax cuts would either increase the deficit or force him to cut Social Security or other popular programs.

But his record suggests that Dole would remain a deficit fighter first as president, and cut taxes only after it was clear he could balance the budget.

Long before the public came to abhor the federal deficit, it was one of the issues that Dole cared most about.

Part of the reason was simple, mainstream Republican economic conservatism, the belief that deficit spending fuels higher interest rates and thus drags the economy. And part of the reason was Dole’s own roots in Depression-era Kansas, when debt was an evil.

Dole became so relentless talking about the need to curb the deficit that members of his own party turned on him. At the party’s 1984 convention in Dallas, younger conservatives like Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia and former Reps. Jack Kemp of New York and Vin Weber of Minnesota tried to “Dole-proof” the GOP platform with an outright ban on tax increases.

Weber, who now supports Dole, recalled that he and his colleagues thought Dole was an irksome nay-sayer raining on the country’s economic boom and on the GOP’s political prosperity.

Within months after assuming the job of chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee in 1981, Dole found himself asked to shepherd Reagan’s 30 percent tax cut through the Senate. Fearful that such a huge tax cut would increase the deficit, Dole steeled himself against the popular new president and shaved the cut to 25 percent.

Still, by the end of 1981, with the deficit approaching $100 billion for the first time in history, Dole knew he had to act. He proposed a $100 billion tax increase over three years and, in 1982, the Congress and Reagan went along.

By 1985, the deficit remained over $100 billion a year, and Dole again decided to act. He proposed cutting federal spending by $300 billion, including a politically perilous move to freeze Social Security benefits.

With Democrats lined up to oppose his plan, Dole needed every Republican vote he could get.

One was then-Sen. Pete Wilson of California, but he was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy. Dole called Wilson’s doctors and persuaded them to let Wilson, wearing hospital pajamas and riding a wheelchair, come to the Senate for a vote after midnight on May 10.

Others were less heroic. Former Minnesota Sen. David Durenberger remembers Sen. East hiding out in a bathroom before being cajoled to go out and cast the vote. D’Amato hid in former Connecticut Sen. Lowell Weicker’s office before he, too, was persuaded to come vote.

“I feared this vote would end the Republican Senate majority,” D’Amato wrote in his autobiography.

With Vice President George Bush casting a tie-breaking vote, Dole won Senate approval for his plan.

“In a moment for the record books, the Senate demonstrated its capacity. We didn’t appoint a study commission. We didn’t buck the decision to future congresses, or to future generations,” Dole recalled in his autobiography.

Said Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla.: “That was the first time anybody took on entitlements. … It was courageous … it took guts.”

But as Dole remembered, “the story didn’t end there. Whenever you bite a bullet, you run the risk of having it explode in your face.”

Several weeks later, Kemp convinced Reagan that it would be political suicide to endorse even a freeze on Social Security benefits for a year. Reagan withdrew his support, and the Dole plan died.

“We should have backed Dole,” said Weber. “It would have changed the politics of the whole country for years to come.”

Without Dole’s huge cut in federal spending, the deficit continued along unabated, forcing President Bush in 1990 to agree to raise taxes, forcing a split in the party that contributed to its loss of the White House in 1992.