Should the voters trust Gingrich? Until a few months ago, he was regarded – by the intelligentsia, at least – as a blabbermouth C-Span congressman. Now he is called a visionary, a description he would not dispute. The pundits expect him to reverse the tide of history, transform the balance of powers, rewrite the compact between voters and their elected representatives.
Most Americans, however, are wary. Only half of those answering a Newsweek Poll have ever heard of the “Contract With America,” and half of them dismissed it as “just a campaign promise that shouldn’t be taken seriously.” It is certainly an ambitious promise. The contract aims to begin untangling the web of federal regulation that has grown up over the past 50 years. However well intentioned – to protect the poor, to clean up the environment, to end discrimination – the rules have become expensive and sometimes arbitrary burdens on local businesses and governments. The contract purports to be a plan of action to make the rule of law a little less onerous. It would even rein in lawyers by seeking to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
Some skepticism is justified. The unified front necessary toget this done could easily crack under the pressure of a host of special pleaders in corporate America and on the ideological fringes. The fine print of the contract needs to be read for loopholes. Yes, Gingrich will keep his promise of a House vote on the balanced-budget amendment by April. But that does not mean that the budget will be balanced, or even come close. The House will vote on a crime bill. But that does not mean that there will be any less crime.
If the contract is not quite the revolution proclaimed by the GOP and hyped by the press, it is not a fraud, either. Gingrich and Co. will not dismantle the welfare state. But voters, who depend on government benefits while whining about too much government, don’t really want a draconian cutoff of all benefits. Republicans are more likely to control the growth of government than the Democrats who have run Congress for 44 of the past 50 years, and in the end, a measure of discipline may be all that voters can or should expect.
In many ways Washington is unchanged since Nov. 8: lobbyists still crowd into “Gucci Gulch,” the hallways outside the tax-writing committees; Republican staffers dress just as drably as the Democratic staffers they ousted; Georgetown hostesses still dish while Talking Heads talk. Yet Washington has changed, in several subtle but important ways:
Liberalism is finally vanquished. Long after the country had derided big government, the Democratic staffs of congressional committees kept on writing ever more complex and sweeping regulations. The diehards in the basement warrens of the Rayburn Building were like the Japanese in caves on Pacific islands in 1945; they kept on fighting after the war was over. One of the healthier Gingrich reforms is to cut House staffs, grown bloated over time, by one third.
Harvard is out. Ever since Felix Frankfurter started sending his best students at Harvard Law School (his “Happy Hot Dogs”) down to run the New Deal, Harvard has stood for a central tenet of Democratic liberalism: Washington knows better (and Harvard knows best). Now Ivy League paternalism is so discredited that Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government had to drop its traditional orientation course for freshman congressmen. The new members went to a program run by the conservative Heritage Foundation instead.
The revolving door is jammed. It used to be so simple: get a job on the Hill or in an agency writing regulations, then swap for a high-paying job with a private law firm lobbying to change the laws you helped write. But those 5,000 Democratic staffers forced from the Hill are having trouble finding jobs. They might actually have to leave Washington and go home.
Or they could wait it out. Washington has a history of subverting attempts to reform it. Despite all of Ronald Reagan’s vows to slash big government, it only got bigger. His plan to cut taxes turned into a bidding war to hand out goodies to the wealthy and corporate interests. There is at least the risk of another feeding frenzy in the Republican Congress. Bill Archer, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, believes in using tax breaks to boost the economy. Most economists scoff, but corporate lobbyists see new loopholes in the making.
Won’t new tax breaks swell the deficit? It all depends on how you add. Supply-side conservatives – including most of the House leadership (Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas) – want to explore a new smoke-and-mirrors accounting gimmick called “dynamic scoring.” Under the current rules, tax cuts are counted against the deficit, dollar for dollar. Under dynamic scoring, tax cuts are predicted to boost the economy, and hence increase revenues.
Fortunately, such tricks are getting harder to play. With 16 cents of every tax dollar going to service the federal debt, politicians are becoming somewhat more honest. Under a “pay as you go” deal worked out in the Bush administration, lawmakers cannot propose tax cuts or spending hikes without finding some kind of offsetting tax hike or spending cut. Repealing the rules takes a 60-vote “supermajority” in the Senate. “Nothing like that is even on the table,” says Armey. “It’s not what we are about here at all.”
To be credible, the Republicans know, they have to vote for spending cuts before they vote for tax cuts. The idea is to “bank” about $250 billion in savings before doling out some $200 billion in tax cuts, says Budget chairman John Kasich. The bond market demands a measure of honesty. Some voters may be fooled by supply-side rhetoric, but Wall Street isn’t. And if interest rates keep going up, the GOP risks flattening the economy.
Even if Congress enacts all the cuts promised by the contract, it will not dent the federal deficit. After dipping for the past two years – thanks to the economic recovery and Clinton’s 1993 tax hike on the well-to-do – the deficit will start rising again in 1997, climbing toward $300 billion a year by the year 2000.
