You can make a case that our calendars have it all wrong. Labor Day is the real New Year’s Day in America.
Everybody’s back from vacation, the school year settles in, bosses posture about making that big push before the end of the year. And, in Washington, members of Congress and the president return, energized, for all the usual hostilities.
This autumn’s wrangling should be special. Congress and President Bush have some major legislation hanging fire. And with all three major political parties (Democrats, Republicans and Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont) spoiling for action, it will take more than Gary Condit and continuing alarm over Al Gore’s thickness-challenged beard to distract the rest of us from the exhilarating main events.
The quick take is that, before leaving town on vacation, Bush pulled together more legislative victories than his critics–or his supporters–expected. But several of those victories are incomplete. The question is whether, in coming months, Bush will wind up signing into law dramatic new initiatives such as a patients’ bill of rights, prescription drug benefits for seniors and an education package.
Plenty of political opponents stand ready to stuff much of Bush’s agenda down his throat. With the Senate now in the hands of Democrats, Capitol Hill warriors such as Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) have their spears sharpened.
But the obstructionist role that some Democrats can’t wait to play could have a downside. In poll after poll during the 2000 election cycle, voters voiced their outrage with gotcha politics. Americans aren’t looking to rally around leaders whose claim to fame is that they blocked somebody else’s legislation.
Pro and con opinions of Bill Clinton aside, his second term had more to do with gridlock in Congress than with his own initiatives. Many voters got the sense that too many senators and representatives saw service in Congress as being All About Them. Not much got done.
That communal lack of accomplishment had only one positive side effect: The government began paying down the national debt because rival factions in Congress couldn’t agree on how to spend federal budget surpluses.
So as Washington goes back to business this week, the pols have a fairly simple choice. They can play gotcha by smacking down each other’s agendas and trying to pretend that’s a win. Or they can remind themselves that they are barely one year short of an event that could disrupt some of their careers.
It’s called an election.
There is every reason to think that, if the economy doesn’t mend, voters will be in an uglier mood in 2002 than they were in 2000. That especially worries Republicans because of the usual backlash in off-year elections toward the party that holds the White House.
But there’s no telling how 2002 might play out. Angry voters don’t always stop after lambasting one party. And Bush has attracted enough Democratic crossover votes–even for his controversial tax cut–to further blur the blame game. So just blocking his legislation, without having something more positive to brag about, may not be the unrelieved joy Democrats had hoped.
Don’t forget that when Bush left for toasty Texas a month ago, he was on a roll. He had just split the opposition in the House to win passage, by a vote of 218-213, on patients’ rights. Less than 24 hours earlier, he’d pushed his energy plan through the House. Earlier he had put together an education package that has fairly strong public support, and had begun to provoke some serious discussion about prescription drug benefits as one element of an overhaul that the Medicare insurance program for seniors desperately needs if it is to remain solvent.
Senate Democrats, of course, now can bottle the administration’s agenda. Or they can take the longer view and decide that when you’re bragging about your accomplishments, it helps to have a few. Something trumps nothing, even if you have to hold your nose and compromise with your foes to achieve it. That sort of pragmatic approach tugged the Congress together at times in 1996 and 1997. Back home, where all those pesky constituents live, it sold better than gridlock.
What might put some Democrats in a bargaining mood is a quiet worry about just how much of Bush’s agenda they can block.
Consider energy. Bush won his big victory in the House by splitting the less than cohesive opposition. Some 86 labor-sensitive Democrats, including House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, wound up opposing increases in auto fuel efficiency, a measure environmentalists favor. The president even got 38 Democratic representatives, including five members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to support petroleum drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by convincing them the project would create jobs. The Democrats’ schisms befuddled many of their loyalists. “I have no idea what they think they’ve accomplished,” Philip Clapp, head of the National Environmental Trust, told a reporter. “Democrats simply walked away from the public policy they endorsed all spring and handed the president a great victory.”
What happens this fall, of course, will be colored by ongoing squabbling about the federal budget. Republicans aren’t happy that they’re getting blamed for giving away too much money in the tax cut, and Democrats aren’t happy that they can’t spend more on their pet programs. In retrospect, that now-thwarted start at paying down the national debt never looked better.
But with Americans demanding action on several key fronts, the men and women of Washington need to realize that their codependent relationship of blame and counter-blame satisfies an ever-smaller audience of partisan zealots.
So, with the 2002 campaign season looming bright, the people we have elected to make our most difficult decisions on public policy get to choose. They can play gotcha. Or they can do their jobs.What might put some Democrats in a bargaining mood is a quiet worry about just how much of Bush’s agenda they can block.
