For three weeks President Clinton has been doing a fair impression of Franklin D. Roosevelt, shepherding a far-reaching economic plan past a skeptical public and through a reluctant Congress.
Clinton has been aided by electoral evidence that the citizenry is prepared to entertain tax hikes and cuts in government programs, and by the transformation of the national Republican Party from a juggernaut to a pitiful helpless giant.
At the moment Clinton’s loyal opposition is split along lines of ideology, economics and personality. Stunned by the election results and reeling in the wake of Clinton’s recovery package, Republicans have done nothing but nibble at the margins.
The GOP’s unifying principle-Ronald Reagan-now is a dim memory to many Americans, and no idea or individual has emerged to replace him.
Many Republicans appear uncertain as to why they lost the November election. They are unsure about the future of Reaganomics and discomfited by their inability to counter Clinton’s economic proposals, much less his charisma blitz.
Looking backward, the more ardent of GOP conservatives bask in the smug assurance that responsibility for the loss of the White House falls entirely on George Bush.
By their lights it was the 1990 budget deal with Congress that undid Bush. If it wasn’t the budget compromise, it was billionaire populist Ross Perot, or Bush’s own meandering campaign style.
The idea that is never entertained is that the election turned on the Republicans’ stewardship of the nation through the 1980s. That possibility doesn’t seem to merit serious discussion.
Turning a tin ear to the election results, the party’s supply-side wing believes America is crying out for a purer, extra-strength strain of Reaganomics.
Sometimes, the internal debate among Republicans over taxes and government spending appears to creep up on the theological.
Last week, as House Republicans yelped for more spending cuts, their one-time guru, former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, was insisting that a focus on trimming government programs was misguided.
Kemp argued that a steady diet of tax cuts would allow Americans to expand the economy and, eventually, reduce the pesky deficit that exploded in 12 years of Republican rule.
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It is a measure of Kemp’s popularity inside the party that many congressional Republicans did their laughing over these pronouncements in private.
Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, for one, never has had much time for Kemp’s fervid supply-side beliefs, and congressional Republicans are far more interested in trashing Clinton’s plan than they are in sharing Kemp’s back-to-the-future economic tenets.
Moving further to the Right, the moon-bayers in service to the Pats-Buchanan and Robertson-insist they’re ready to turn the corner in the cultural war they declared last summer at the Republican National Convention in Houston.
They’ve been aided in their effort by former Education Secretary William Bennett, who fancies himself a player in the 1996 White House derby.
Last week Bennett, who has been aligned with Kemp in Empower America, a post-election GOP interest group, appeared to move closer to Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.
On Wednesday, Ralph Reed, the coalition’s executive director, released the results of a poll on “family values” and told a news conference that the evangelicals were “not saying that these (cultural) issues should be the central or most important thing the party talks about.”
Bennett demurred, saying that Reed and Robertson didn’t go
far enough.
“There are no issues with any higher priority than cultural, educational and moral issues,” Bennett said, flying in the face of an electorate that, through Clinton and Perot, rejected the pious and self-satisfied rhetoric of Houston.
Meanwhile, the slash-and-burn wing of the GOP was busily engaged in a campaign of ridicule designed to reveal the president as unmanly, as the willing pawn of his left-wing spouse.
All the available evidence suggests Americans have the economy on their minds, but conservative publications like National Review and The American Spectator keep making a cover girl of Hillary Clinton, painting her as the McGovernite demon burrowed into the heart of the administration.
It’s an obsession shared by radio smartypants Rush Limbaugh and the Ollie North sect of the GOP, which harbors an antipathy toward the first lady that suggests a need for psychological help.