Congressional Democrats have been able to forgive Bill Clinton for many sins–botching health-care reform, waffling on Bosnia and China, pushing through a North American Free Trade Agreement, being civil to Newt Gingrich on national TV. What they may not be able to forgive is his newfound commitment to fiscal responsibility.
In the aftermath of the president’s Tuesday speech unveiling a surprise plan to balance the budget in 10 years, the mood among Democrats on Capitol Hill ran the gamut from strong displeasure to sputtering rage. “The word `betrayal’ came up three times, from three different members,” one representative said in recounting the House Democrats’ angry meeting with Clinton on Wednesday.
Another Democrat told The New York Times he felt like Capt. Scott O’Grady must have felt when he was hiding in the forests of Bosnia and subsisting on bugs and leaves. “The difference between House Democrats and Capt. O’Grady is that Capt. O’Grady had allies,” he complained.
Bad enough that the president proposed to eliminate the deficit, which was quite a turnabout: Only four months ago, he had recommended keeping it at roughly $200 billion a year more or less forever. More galling still was Clinton’s decision to address the insolvency of Medicare, which will make it harder for his party to portray Republicans as heartless Scrooges plotting to brutalize Granny.
Never mind that something has to be done about the trust fund or there will be no money to pay for doctor visits and hospital stays. Congressional Democrats had fully intended to contribute nothing to the Medicare debate except shrieks of pain and howls of outrage. They may stick to that plan–Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, a leader on health-care issues, said House Democrats should simply ignore the president–but Clinton has taken much of the fun out of it.
The Democrats, however, really have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, they were attacked by Republicans as feckless spendthrifts. So when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, they seized the chance to cast themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they soon found they enjoyed preaching hellfire-and-brimstone sermons about the dangers of living beyond your means.
When Reagan proposed a tax cut, they predicted that the ensuing deficits would set off runaway inflation. When a recession struck instead, they blamed his fiscal policy and said it would keep interest rates so high that any recovery would take years. When a robust and long-lived expansion followed, they blamed the budget deficit for the trade deficit. Throughout the 1980s, they identified the “Reagan deficits” as the root of all evil. And they forced both Reagan and his successor, George Bush, to accept tax increases to stanch the flow of red ink.
But it turns out they were not opposed to deficits after all–only to tax cuts, which they could cite (falsely) as the source of the ballooning national debt. Many Republicans, including Reagan, favored cutting taxes partly as a way to shrink the government: If you can’t tame the beast, they figured, why not try starving it? The Democrats understood that strategy perfectly well, but they didn’t want to defend Big Government on its own merits. Nor did they want to take the principled position that higher taxes are a positive good. It was easier to attack the deficit.
Now, however, they have a different problem: Republicans are trying to shrink the government directly, by slashing spending on a host of domestic programs created and cherished by Democrats. And they are doing it in the name of that great Democratic cause of the last 15 years: fiscal responsibility.
While the Democrats habitually lectured on the need to balance the budget, the Republicans have actually come up with a blueprint to do it by 2002. When the Democrats protest cuts in spending on this or that, the Republicans, learning from Democratic tactics in the ’80s, can avoid debating the merits of the issue by merely inveighing against the immoral custom of living at the expense of our children.
Congressional Democrats apparently think they could tolerate the embarrassment of being exposed as frauds on the deficit, but Bill Clinton is not quite so shameless. Having been relegated to a minority by the voters, they find themselves abandoned by their own president. As they become less relevant, they will have ample time to contemplate the wisdom of H.L. Mencken, who said that injustice is easy to bear; what stings is justice.
