The White House was in a state of panic. It was last Thursday morning, and Bob Kerrey was on the phone to Bill Clinton. The senator had just delivered what is known in the lobbying trade as a “hard no.” The president’s economic plan wasn’t tough enough, said Kerrey There were angry words, raised voices. Clinton was distressed–and desperate. He had to have Kerrey’s vote. Six other Democrats had bailed out. Bob Dole, who had played the grim reaper to Clinton’s car dealer in back-to-back TV addresses, was keeping every Republican locked up.
Secrecy was decreed. The House was scheduled to vote that night, and if word of Kerrey’s defection got out, the game might end there. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell got the word from Kerrey and called Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Kerrey’s good friend. “You can promise him anything on my behalf, or the president’s behalf,” Mitchell said. But unlike most lawmakers, Kerrey was not interested in being bought off by a pork-barrel project. Actually, no one was quite sure what Kerrey wanted. “I make my decisions vertically, not horizontally,” said Kerrey, known to mystified colleagues as “Cosmic Bob.”
While political aides muttered threats (“He’s going to have a tough time being a Democrat if be stiffs us on this,” said one), Moynihan went to work, gingerly. He invited Kerrey to drop by his office. When he arrived, his protege was visibly anguished. There was no hard sell. Go see a movie, Moynihan told his friend, whose favorite novel is Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer.” Kerrey chose the Tina Turner biopic, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” (“That’s the right question for the hour,” Kerrey enigmatically told reporters afterward).
That evening, Moynihan’s wife, Liz, softened up Kerrey with a soulful talk about the hopes and dreams of future generations (and, more practically, about how Kerrey’s political career would suffer if he deserted the Democrats). In the morning it was the president’s turn again. Clinton and Kerrey talked things over during a long breakfast in the private White House residence. What about the idea, broached by Clinton aides earlier, of a bipartisan commission on spending, led by Kerrey? The senator expressed guarded interest but made no commitment. “I’m going to do in the end what I think is right,” he said.
It fell to Moynihan to close the deal. In a private meeting Friday afternoon in Kerrey’s office, he didn’t mention Clinton, party unity or budget details. It was all emotion and friendship and abject appeals to Kerrey’s vanity. “I need you on this one,” Moynihan said, according to close friends of both men. “if you give me this one, I promise I’ll never ask you for anything else.” Moynihan told Kerrey that he might be president some day. “You’ll need to ask people for votes like this one,” he said.
Seven hours later the nation learned the results of all this lobbying–and Kerrey’s price. It was the chance to deliver, in prime time, a stirring jeremiad on the shortcomings of the president’s leadership. The budget bill, Kerrey said in a speech to a hushed Senate, was far too timid in its spending cuts and too political in its heavy taxing of the rich. “Our fiscal problems do not exist because wealthy Americans aren’t paying enough taxes,” he said. “Our fiscal problems exist because of rapid, uncontrolled growth in programs that primarily benefit the middle class.” But in the end, Kerrey said, “I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your presidency.” He would vote “aye.”
So Clinton’s economic package was passed in a fitting way: at the last possible moment, by the thinnest possible margin, with much speechifying and grandstanding–and a grimness that reflected the lack of enthusiasm in the Congress and the country. The House approved the five-year, $496 billion plan by a 218-216 vote; the Senate went along 51-50, with Vice President Al Gore casting the tiebreaker. In all the roll calls, not a single Republican voted for the measure, the first time in memory that one party had completely refused to participate in a major piece of legislation.
It is true that Clinton had averted a humiliating defeat for himself and his party. He joked that he had won by a “landslide,” and bravely declared, “We are seizing control of our economic destiny.” With skill and relentlessness, he had cajoled enough Democrats into passing a bill that just might slow the ominous rise of the federal debt. From the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, he declared, America could “hear the sound of gridlock breaking.”
