Recent commentary from National Journal:
Social Studies: Don't Pardon Ex-President Clinton -- Commute His Sentence, by Jonathan Rauch (September 13, 2000)
An ex-President jailed? The spectacle would be wrenching, the symbolism right out of some banana republic.
Legal Affairs: Boy Scouts Vs. Gays -- The System Is Working Just Fine, by Stuart Taylor (September 13, 2000)
A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus.
Media: Reality Politics, Anyone?, by William Powers (September 13, 2000)
Perhaps the presidential campaigns could take some cues from CBS' new reality-TV series.
Political Pulse: Clinton -- Just Doing His Job, by William Schneider (September 13, 2000)
President Clinton is sending a message: this campaign is not about me.
Legal Affairs: Gore-Lieberman -- Racial Preferences Forever?, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 6, 2000)
Is there anything left of the senator who used to say that the system of group preferences has to end?
Political Pulse: A Referendum on Government's Role, by William Schneider (September 6, 2000)
In 1988, Dukakis said the election was about competence, not ideology. This year, Gore is doing the opposite.
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The Campaign:A Sitting President Cannot Disappear, Nor Should He
The quaint Labor Day "launches" by Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas produced no shifts in direction or major surprises, but thankfully, presidential campaigns always generate enough unexpected plot twists to make them entertaining.
Is Adam Clymer of The New York Times really a "major league asshole?" Or did Bush's unexpected ad-lib into a live microphone undermine his pledge to elevate the tone of American political discourse? What will be the effect of Bush's gambit in agreeing to debates moderated by Larry King and Tim Russert? Will the punditry's efforts to make Bush into The English Patient -- or at least, Yogi Berra -- chip away at his credibility? And just why is Al Gore, to use a racetrack expression, running like a horse who is "loose in the lead" when he's not yet at all clearly in the lead?
Many trees were killed for the newsprint it took to explore these weighty matters, which also were grist for a week's worth of cable news gabfesting. But what really occurred as the bell sounded for the first week of the traditional Labor Day-to-Election Day sprint was that the policy differences between the two candidates began coming into focus.
The 2000 election is going to be about issues after all.
This wasn't supposed to happen. With productivity up, the nation's jobless rate hovering near what economists call "zero real unemployment," and government budget surpluses projected into the foreseeable future, the 2000 election figured to be about personality and tactics, not policy and substance. In keeping with this story line, both major parties held low-key conventions featuring muted attacks on their opponents (swing voters don't like partisanship) and contrived rosters of speakers representing every hue in the ethnic rainbow. The rhetoric was mostly canned and, at times, interchangeable. Which convention, for instance, trumpeted the "leave no child behind" line? The answer is both.
It was at this point that Bill Clinton rode to the rescue. Yes, that Bill Clinton, who the pundits insisted should make himself scarce, if not for the sake of good manners, then for the sake of Al Gore. But a sitting President cannot disappear. Nor should he, even if he wanted to, and Clinton is fairly candid about how little he wants to. After teeing off this Labor Day on the 10th fairway at Army-Navy Country Club, Clinton wistfully confided to the accompanying pool of reporters: "This is the first time in 26 years I haven't been in a parade or something. I don't know what to do. I'm lost out here."
Not so lost, as it turns out. Four days earlier, the President helped put this formless campaign back on track. He did so in the most official of capacities: He vetoed an estate tax relief bill that had been passed by the Republican-controlled Congress.
"I believe," Clinton said in the East Room, "that this latest bill, this estate tax bill, is part of a series of actions and commitments that, when you add it all up, would take us back to the bad old days of deficits, high interest rates, and having no money to invest in our common future...."
Three weeks earlier, Clinton employed similar language while vetoing another GOP effort at tax relief, the elimination of the so-called marriage penalty. This veto was riskier: Clinton had vowed in his 2000 State of the Union Address to do away with the marriage tax, but in torpedoing these two measures -- with Gore's concurrence -- the President drew a sharp contrast between his Vice President and the challenger from Texas.
"Let me be clear," Clinton said. "I support tax cuts, but tax cuts we can afford."
