ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 7, 1996 TAG: 9611070023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
IN HIS victory speech Tuesday night, President Clinton said it's time the parties put politics aside and worked together to address the nation's problems.
Put politics aside? Give us a break. Clinton himself was hardly putting politics aside by implying that future investigations and criticisms of his presidency would constitute, and should be dismissed as, just more politics.
Still, he is on to something. Voters this week chose to continue divided government. That doesn't mean they want a Democratic president and Republican Congress only as foils for each other.
Bill Clinton won partly as a check on Newt Gingrich. The GOP retained Congress partly as a check on Clinton. But these negative mandates can't guide the positive steps that America needs to take.
Especially after a nasty campaign, the temptation to seek partisan advantage at the expense of national progress will be acute. Some Republicans will want to let Democrats hang on their promise to "protect" Medicare. Some Democrats will want to watch GOP leaders come up, alone, with spending cuts needed to balance the budget. This will solve nothing.
To fix unsustainable entitlements, to fine-tune welfare and immigration reform, to expand access to health insurance while slowing the growth of health-care spending, to fight inequality in Americans' access to education and opportunity, to improve risk assessment in environmental and other regulations, to promote development of the next century's infrastructure while downsizing bureaucracy, to help spread free trade and democracy abroad and, yes, to clean up campaign financing: These are tough tasks; they require hard choices. But they have to be taken on.
The parties will have - should have - reasonable differences on how to go about such tasks. That's what politics is about. Indeed, we would be misguided, as well as naive, to hope for cooperation to the exclusion of combat in the next four years.
America's challenges can be taken up in a serious way, though, only if the president and a pragmatic core in Congress work together and seek consensus. Members of the Virginia delegation ought to join this pragmatic core.
From our region, Bob Goodlatte, Rick Boucher and Virgil Goode each won House seats with more than 60 percent of the vote. Virginia's John Warner, 69, may be serving his last term in the Senate. Surely, Goodlatte can afford to stop tinkering with the Constitution, Boucher to acknowledge the corrosive effects of PAC giving, Goode to raise his sights from the tobacco fields, and Warner to question military spending requests - enough to help tackle national, structural problems that only grow larger with delay.
Who knows: An electorate that has chastened both left and right for ideological arrogance and partisan excess may be in a mood to reward practical efforts and progress-achieving partnerships. That's not putting politics aside. That's exercising politics in the service of leadership.
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