The old year ended in a wallow, with the national press mired in Little Rock, following the lead of the professional Clinton haters and taking testimony from a pair of Arkansas state troopers rounded up in a presidential sex scandal that had everything but a woman’s name.
The troopers’ tale already has begun to recede, fought off by an administration that is better at dousing fires in Clinton’s private life than it is at doing almost anything else.
By the end of this month, the troopers will be back to drinking on their shifts and the talk will be of a balanced-budget amendment and the promise of welfare reform.
Clinton opposes the former idea and champions the latter, although public reaction to the high cost of “ending welfare as we know it” may dampen enthusiasm.
Still, an overhaul of the welfare system is the public policy carrot that follows the stick of deficit reduction and health-care reform. Nobody likes the present arrangement, although liberals surely will inveigh against Clinton for blaming the victims.
In fact, the Jesse Jackson-Jerry Brown-Ralph Nader wing of the Democratic Party probably will confront the president on the issue, perhaps in alliance with elements of organized labor.
If you’ve watched the occasionally wily New Democrat at work, you’ll understand that is a fight Clinton is more than willing to join.
More Top Picks Best Night Driving Glasses For Seniors
Welfare will be folded into the expanding national debate over crime and punishment, a debate Clinton will attempt to lead in his State of the Union message later this month.
Drugs, guns and family values will feed the congressional instinct to manufacture feel-good legislation on television violence. Lawmakers who should know better will fall prey to the instinct to ban pictures of lethal weapons rather than banning the weapons themselves.
More significantly, the debate over “school choice” is all but certain to well up in every school district and confront every politician.
Arguments over vouchers for public and private schools and over the roles of parents, teachers unions and government will grow increasingly contentious as education becomes a national obsession.
The abortion fight will move back to center stage as the Clinton health-care package moves through Congress and the volatile question of federal funding of abortions for poor women re-emerges.
Like it or not, elections will happen in the new year.
At the federal level, the results of House and Senate contests will be taken as referendums on the Clinton presidency.
Voters have stayed angry since shipping George Bush off to private life, and more incumbent Democrats than Republicans are preparing to defend themselves. If they are to be returned to office, it will be a revived economy that is the agent of their salvation, and of Clinton’s.
Ross Perot? Well, here’s the deal. It’s real simple. Ol’ Ross is going to have to find another hood to get under, or another barn to clean out or another issue to demagogue. Time’s about up, Ross.
Meanwhile, many of us will continue to feel like hitchhikers on the information superhighway.
In 1993 telephone, cable, wireless and entertainment companies converged in multibillion-dollar alliances that, we are assured, will in time offer 500 channels of video entertainment, information and voice services.
Presumably, Geraldo Rivera, John McLaughlin and Rush Limbaugh still will have shows. Presumably, we will get to know more about the 1994 equivalent of Michael Jackson, Joey Buttafuoco and John Wayne Bobbitt.
Along with the dumbing down of news, the ruination of sport will continue apace in 1994.
A mangling of major league baseball’s divisions and the inauguration of a playoff system that will reward second-place finishers and “regionalize” television coverage isn’t the final indignity but will have to do until the game’s feckless proprietors invent another one.
This year we will hear more about Boris Yeltsin and authoritarianism, about retired Gen. Colin Powell and the identity of the Republican who will challenge Clinton in 1996, and about Vincent Foster, the White House lawyer who killed himself in July.
House Republican leader Bob Michel will head off into honorable retirement in Peoria, and Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) will remain in Washington to face an uncertain legal future.
The 1996 Democratic National Convention, we will learn, will be staged in California, not in Chicago.
And at the end of 1994, it will be five years since the Cubs were in the baseball playoffs. The real baseball playoffs, that is.
Happy New Year.