That's the rub, of course, because it suddenly seems that we can afford a lot. For the past two decades, in the era of deficit spending, any new proposal, ranging from expanding Head Start to constructing B-2 bombers, was a conversation about Other People's Money; namely, the money of our children and grandchildren. This is not true anymore, at least according to the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates, which predict a 10-year surplus of some $2.2 trillion -- not counting another couple of trillion in Social Security leftovers. And so the 2000 campaign is centering on what to do with this pot of gold. Basically, Bush and the Republicans want to give it back to the taxpayers, while Gore and the Democrats want to spend it on an array of domestic programs.
Bush explains it simply: "The people own the surplus, not the government." Gore, by contrast, sees an opportunity to address a host of long-deferred national needs. In Columbus, Ohio, the Vice President cited four pet issues he would like to spend the money on -- three of these related to education. One was tax credits for college tuition; another was "universal preschool" for every 4-year-old; the third was modernizing schools with (presumably federally guaranteed) bond issues in a program Gore described as "comparable in scale to the GI bill." All this came on top of a sweeping prescription drug benefit for the elderly that would expand Medicare spending by $250 billion over the next 10 years.
The next day, in Cleveland, Gore flushed his wish list out considerably with his 191-page economic blueprint titled Prosperity for America's Families. Though the title is clunkier than Putting People First, the 1992 Clinton-Gore manifesto, the new document reflects Gore's differences with Clinton in other ways. For one thing, it is much more specific in its details.
The Bush response was nearly schizophrenic. On the one hand he argued, as any good Republican ought, that Gore was "spending the whole surplus on bigger government." Bush also noted, not unreasonably, that Gore didn't seem constrained by the rules of math. But on the other hand, the good governor hurriedly produced his own Medicare drug prescription benefit plan. In so doing, Bush confirmed that most Republicans consider this issue radioactive. Only Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., has shown the guts (foolishness?) to run against prescription drug benefits directly. The rest of the GOP simply wants it go to away. Democrats think it's such a trump card that Clinton used it as an excuse for breaking his promise about the marriage penalty. When he vetoed that bill, Clinton said he was doing so because it wasn't linked to a prescription drug benefit.
The other curious aspect of Bush's $150 billion, 10-year Medicare prescription plan is that it was aimed at the poor and provided almost nothing, really, for the middle class. In this way, the plan had the feel of a Republican proposal given under duress, like a phony confession from a tortured POW. It also resembled those Clinton-Gore education tax credits, which sound great until you read in the fine print that they start phasing out when your family reaches the middle class.
Nonetheless, this race is now a real debate about real issues with real philosophical differences of opinion. That is what campaigns are supposed to be.
There is, however, another school of thought about handling the surplus. It is advocated by such good-government types as former CBO head Robert D. Reischauer and (one infers) taciturn fed chief Alan Greenspan. It once was epitomized in Congress in the person of Sen. Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M. This school holds that projected surpluses are nice, but the prudent course is to hold the line both on spending and on tax relief. Use the money to pay off the national debt and restructure Social Security, to make it truly solvent-then take stock and see if the surpluses are real.
Gore, who sometimes lets his nerdy good-government side show, paid lip service this week to that theory, saying he wanted to pay off the debt by 2012 and set aside a $300 billion lockbox of the surplus for a rainy day. These were rhetorical gimmicks, mostly, but at least he paid homage to the notion of fiscal restraint. The problem is that the slogan "Keep Interest Rates as Low as They Were in the Sixties" won't get anybody elected to anything. Besides, there aren't many "Domenici Republicans" left in Washington, let alone Domenici Democrats. These projected surpluses are so mind-boggling that they've made supply-siders out of the entire GOP, even the real Pete Domenici. They've also convinced Bush that the public will ultimately agree with him on the logic of big tax cuts.
We'll see about that. In the meantime, the tone of the campaign has been set not by the men who want to be President, but by the man who already is.
"Everybody knows ... there are differences of opinion about what we ought to do and how we ought to do it," Clinton said when he vetoed the Republicans' estate tax bill. "That's why we're having another election this year -- and that's up to the American people to decide."
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Carl M. Cannon is a correspondent for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
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All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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