Foxes and groundhogs

IN Groundhog Day, Bill Murray wakes up every day at the same time to be beset by the same obstacles and irritations. Republicans are getting to know the feeling. The 105th Congress has so far had an eerie resemblance to the 104th. The Balanced Budget Amendment is likely to fail again, and term limits already have. Republicans are demanding "CBO scoring" of the budget and condemning "OMB scoring" as too optimistic. Sens. Domenici (R., N.M.) and Gramm (R., Tex.), among others, are complaining that President Clinton should impose more pain, earlier, on Medicare beneficiaries.

Republicans have been through this fight once already and should be hesitant to undertake it again. Yes, as we argue above, President Clinton's budget is phony. The GOP has to accept that there won't be a genuine balanced budget until a Republican is elected President. And the party shouldn't again risk its political health over bogus efforts to achieve a temporary balance in 2002.

They should focus attention instead on the next few years of the budget, while being realistic about their ability to improve it substantially. They should make targeted, small-scale changes that suit conservative priorities. (Keeping their promise to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts would be a good start.) As the price of striking a deal that preserves the broad outlines of Clinton's plan, Republicans should insist on procedural reforms that will help budget-cutters in the future.

Next, they should work to make the President's tax cuts as broad-based and as big as possible. Republicans should see and raise any tax-cut offer the President makes to the middle class. Clinton's tax breaks for higher education, for example, should be met with tax breaks that let families save for medical care, home ownership, and private schooling. If this causes accounting problems in 2002, that's OK. It is more important to get as much tax relief as possible to the American people.

What is most important for Republicans is to drop their obsession with the deficit as such. The real problem has always been out-of-control federal spending. In the past, Republicans have been able to use the deficit as a crude cudgel against new spending proposals. But that no longer works now that Clinton has endorsed balancing the budget. The debate has shifted to the ground of "values" -- terrain on which the President maneuvers skillfully and quickly, as he demonstrated last year.

Republicans need not fear "values" talk; they should welcome it. For fiscal policies are not the only, or even the most important, determinants of America's future. A large range of other issues go to the heart of what kind of people we will be -- indeed whether we will be a people at all. Are we to be a self-governing nation, or one ruled by judges? Should parents govern children, or should they be ruled by certified experts? Are we to provide genuine care to those in need, or abandon them to the ministrations of the state? Are we a collection of mutually suspicious tribes whose relations should be mediated by government, or a self-confident and united American citizenry? A culture of life, or a culture of death? On these questions, today's GOP offers only silence.

If it doesn't soon start to speak to middle-class hopes and fears, it may find that nobody is listening.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
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