Having won the budget battle without a single Republican vote, President Clinton began Monday to seek bipartisan support for his health-care proposal and other bellwether programs.
At a rally in West Virginia, Clinton called on Republicans to join him in ending the partisan rancor that characterized the debate over the budget.
“We cannot have every great issue of the day decided on the basis of partisanship,” Clinton told a crowd at the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston. He said issues should not be tackled with an eye on the next presidential campaign.
“We have got to do some of these things together,” the president said, adding that he didn’t care if the solutions were credited to party or ideology.
Unable to count on Democrats to unite solidly behind all his programs, Clinton needs to secure Republican help to act on the rest of his ambitious agenda for change.
While he won approval for his economic plan without Republican help, a larger pool of potential votes in Congress will probably be crucial to passing a plan for universal health care or ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement, two issues on which the Democrats are deeply split.
Health care and NAFTA are only two of the major issues that Clinton wants Congress to tackle after Labor Day, with welfare reform, campaign financing, crime and further budget-cutting among the other subjects that are likely to be addressed in the fall.
Talking to reporters last week, Clinton decried the “incredible partisanship” that swirled around the budget battle and pointed to the bipartisan work on national service and the Senate’s 96-3 confirmation of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court as examples of his vision for the future.
“I don’t think we’ll have this level of partisanship on any other issue,” he predicted.
After winning one filibuster vote on national service, Republicans backed down from continuing to block the measure when a handful of moderate GOP senators said they would support it. The Senate then passed it last week 58-41, with seven Republicans voting for it and four Democrats opposing it.
Responding Monday to Clinton’s challenge, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) acknowledged that Americans are tired of partisan bickering. But he added, “Unfortunately, Democrats see bipartisanship as having Republicans just simply sign off on their ideas.”
Dole also criticized the president for snubbing Republican overtures. “So far, he has only rarely asked for our cooperation and ignored our efforts to help when it was offered,” Dole said.
To secure the votes of several Democrats last week, Clinton pledged to pursue another round of budget cuts in the fall, including the touchy area of entitlements, the fastest-growing area of government spending, which includes Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and veterans benefits.
Reflecting recently on the partisan division, Clinton said he believes the GOP will not act in lockstep when the discussion moves to “non-tax, spending-control issues.”
“Clinton’s strategy was always to move to attract more Republican support after the budget deal,” said Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research organization.
“He made a calculation early on that he would not be able to get any Republican support on the budget without abandoning a significant element of his own party, which wasn’t wise to do at the beginning of a presidency.”
The partisan bickering has taken a toll on Congress, too, and improved relations could benefit it as well as the president. A new ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 64 percent of those surveyed disapprove of the job Congress is doing.
Republicans say their attitude toward Clinton will be different on subjects other than the budget, such as the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico.
“We’re ready to help on NAFTA,” Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), the minority whip, said last week on ABC-TV’s “Nightline.” The president will “get more help from the Republicans than he’ll get from the Democrats.”
The degree of Republican crossover will depend on the topic. Mann predicted, “On NAFTA, it will be massive Republican support. On welfare reform, it will be significant support. On health care, it will be minor Republican support.”
Knowing that it has to do a better job selling its programs, the administration already has begun promoting compromise on health care even before the president settles on the final details of his proposal.
Though the plan is not scheduled to be unveiled until September, members of Congress will soon receive briefing books on the proposal, and the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton are out promoting it.
As he is looking ahead, the weak public response to the economic plan-48 percent in the ABC-Post poll disapproved of it, believing it won’t work-is forcing Clinton into the unusual position of still trying to sell it.
Much of his speech in Charleston was devoted to extolling the plan, and the vaunted White House “war room” will stay in operation for a while to continue the public relations effort.