The only way to tame the deficit monster is by attacking the middle-class entitlement programs. The contract actually goes in the opposite direction, reducing the taxes for upper-income social-security recipients. Yet if social security remains off-limits to cuts and defense-spending increases, as promised by the contract, within a few decades there will be literally no money left over for so-called “discretionary” spending. That means no FBI, no weather service, no coast guard, no money for subways or highways or schools.
The Republicans are dodging this reality. For now, they are only willing to cut back programs that are unpopular or unknown or mostly benefit either the poor or the well-off elites. They would whack aid to the United Nations, Africa and Russia by $16 billion over five years, eliminate obscure agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey and cut federal aid to the arts and public broadcasting. “By getting the first screams out of opera lovers, foreign-aid advocates and research scientists,” says one Hill staffer, “you build credibility for making the tougher cuts to come later to balance the budget.” Only gradually will the target list expand to include farmers and the middle class. The elderly are safe, says Gingrich, “for another three to five years.”
To control federal spending at all, theRepublicans will have to discipline themselves. Gingrich has good control in the House, where the 73 freshmen are called “Newtoids.” The Senate is dicier. There are a half-dozen moderates in the GOP’s narrow (53-47) majority. One of them is maverick Sen. Mark Hatfield ofOregon, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He will preserve his pet projects, like dams in the Pacific Northwest. As conservative writer David Frum points out, there is a ton of corporate pork that could be cut from the budget. He cites grants to agribusinessmen, subsidies to industry and utilities in the name of energy conservation, the Department of Commerce’s grants for economic development, federal underwriting of corporate advertising overseas. All of these have Republican as well as Democratic guardians. You won’t catch Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole gladly cutting back federal favors for the Midwestern agribusiness giant Archers-Daniel-Midland. ADM’s CEO (and Dole’s condo neighbor in Florida) Dwayne Andreas has given generously over the years in campaign contributions to Dole and the Republicans.
Gingrich will also have to watch his own right flank. The contract has some significant omissions. It makes no mention of getting prayer back in schools, or banning abortion or protecting the rights of gun owners. All of these are familiar planks in the Republican program. But the “social issues” are emotional and controversial. Gingrich knows they would divide his own party and distract the GOP from accomplishing anything.
He cannot put off the conservative activists indefinitely. He has already suggested a vote on school prayer by July 4, although he would privately prefer to wait until autumn, after the spending and tax bills are done. Gingrich will come under tremendous pressure from interest groups, who will not only press for action on the social agenda, but also oppose attempts at moderation. Lobbying organizations tend to be run by hard-liners, who find it easier toraise money by charging “Sell out!” than proclaiming “Sensible Compromise!” On school prayer, Gingrich could support a popular compromise, a law permitting a moment of silence. Ralph Reed, the top operativeof the Christian right, seems willing to be both patient and politically reasonable. But many true believers will demand nothing less than a constitutional amendment permitting prayer of any kind. “The way liberalactivists have gotten their proposals passed is by never being satisfied,” says Tom Kilgannon, spokesman for the Christian Action Network, a Washington-based lobbying group. “I think you’re going to see the religious right do the same thing.”
The gun lobby has no intention of being bound by the Republican contract. “It’s really too narrow,” says Tanya Metaksa, chief lobbyist of the NationalRifle Association. “It was devised when the Republicans were in the minority.” The NRA, which donated $4.2 millionto political candidates last year, is determined to repeal the ban on assault weapons that was passed as part of last year’s crime bill. If the bill gets to the Senate floor, “we’d really have a big, big gridlock party,” said Dole last week.
There are any number of internecine feuds that could disturb GOP harmony. Discordant notes have already been heard between inclusive optimists like Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, who take an expansive view on immigration, and gloomy nativists like Dole, who would like to slam the door shut on illegals. On a personal level, Dole has no great fondness for Gingrich, who once described the senator from Kansas as “tax collector for the welfare state.” Last week Dole gleefully tweaked Gingrich for his $4.5 million book deal – helping force Gingrich to forgo the fat advance.
President Clinton is badly wounded now (Newsweek’s Poll showed his approval rating at 39 percent, with 45 percent disapproving). But he strucka tone of determined moderation in a Newsweek interview last week (page 43). If hecan position himself as a reasonable centrist, prudently restraining heartless Republicans from gutting still popular programs, he could become a threat to the Republican Ascendancy. Over time, the Democratic Party was pushed to ideological extremes by its interest groups, and at the same time bought off by corporate lobbyists. If Gingrich is to avoid a similar fate for the GOP, he is going to have keep coming up with useful disciplinary tools like the contract. He has to wield power, without becoming the establishment. The only way he will win in Washington is if he can keep on running against it. NEWSWEEK POLL
65% have at least some confidence that Bob Dole will do the right thing for the country;
58% feel the same way about President Clinton
In a 1996 presidential race, 38% would vote for Bill Clinton;
48% would vote for Bob Dole
