President Clinton’s political fate is in the hands of nearly 200 members of Congress, most of them Democrats, all of them meeting behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.
Now there’s a scenario that’s scarier than dinnertime at Jurassic Park.
In about three weeks, the House-Senate conference committee will emerge with a package of taxes and spending curbs designed to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over five years, or maybe $400 billion over five years. The idea is to “reconcile” the divergent plans that passed the House in May and the Senate in June, both by the skimpiest of margins.
The final package will be presented to the House and Senate, and if it fails, you can pack Clinton’s presidency into an egg crate and ship it back to the Arkansas State Fair.
You’d think that grim reality would stir the hearts of Democrats who’ve spent most of the last generation looking over the fence at the White House.
Not so in the party of the self-inflicted wound. Factional fighting has been all the rage in the budget process, and all of it has been conducted inside Clinton’s party.
For example, a group of several dozen Democrats, many of them Southern conservatives and moderates, want to abandon the idea of an energy tax altogether.
A subspecies of that group wants to justify dumping the fuels tax by lowering the stated deficit target from $500 billion to something closer to $400 billion.
Meanwhile, liberals in the House and Senate, including the 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, want more in the package for job growth and help for low-income working families, provisions that were scaled back in the Senate when the energy tax was gutted by Democrats from the West.
With Republicans sitting out the budget process, the battle has shaped up as a fight between the traditional liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the centrist, Southern suburban wing that spawned Bill Clinton as a presidential candidate.
So despite an 80-vote Democratic majority in the House and a 56-44 advantage in the Senate, Clinton will endure his own private Alamo right up until the moment the Congress votes.
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Luckily for Clinton, the budget conference is dominated by two men who identify themselves as “regular Democrats.”
The two are Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, chairman of the Finance Committee.
Rostenkowski and Moynihan are, well, dinosaurs. They are legislators for whom notions of presidential loyalty and party discipline are not alien, legislators who understand that what the country will not accept from Washington is more dithering and more gridlock.
Were it not for the prehistoric likes of Rostenkowski and Moynihan, the president’s plan would be in the hands of self-promoting free agents like Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma and deal-cutters like Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.
Held hostage by many of his centrist allies in the party, Clinton must negotiate in the knowledge that just about every Democrat in Congress has veto power over his economic plan.
Six Senate Democrats walked away from Clinton the last time, when Vice President Al Gore cast the deciding vote in a 50-49 cliffhanger at 3 in the morning. And in the House, the vote was 219-213, with nearly 40 Democratic defections.
Some of Clinton’s friends suggest that a few innings of political hardball might help the president as the conference unfolds.
Last month, a gaggle of nervous Democratic governors met in Vermont to talk about health-care reform and Bill Clinton’s travails.
At a private dinner party, Tennessee Gov. Ned Ray McWherter, who served 14 years as speaker of the Tennessee House, had some unsolicited political advice for the president.
According to several Democratic diners, McWherter told his fellow governors that as House speaker in Nashville he once confronted a young Democratic state legislator who’d developed a habit of voting against him.
Calling the offending zealot into his office, McWherter handed the young man a photograph of a state-owned road grader, asking the lawmaker if he recognized the highway equipment.
Certainly, the young Democrat allowed. That’s a road grader.
Well, you’d better take a good long look at the picture, McWherter suggested. Because if he didn’t begin to vote with his party, it was as close as the lawmaker would get to seeing a road grader in his district.