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player ready...Times have changed, as times will after presidential elections, and the Grand Old Party-once on top-these days looks as gloomy as the Chevy Chase fan club.
Bill Clinton’s over-the-falls-in-a-barrel-and-back-again presidency hardly emits the sweet smell of success, but his relentless domestic agenda and his indefatigable style have Republicans constantly chasing his serve.
A year into Clinton’s tenure, he has forced his most fervid Republican antagonists-Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, to name a couple-to sit and ponder his vast, government-centered vision of the future.
The theatrics of the national policy debate have changed, and they’ve been enhanced as Clinton has come to understand the bully-pulpit aspects of his occupation.
A president can direct the national debate, as Ronald Reagan did, and as George Bush and Jimmy Carter did not.
As long as a president keeps talking about what he’s going to be doing, his opponents will find themselves braying from the balconies.
In the 1980s a State of the Union address by Reagan or even Bush would be followed by a tedious recounting of Democratic bromides, robotically delivered by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, or by his successor, Jim Wright, or by his successor, Tom Foley.
If one of these jowly pedants was unavailable, the Democratic response would be turned over to the eminently serious George Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic leader in the Senate and a man apparently rendered dour and humorless by a brief stint on the federal bench.
Last Tuesday night, in the wake of Clinton’s speech to Congress, Dole was the designated naysayer, and a poor job he did of it.
Dole had a chart and an attitude, but he sounded like poor old Jim Wright, insisting that the president’s ideas on health care and crime and welfare were ill-conceived or downright dangerous.
Sadly for Dole, who is among the city’s more compelling figures, he doesn’t have an idea in his head. Right now, the Republican idea larder is empty.
Most of what passes for thinking in the party is apparently being handled by William Kristol, a conservative intellectual who served as Dan Quayle’s brainpan while he was vice president.
It was Kristol who peddled the notion that Republicans should oppose Clinton by declaring the absence of a national health-care crisis.
Figuring it would save them wear-and-tear on having to come up with a health-care alternative, the whole posse of 1996 hopefuls, from Dole to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, fell in line with Kristol’s proposal.
Even one of Clinton’s putative allies, Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.), chimed in with Kristol.
While it’s true there has been an erosion of support in public and in Congress for the Clinton health plan, selling incremental change-insurance reform, limiting restrictions based on pre-existing medical conditions-may be harder than it looks for Republicans.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey last week showed that 68 percent of those asked said real health-care reform required “a complete overhaul” of the current system.
On crime, Clinton called for legislation that would ban assault weapons, hire 100,000 additional police officers and incarcerate three-time violent felons for life. Throw in his support for the death penalty and you have a Democratic president who sounds anything but soft on crime.
Still, Republicans tried. “The president said nothing about regional prisons,” squeaked Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida. “He took the glamor issues.”
Having watched Clinton pilfer pages from the Republican hymn book on violent crime, Gingrich was reduced to lugging around an old Democratic argument: The proof of commitment is a willingness to throw public money at it.
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“We look forward to analyzing the (Clinton) budget next week,” Gingrich said. “If there’s no money for new prisons, it does not matter how many speeches that Clinton gives on locking up criminals.”
Some Republicans, including beyond-the-Beltway governors such as Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, would like to see a coherent GOP vision of the future. But, in Campbell’s words, “Republicans have a hard time agreeing internally on some key issues.”
Right now, that’s working for Clinton.