Of course, this must be accomplished in what the Washington wonks are calling “the context of a balanced budget.” And what exactly does that mean? The rap on Clinton is that by becoming essentially a moderate Republican on fiscal issues, he’ll be remembered mostly as a president who played a good game of defense against extremist ideas, with some nice on-court cheerleading to make everyone feel better. There was even a mantra for it in the campaign: “balancing the budget while protecting our values,” the values being “M2, E2” (code for Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment).
This defensive maneuver worked brilliantly last year, but it hamstrings Clinton as he begins his second term. Commitment to a balanced budget means little money for the big, bold initiatives that could catapult him to greatness–or at least greatness in the eyes of the liberals who write most American history. At the same time, by promising so feverishly to protect the elderly, the president will have a hard time making the long-term cuts in entitlement programs necessary to make balancing the budget anything more than a temporary achievement.
Clinton’s new Medicare proposal, for instance, amounts to little more than an accounting gimmick that buys him nothing in the long run. Unless he pulls a Nixon-to-China on entitlement reform, he will win few points for fiscal responsibility. The epitaph HE CUT THE DEFICIT IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS TENURE, ONLY TO HAVE IT BALLOON LATER will not be carved on a monument any time soon.
This is what the British call a sticky wicket, and it has yielded a domestic agenda widely derided as too modest, even for a centrist. The usual Washington wise guys anticipate a kind of energetic do-nothingism from Clinton. His short-term goals are viewed as either futile, like campaign- finance reform and trying to roll back the food-stamp and welfare cuts for legal immigrants, or as cakewalks, like uncontroversial regional trade pacts and more money for community policing.
But don’t write off Clinton’s priorities as puny without a close look at education, a major concern of his since his earliest days in politics. The president’s best hope for leaving a lasting imprint is that seemingly prosaic ideas like tax credits for college and national student-performance standards just might transform the country the way the GI Bill did in the 1950s. In 1996 the president began envisioning a nation where the first two years of college are as common as high school. Eventually, Clinton may be able to invoke “education” the way earlier presidents invoked “national defense”–as Mom-and-apple-pie crust for expensive goodies that would never be swallowed otherwise.
And that’s not just political packaging. In today’s knowledge economy, the idea of education is broadening beyond the classroom to welfare (job training) and health care (educating people to shift to preventive, less costly medicine). Clinton won election and re-election partly by convincing voters that education was their ticket to survival in the confusing future, and that he would help them write it. That is actually a mammoth promise.
But the odds are against him, and not just because he could be capsized by scandal or recession or a balky Republican Congress. Though the new line-item veto will help (recalcitrant Republicans will face a choice between losing their pet projects and siding with the president), the two domestic issues most likely to affect Clinton’s historical reputation–education and welfare–are now largely state and local duties.
Which means the president will have to fashion a whole new way of governing, in which Washington doesn’t run many programs or pass many laws but instead coordinates and leverages broader social change. Evoking Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton calls this the bully-pulpit approach. But given the reduced moral authority of the presidency and the increased complexity of public life, the pulpit’s sound system is not strong enough. Exhorting Americans or highlighting successes is important but insufficient.
To move farther, Clinton needs what his communications director, Donald Baer, calls a domestic “Marshal Plan”–that’s “marshal” with one “l.” The original Marshall Plan, announced in 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall, was a huge investment in postwar Europe. No one is expecting that now domestically. Instead, this organizational effort, whatever it is called, would move beyond eloquent words toward concrete-action plans for marshaling existing resources of government, the private sector and nonprofits.
Despite endless conferences and a lot of talk about rebuilding “civil society,” this is not fully happening yet. “Replication” of successful programs is all too rare. For instance, Oregon has an innovative health-care plan that has cut the rate of uninsured Oregonians to 11 percent–much lower than the national average. But the plan has not been emulated. Government engages in “a systemic suppression of good ideas,” says Harvard professor Alan Altschuler, who is trying to address the replication problem by helping judge the Ford Foundation’s Innovations in American Government awards.
Even if Clinton does educate and marshal, he will still swim upstream in the old-fashioned, everyday world of Washington policymaking. Here’s some of the rest of this year’s agenda.
The Plan From Hope: The president’s “Hope Scholarships” are named not after his hometown but after a similar program in Georgia. They would provide a $1,500 tax credit (direct money) and a $10,000 tax deduction for college costs. The plan, which is aimed at middle-class families more than poor ones, would make the first year of college essentially free. Students earning at least a B average would be eligible for a second year of the credit. This is a big-budget item–$42 billion over six years–and it could generate both grade inflation and tuition inflation. But it’s the biggest plank on Clinton’s bridge.
Bricks and Mortar: Computers in the schools? Try classrooms that don’t leak. A new report says that more than a third of American children attend schools that need to be rebuilt or undergo major repairs. The backlog now totals a staggering $112 billion. Clinton is proposing $5 billion over five years, with a bonding formula to leverage an additional $20 billion locally. It’s a start–and a way to get federal money into the schools without threatening local control over curriculum.
The Little Engine That Could: Clinton keeps the children’s book of that title in the Oval Office, and it will take a similar Herculean effort to get enough reading tutors into the schools. America’s Reading Corps is lightly funded–only $200 million over five years to train 30,000 reading specialists, who in turn are supposed to train a million volunteers. The aim is to make sure every child reads by third grade, a noble goal that, if achieved, would yield huge personal and economic benefits for the country. But until Clinton and Congress add another zero to the funding, it’s little more than a charade.
KiddieCare: One of Clinton’s biggest campaign promises was to provide health coverage for the 10 million children who are uninsured. But when states and private employers now generously insuring some lower-middle-class families figure out that Washington will do it, they’ll dump those kids into the federal pool, sending costs into the stratosphere. No one has figured out how to solve that one yet.
Help Wanted: For welfare reform to work, it must become an education program. Former recipients must learn how to hold down jobs. The president’s favorite idea, based on a Kansas City plan, is to allow states to transfer a welfare recipient’s check to an employer as a wage supplement. The government picks up at least half of the new worker’s salary, plus benefits, and the employer picks up the other portion, often minuscule. By the time benefits expire, the company should have a fully trained employee.
In theory, anyway. Incentives to hire welfare recipients haven’t worked in the past. Clinton may be forced to revisit the old idea of low-wage public-sector jobs, though he would have to persuade labor to drop its hidebound opposition. The president is seriously interested in making welfare reform a reality, but not yet seriously enough committed to what’s necessary to accomplish it.
Having been burned so badly on health-care reform in 1993-94, Clinton has become a quintessential consensus politician, determined to move slowly with confidence-building measures that restore faith in government before trying big fixes. The confusion comes from interpreting this as a retreat from the lofty goals of the Inaugural Address. Under fire, the president is still trying to advance. But he must move from merely exhorting his troops to marshaling them for conquest.
