JAMES CARVILLE and PAUL BEGALA
Editorial/Op-Ed
May 27, 2001
WASHINGTON - It's striking and for us Democrats - embarrassing that it took a Republican to unmask the Bush agenda. When Jim Jeffords quit the G.O.P., he spoke powerful truths about the truly radical nature of what President Bush is trying to achieve. Too many in our party have been sleepwalking as George W. Bush has audaciously sought to deny the federal government the money and the power to have a positive effect on people's lives.
Senator Jeffords, a lifelong Republican who had stuck it out through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, said he quit the G.O.P. because he disagrees with the president "on very fundamental issues - the issues of choice, the direction of the judiciary, tax and spending decisions, missile defense, energy and the environment, and a host of other issues, large and small." Democrats should use their new majority status to speak - and act - against the right-wing agenda Mr. Jeffords was protesting.
Without the moral authority of a clear electoral mandate, Mr. Bush is hardly in a position to dictate the sort of sweeping program he has been pushing. Here's a battle plan for stopping him, emphasizing three tactics.
First, call a radical a radical. Mr. Bush's agenda is neither compassionate nor conservative; it's radical and it's dangerous, and Democrats should say so. Mr. Bush is proposing a diminution of the government's ability to protect its citizens that is breathtaking in its scope.
His environmental agenda would put more arsenic in the water and more pollutants in the air. His Social Security plan will cost $1 trillion to implement and will hand over Americans' retirement benefits to the vagaries of the stock market. And his missile defense system will cost untold billions, alienate our allies and, even according to its proponents, may not work.
With the complicity of a dozen Democratic senators, Mr. Bush has already pushed through a tax cut that will cost the federal treasury at least $4 trillion over the next two decades (despite being advertised at only $1.35 trillion) and will put the United States in a fiscal straitjacket for a generation or more. And that's just for starters. In an interview in The Financial Times last week, Mr. Bush's Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, called for the total elimination of all taxes on all corporations, to be replaced by higher taxes on individuals. Mr. O'Neill said he favors an end to the federal commitment to Social Security and Medicare. The Financial Times - hardly a left-wing bastion - called his ideas "radical."
But where were the Democrats? If a Democratic Treasury secretary had called for a comparably radical left-wing agenda - say, nationalizing the oil companies - the Republicans would have called for his resignation.
Democrats must speak out. Every element of the Bush agenda, from the tax cuts to the judicial appointments to the regulatory retreat, would minimize the federal government's help for people while maximizing corporate influence. Everything the federal government does that helps people, from helping to put police officers on the street to financing Medicare, is at risk in this revolution.
Second, the Democrats must work to spend and shrink : spend the money and shrink the tax cut. Since most of the Bush tax cut's more onerous provisions don't take effect for years, there is plenty of time to fix things. If Republicans can propose repealing years of health and environmental laws, Democrats can propose repealing the most damaging aspects of the Bush tax cut.
Fully fund a prescription drug benefit for the elderly. Commit the country to reducing school class sizes by hiring 100,000 new teachers. Finance school construction and renovation. Increase military pay and benefits. Extend health care coverage to millions of Americans. Fund the priorities Democrats would have funded if there were no tax cut, and pay for it by trimming the more outrageous giveaways in the Bush tax cut. Force Congress and the country to come to grips with the real-world trade-offs that were ignored or glossed over in the rush to cut taxes.
Democrats ought to continue to raise alternative tax cuts: refundable credits for the working poor, reductions in the Social Security payroll tax, a repeal of the "pre-death tax" that requires middle-class elderly people to impoverish themselves in order to qualify for long-term care - these tax cuts for the poor and middle class should be offered as replacements for the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Even if they don't pass, proposing them and fighting for them will offer the public a stark choice - the kind of distinctions on which elections are won. If Republicans want to run for re-election as the party that killed middle- class benefits in order to preserve tax breaks for the wealthy, Democrats can emerge with a healthy majority, and then we can defuse the time bomb of the Bush tax cut. But we have to wage the battle in order to win it.
The Democrats should realize that their political future and the national interest in expanding education, health care and retirement security are one and the same. Speaking about the surplus, Senator Phil Gramm, a Republican, was candid enough to admit, "If the Democrats could spend it all, they could be the majority party for another 50 years."
There is enormous risk in this strategy : if Republicans pass the spending programs but defeat attempts to reduce the tax cut, we will be plunged back into deficits. But better the risk of deficits than the reality of an emaciated and emasculated national government for decades. When forced to choose, the American people will demand that the savage inequalities of the Bush tax cut for the rich be tamed in order to fund important priorities for the middle class.
Third, when push comes to shove, the Democrats should obstruct. They should push a positive agenda, passing a patients' bill of rights, an increase in the minimum wage and campaign finance reform - filling Mr. Bush's desk with progressive legislation and defying him to veto it. But if Mr. Bush continues to push his radical agenda, offering right-wing judicial nominees and environmental policies that threaten our air and water, Senate Democrats may have no option other than to obstruct. They should not shrink from that duty. Stop signs save lives.
We don't believe the spin that stopping Mr. Bush's assault on middle- class programs will hurt Democrats with voters. Bob Dole helped lead his party to victory in 1994 by stopping everything he could - from Bill Clinton's economic stimulus package to his health care plan - and Mr. Clinton's proposals were far more popular than Mr. Bush's are. If Democrats are seen as the people who save America from Mr. Bush's right-wing agenda, they will be regarded as principled, courageous and effective.
Accommodation with the radical Bush agenda - offering a kinder, gentler Mr. Bush, as it were - is a prescription for policy failure and political defeat. But if Democrats follow Jim Jeffords's lead and speak with candor and conviction about George W. Bush's misdirected plans, if they stiffen their spines and use their power to stand up for the majority of Americans, who rejected the Bush agenda in the November election, they will be worthy of the majority status Jim Jeffords has given them.
James Carville and Paul Begala were political advisers to President Clinton. They are currently writing a book on political strategy.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company