THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512090002
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Newt Gingrich, of all people, once mocked Bill Clinton for excessive ego. After several eruptions of spite and petulance, he now promises GOP colleagues to button his own lips and hunker down. The idea is to attract less lightning to Republican reforms and provide less grist for the president's propaganda mills which, with some success, pose Clinton as the noble defender of the elderly against heartless Republicans.
This, of course, is world-class pandering, but scare tactics helped congressional Democrats to regain seats during the Reagan years and appear to be working now as Clinton's stock rises in the polls. And no wonder: His strategy is to empathize with public yearning, as The New Republic puts it, for ``a balanced budget, lower taxes and higher government spending.''
White House Budget Director Alice Rivlin, once a steady voice for fiscal discipline, now speaks of a need to guard against ``savage cuts'' in Medicare and Medicaid. This is false. There's no doubt some Republican initiatives need revision - or vetoes - but the thrust for spending less on entitlement programs like Medicare is right and long overdue. The Republicans' fight for slowing growth of spending took courage of the sort that may not come again. So did insistence on balancing the budget within a time certain. Substance is on their side, expedience on Clinton's.
Consider: (1) The president denounced Republicans for proposing a Medicare premium increase that was included in his own budget. (2) His surrogates generate hysteria by attacking a reform concept which seems identical to that advanced by Hillary Clinton in testimony on Sept. 30, 1993: ``We intend to provide new benefits from - not cuts - but from reductions in the rate of growth of Medicare. . . . We are talking about beginning to reduce the rate of increase in Medicare. . . which would bring us down from about an 11 percent increase annually to about a 6 or 7 percent increase annually.''
Whether out of the mouths of the Clintons or the Republicans, that made sense, and it shouldn't be sacrificed because Democrats think fear is the only thing they have to sell to voters. Unchecked, Medicare spending will equal outlays for defense within six years and exceed defense spending by $100 billion within 10 years; the time's foreseeable when entitlements and interest on a massive debt will consume all federal revenues.
Bill Clinton shouldn't treat these trends as trifles; if he wins re-election by ducking or denying them, he will become their prisoner and many other programs he espouses their victims.
Yes, of course, the Republicans appear cynical by insisting on a tax cut while curbing health care and other benefits. Had he not also proposed tax cuts, the president's opposition to GOP spending cuts could be infused with a measure of principle. But as matters stand, the Clinton presidency domestically is dominated by polls and opportunism. His tactics encourage voters to hate the medicine rather than the disease. There's no real comfort in citation of declining deficits because any downward bump in the economy would push them up again; worse, a debt that consumes a seventh of the budget grows along with deficits of any size.
The president shows courage in bucking public opinion against sending troops to Bosnia. He's moved, aides say, to do the right thing and Bob Dole steps up with him, behaving in a grown-up way. The fact is, though, that spiraling debt is more dangerous to the United States than chronic strife in Bosnia. It shouldn't be too much to ask that the president acknowledge that by word and deed. He should show some courage and run some risks for the solvency - and the spirit - of the nation. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB