Dick Lamm hasn’t won an election in more than a decade, lost his last race to a guy who wears a pony tail and rides a Harley, and once said that old people “have a duty to die.”
Somehow this qualified him for a brief canonization by the press as a fresh new face in politics. Now that that’s out of the way, Lamm is free to assume his rightful place in the presidential campaign. That is, he will give the 1996 Ross Perot the one thing the 1992 Ross Perot didn’t have: somebody Perot could beat.
Perot and Lamm will make the rounds of a couple of conventions to be held this weekend by the Reform Party, the new group created and bankrolled by Perot. Next month, the members of the Reform Party will choose their candidate for president. Presumably, they will choose the landlord.
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And Perot will be back at it, going after Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and telling us again how we’re going to have to reform Washington.
There’s a big problem for Perot and the Reform Party. To borrow from the ward boss Paddy Bauler, America ain’t ready for reform.
Perot might not realize that, but the Democrats and Republicans do.
People loved to hear Perot talk in the 1992 campaign about the “shared sacrifice” we’d have to make to balance the federal budget. But since then, each time the Democrats and Republicans have tried to use one of his ideas, they’ve been burned.
Look at Perot’s plan to balance the budget in five years. His biggest spending cut was $141 million from Medicare and Medicaid.
He wanted to hike gas taxes by 50 cents a gallon, limit mortgage deductions, increase Medicare user premiums and raise the top marginal tax rate.
Now, Clinton and the Republicans have made plenty of political miscues over the last three years, but two that really stand out have Perot’s fingerprints all over them.
When Clinton signed a deficit reduction package that increased the gas tax by just 4.3 cents a gallon and the highest marginal tax rate to 36 percent, he was roundly criticized on talk radio for hiking taxes. He cut the deficit using pieces of the Perot prescription, and people rewarded him by booting his Democratic buddies out of the House and Senate.
Clinton looked like he was politically dead and buried. But then the Republicans had their turn. Like Perot, they proposed a big cut in Medicare. People, the elderly in particular, despised them for it.
Ever since, the Democrats have been selling themselves as the saviors of Medicare (even though they wanted to cut spending on it, too.) Union-financed television ads have been hammering Republicans over Medicare. Now Clinton has a huge lead over Bob Dole and the Democrats have a chance of reclaiming control of the House and Senate.
And as the election approaches, you don’t hear Clinton or Dole or the GOP congressional leaders talking much about what they’ll do to whack out the rest of the budget deficit. They got the message. Don’t rile anybody.
This shouldn’t be a particularly startling revelation. Many people predicted that when the voters who were crying for revolution saw the revolution in action, they would promptly gag. That’s exactly what has happened in the last few years.
But it does make you wonder where Perot can go with his presidential campaign this year. Many of the people who loved his “shared sacrifice” prattle last time are scared to death of the same ideas now.
What else is he going to talk about? Ethics in government. Ha Ha! Who cares?
Clinton has been dogged by Whitewater, the travel office fiasco, the FBI files scandal, and yet he hums along with a fat approval rating and that big lead on Dole.
People are starting to call Clinton a Teflon president. But how about Dole? The former vice chairman of Dole’s campaign recently agreed to plead guilty and pay $6 million in fines for illegally funneling cash to the campaign. That barely caused a murmur. The Democrats scream that he is breaking federal campaign law by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more than he is allowed. That hasn’t registered with voters, who have found other reasons to be less than enamored of Dole.
Voters enjoyed two elections where they flexed their muscles, tossing out a Republican president and then tossing out a Democratic Congress. Now it seems they’ve become placid, even meek. They’ve seen what shared sacrifice really means, and they don’t like it at all. Bill Clinton’s giving them a feel-good campaign, and by golly they want to feel good.
It seems like there’s only one thing that might have gotten them really mad this year. If they had actually elected Ross Perot in 1992, they’d be ready now to run him out on a rail.