But Kerrey, for all his moody dithering, was right: if the Democrats were going to become the party of fiscal responsibility, they had a long way to go, especially with no help from the churlish GOP. Examined closely, the deal was far less than advertised. A full $46 billion in new spending “cuts” were actually mandated three years ago, by the infamous 1990 budget deal. An additional $24 billion in “cuts” were in reality new taxes, fees and charges. Some $65 billion in “cuts” were just predicted savings on servicing the national debt. Most of the rest were still-theoretical slowdowns–such as spending on defense–and are promises that will not be detailed before next year. The real deficit reduction comes from new taxes. The GOP had convinced the nation that most of the tax burden would fall on the middle class. But that isn’t true, either. In fact, the Democrats were playing old-fashioned redistributionist politics, sticking it to the rich.
No wonder the public was confused. Clinton alternately hailed the package as earthshaking change and tried to reassure voters that they wouldn’t notice the difference. Meanwhile he desperately bought off member.. of Congress through any means available. Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona won some easing of new taxes on wealthy social-security recipients. Sen. Dianne Feinstein got tax breaks for high-tech, high-growth firms in California. The leadership helped itself. House Speaker Thomas Foley got concessions for the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest; Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell made sure the luxury tax on yachts was removed, a boon to the boatbuilding business in Maine. There was face time and phone time for the most obscure legislators. Before the House vote, Rep. Don Johnson of Georgia was on the line with Gore when another call came through. “Excuse me, Mr. Vice President,” he said. “You’ll have to hold. The president is on the other line.”
The contradictions were all too apparent. While handing out the goodies, Clinton promised to put government on a diet. To win conservative Democratic votes, he signed executive orders creating a deficit “trust fund” and obligating a review of entitlement spending if it rises faster than the five-year plan predicts. He promised to submit a bill in the fall asking for new cuts in this year’s budget. Welfare reform will save money, officials said. So will Gore’s efforts to “streamline” government. Health-care reform is supposed to achieve the biggest savings of all, slowing the rise of the fastest-growing item in the federal budget.
Prodded by Ross Perot, the Democrats, in control of government for the first time since 1980, now seem locked in the role of the deficit-reduction party. They can’t expect much help from the Republicans, who have recaptured an almost giddy sense of unity as the antitax party. When Dole spoke to the nation last week, he was derided by Washington insiders for his funereal demeanor. But some Democratic insiders privately conceded that he had made his point, and the clogged switchboards in Congress and tepid poll numbers bore them out. Last week 41 Republican senators-more than enough to block new legislation–sent the president a letter warning him not to propose new payroll-tax “premiums” to pay for his health-care plan. Republican strategists were eagerly anticipating the prospect of attacking Democrats in conservative districts in next year’s congressional elections. “We can say, accurately, that each and every one of them cast the deciding vote,” crowed Republican Chairman Haley Barbour.
Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, need to be paid off for their forbearance. Leaders of the American Association of Retired Persons refrained from denouncing the budget deal–but they won’t when it comes to health care. The president got near-total support from Democratic women in Congress and all 38 Democrats in the Black Caucus. “The president will understand the numerical value of the caucus,” said Black Caucus chairman Kweisi Mfume. He now expects a “new relationship” with the White House.
In the White House’s Roosevelt Room late Friday night there was a sense of jubilation as staffers were rewarded with souvenir rock-tour-style T shirts emblazoned with the word VICTORY. Among Democrats, there was pride that the president had taken on the toughest of issues and that he had won. But in the country, it wasn’t clear how much faith in government he had restored. Voters weren’t inspired by the made-for-TV spectacle of the Leader of the Free World doing deals on bovine hormones and restaurant taxes. The gloomy truth is that deficit-reduction deals in themselves are not ennobling exercises. “This is maintenance, not fundamental change,” says Democratic political analyst Bill Bradley of California.
It was left to Kerrey to sound the larger theme on a night that should have been Clinton’s alone. “So what do we achieve by our actions, Mr. President?” he asked rhetorically. “Unfortunately, it is disdain, distrust and disillusionment. Shared sacrifice…is our highest ideal, and the only way we will build the moral consensus needed to end this nightmare of borrowing from our children.” But that was easy for Kerrey to say: he’s not president, and he doesn’t have to preside over a Democratic Party that is trying to remember how to lead.
