The Anatomy of a Debacle : Running for reelection and away from reality

Many years ago, an east coast newspaperman wrote that the only way to look on a politician is down. Until Thursday, that seemed a harsh and sweeping judgment.

But 57% of the members of the House of Representatives actually made it seem quite tame when they blithely chose to gamble with the nation’s future rather than chance exposure to angry voters next month.

To be sure, Thursday’s rejection of a deficit-cutting plan put together in four months of shirt-sleeve negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders reflected what members were hearing from voters.

In a torrent of telephone calls, the people at home told members and their staffs that they did not want to pay more for Medicare, pay higher gasoline taxes or absorb any of the other cuts in spending and increases in taxes proposed by the plan.

Yet a vast majority of American voters also insist that the U.S. government has lived beyond its means for far too long and must stop adding to a national debt that is already $3,206,100,000,000, as in trillion.

Furthermore, the Constitution envisioned a government in which representatives would represent the interests of the people who sent them to Washington and not the interests of their own political careers.

There is virtually no argument among economists that a reduction of the deficit, with a good chance that interest rates would follow suit, is in the real interest of everybody.

The package that the House rejected by a vote of 249 to 179 is far from perfect. It puts too big a burden on the poor and lets the wealthy off too lightly. About 6 million of the 33 million Americans who depend on Social Security and Medicare would have real trouble scraping together higher contributions toward their health insurance.

But the White House would have nothing to do with any increase in, say, income tax rates (especially at the highest levels) that would spread the tax burden more evenly, so Congress had to negotiate the best alternative it could.

The package was exactly as the House leadership described it--the best it could get, at least for now.

The task at hand, after all, was cutting the rate at which the federal government goes into debt every year, not rewriting the tax code. Restoring fairness to the tax structure with a return to the principle of progressiveness is another task that can be tackled at another time.

It also is fair to say that only because President Bush put his own popularity on the line by reversing his “Read my lips” campaign stand against higher taxes did Congress have anything at all on which to vote.

Not even a warning from Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve board of governors, that failure to cut the deficit could tip the economy into recession was enough to tear the thoughts of 249 members away from themselves.

Fear of retaliation at the polls was not the sole cause of their craven behavior Thursday. The plan might even have squeaked through except for an unholy alliance of liberals and conservatives, each rejecting the plan for different reasons.

Many of the 105 Republicans who voted against the plan seem to believe that cutting taxes speeds up business enough to increase government revenue and raising them has the opposite effect.

Many no votes were cast by Democratic liberals, saying that taxes should be based on the ability to pay and that the federal government should be increasing, not cutting, domestic social programs.

Ernest Hemingway described courage as “grace under pressure.” What the nation saw Thursday was disgrace under pressure, with thoroughly wretched implications for a country whose financial foundation must be solid if it is to compete as a world leader in a global economy.