Indeed, the more patently untrue, the lustier and more protracted the cheer. The fundamental proposition was always the same: that we could have it all-a stronger defense and more investment in domestic programs, environmental purity and accelerated energy development, lower taxes and increased benefits, etc. We will do this, but not at the expense of that … the speaker would intone, his voice rising to indicate deep conviction for the wholly implausible second part of the sentence. And the place would go nuts.
You do not have to buy all of Bill Clinton’s program or to check your view that there was too much of some things, not enough of others, to acknowledge that his Feb. 17 address for the most part crashed through this tradition of mutual dissembling between presidential speaker and congressional audience. Yes, there were some muzzy, unpersuasive moments. But in the main Clinton was saying not that we could have it all, but that we couldn’t and that we now had to choose how to get out of the economic predicament that had been talked about mostly by indirection or even covertly in Washing-ton for years.
Over those years, the dialogue on the question of the budget deficit and its effect had become ever more tortured, demeaning and involuted-embarrassingly so, I would have thought, for grown men and women. We at The Washington Post, starting back in the early Reagan years, would occasionally be visited (“off the record”) by prominent Republican legislators and others urging us editorially to help bring about some bipartisan deal wherein big shots of both parties would just sort of close their eyes, hold hands and jump off the cliff together, always with careful provisions to keep one of the parties from cheating and being left standing there on the ledge while the other-poor fool plummeted into the political abyss. They would talk about ways to frame the thing so that Reagan more or less wouldn’t notice or at least wouldn’t have the wit to object. They discussed him as if he were the mad uncle in the attic who, unfortunately, still had title to the house.
It was unbelievable, now that I think of it, but at the time it seemed only mildly strange. That is because Washington had pretty thoroughly bought into the proposition that some of the things Bill Clinton was to say the other night simply could not be said, not even argued about-too dangerous. People outside this city who complain about the waste of taxpayers’ money should, if they want to get even madder, merely contemplate how much they paid out in both executive and legislative branch salaries over the decades to people who gave over hours and days and weeks of paid time to fussing about who would or wouldn’t get the blame for saying aloud what they were all whispering among themselves.
Do you remember those episodes during the past decade in which it would be leaked that the White House and the congressional leadership were both in a frame of mind to do something about the deficit which would necessarily involve a tax increase, but that the understanding was that neither should be seen to have initiated the move? We had plenty of that going on, and more than once the deal would collapse because one side or the other said the wrong thing about whose idea it had been. Such breaches of the delicate political protocol were generally thought to be far more odious than, say, the deficit problem itself or the resolute failure of the parties to attack it honestly. Only think of the hilarious run-up to the budget agreement of 1990, an interminable spat over forcing Bush to speak the words “tax-revenue increases” before the Democrats would proceed. By last summer’s election campaign the dialogue had degenerated into am not/are too arguments over whether trivial license fee increases in Arkansas under Clinton qualified as tax hikes and whether similar federal actions under Bush did as well.
Whatever else he did and whatever you may think of his proposals, Clinton in his State of the Union address took us from this dishonest dithering into the reality zone. He fundamentally altered the character of the discussion. It became both serious and real. This seemed to me to be a relief to everybody, including even some of those who oppose what he wants to do. They can talk out loud and not worry about pretending to be talking about something else as if the public itself were a bunch of children who must not be frightened.
I cannot say what transformed the moment so that this became possible. Some other pols have attempted to talk straight on this subject and vanished without a trace. But people seemed ready, and Clinton seized the moment. Kennedy did this on civil rights after the televised Birmingham police behavior scandalized the public; Johnson did it after the shock of the assassination of Kennedy created a brief period when legislators were ready to act. Bush failed to take advantage of an opportune moment to get some domestic business done in the aftermath of the gulf war when his popularity was at a spectacular high. These moments of opportunity, of course, also end. I figure the Clinton administration has at best a couple of months in which to keep the momentum going and get its program on the tracks. If it can’t do this–can’t get it going–then the moment will have been irrevocably lost. But whatever happens, I think the particular verbal taboos that made discussion so difficult (and so silly when it occurred) may have been junked for good. Maybe there will be new taboos. But meanwhile we can at least take advantage of the new candor and have, for once, an honest fight.
