This is a satisfying deflation–given all the heavy breathing that attended the current effort–but not entirely fair. Clinton has had to work harder for his $500 billion. He’s had to cut defense deeper and raise taxes more–and transfer that money, in effect, to the ever-spiraling health-care entitlement accounts. The rich are socked harder than Bush would have permitted, and some of that money is given to the working poor–a significant step to reward work and make welfare less attractive. But the real shock comes in the traditional liberal stomping grounds, discretionary domestic spending: Clinton will spend only about the same as Bush did. Most of the “investments” the president touted during the campaign–especially in infrastructure-have been vaporized. To make matters worse, if he wants any of his domestic proposals to be enacted, Clinton will have to convince the congressional bulls that his programs are better than the existing ones. “Every new dollar the president hopes to spend in this area will have to be financed by more than a dollar in spending cuts in 1994 and 1995,” says Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Could it have been different? Maybe, if Clinton had been willing to risk his presidency on drastic reform, challenging the Congress to eliminate a raft of anachronistic or superfluous federal programs (the list is almost a cliche by now) and really going after entitlements by suspending cost-of-living adjustments. Or, by proposing a really stiff energy or consumption tax. He might have used the money to give his investments a fair test; or further reduce the deficit; or a little of both. The question is academic: Clinton signaled his flaccidity from the first, ceding the line-item veto to the congressional leaders over dinner a week after he was elected. Since then, he has been backpedaling furiously, whenever challenged, on everything from Western grazing fees to his BTU tax.
Then again, it’s probable Congress would have withstood a real presidential kamikaze onslaught and–like the toy clown that bounces back smiling no matter how hard you slam it–come out in precisely the same place. A $500 billion deficit-reduction package every three or four years may just be the Hill’s version of the status quo. It is possible that presidents, for the moment, will have to find another way to define themselves than through the budget process. If so, it’s particularly hard on Clinton, whose “vision” was married to a laundry list of programs he wanted to see funded. Without his beloved programs, what can Clinton’s presidency be about?
There are several possibilities. One-given the Hooray for Change/Are You Kidding? nature of the moment–would be rather ironic: foreign policy. Clinton may find, and define, himself in some future crisis. This isn’t terribly likely; the public won’t have much patience for any extended wanderings or involvements, absent a first-rate villainous threat to national security. Clinton’s aides say health care is where the real action will be–but the dynamics there are likely to be similar to the budget process, and the results as equivocal. A more promising path may be to actually try to manage the federal government. Al Gore has been going about, finding all sorts of bizarre procurement, personnel and performance practices. The president could devote himself to trying to make the programs that exist actually work. But here, too, the Congress and federal employees’ unions will block his path. (Indeed, Congress wants to give the unions more power through Hatch Act “reforms” that would allow federal employees the right to form political-action committees–PACs–and buy off the legislators who fund their agencies.)
No one of these paths, even if pursued with unaccustomed rigor, can save Clinton. Lacking the power to really mess around with the budget-and absent a true national crisis -the modern presidency seems to be more about who the occupant is than what he does. Ronald Reagan was the only recent president who made this work for him. He was reassuring, a secure presence. It didn’t matter what he actually did: he could cut taxes in 1981 and raise them again in 1982, and people didn’t care because they trusted him to do the right thing. Clinton showed some of the same potential during the campaign-people didn’t know him very well, but he seemed to know them.
That intimacy has vanished. As president, Clinton has seemed strangled, subdued, remote. Part of it is attributable, no doubt, to the horrific string of tragedies and embarrassments that have plagued his White House. But there’s also been an unexpected blandness here-no soaring rhetoric, no moral presence, no sense of drama, no sense of fun. His concessions seem more vivid than his convictions. His natural curiosity and enthusiasm have been overwhelmed by his (equally natural, but less attractive) obeisance to authority, in this case to the Congress. He has replaced Bush’s “Do No Harm” with “Do Not Offend.” As a result, he seems in danger of replicating not just Bush’s deficit-reduction package, but his remote, passionless, purposeless presidency.
