Republicans Must Negotiate Paradoxical Set of Pitfalls : With Gingrich at the Helm, the GOP Ascendance Prompts Debate About the Role of Government; Party Risks Going Too Far or Not Far Enough

Near a microphone, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has a weakness for both cyber-babble and the lacerating one-liner that leaves just a trace of blood on his own lips. But he can also be refreshingly direct: “My challenge to the American people is real simple,” he declared in his first speech after the GOP landslide earlier this month. “You really want to dramatically reduce power in Washington? You have to be willing to take more responsibility back home.”

With Gingrich at the helm, the Republican ascendance should prompt the most fundamental debate about government’s role since at least the New Deal. In Gingrich (and such like-minded allies as Texas Sen. Phil Gramm), liberals face opponents much more tenacious and committed than Ronald Reagan to radically reducing Washington’s reach.

Indeed, as they scurried across the capital last week from television studio to news conference--as if taking an electronic victory lap--GOP luminaries like Gingrich and Gramm, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett and party strategist William Kristol all presented the election as a historic referendum on the federal government. The Republican sweep, Kristol said, marked “the end of the New Deal era” in a precise way: It signified that Americans finally had concluded that new programs from Washington could not solve the nation’s problems.

Kristol has a good case for reading a strong mandate in the election results. The only way to deny the ideological content is to assume that no one in America listened to anything the candidates said. Virtually every Republican candidate this year ran on the same three-legged message: one part Reagan (smaller government), another Ross Perot (congressional and political reform), and a third Bill Bennett (values, virtue and tough love for the poor).

With that appeal overwhelming all Democratic defenses, the election represented a decisive victory for the decades-long GOP project of shifting populist discontent away from its historic targets of the rich and big business toward government (and, to a slightly lesser extent, an underclass portrayed as violent and welfare-dependent). In a survey immediately after the election, veteran GOP pollster Richard B. Wirthlin found that three-fourths of Americans now agree with Reagan’s classic contention that government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.

That strong statement of dissatisfaction with Washington gives the Republicans a lot of rope for the coming months. But they could still hang themselves with it, if they are no more successful than President Clinton at negotiating a paradoxical set of pitfalls: the risks that they will go too far, and not far enough, in pursuit of their agenda.

On one side, Republicans can be undermined by not going far enough in pursuit of wasteful spending for fear of offending powerful Republican-leaning interests--the same way Clinton’s support from public-employee unions, teachers and social workers has blunted his knife in some arenas. Already Kristol’s call for placing agricultural subsidies on the block has drawn howls from farm state Republicans such as incoming Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. Kristol might also have mentioned an entire panoply of other inefficient subsidies to industries with the same claim on the GOP that public-employee unions exert on the Democrats--from Western ranchers to mining, timber and energy companies.

Beyond those narrow subsidies stands the biggest sacred cow in the barnyard: entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and government pensions that are driving the deficit (by 2004 mandatory spending will constitute two-thirds of the federal budget) but have become woven into the fabric of middle-class life. Unless Republicans are willing to tug on that thread, they will never come close to fulfilling their core promise of a balanced budget.

The risk on the other side is that reformist Republicans will go too far in pursuing their vision of the ideal state. In his first two years, Clinton’s single biggest mistake was seeking to reify, in one great leap, his panoramic revelation of the perfect health care system.

Already, the same hubris is infecting GOP plans for welfare. In pushing for benefit cutoffs that could force substantial numbers of poor women to abandon their children to orphanages, the House GOP leaders ultimately could face the same dynamic that did in Clinton’s health care plan: However much the problem worries Americans, they may end up fearing the solution even more.

Welfare points up another critical choice facing Republicans as they try to imagine a post-New Deal government.

Most House Republicans want to “solve” welfare in Washington, with stern nationally established time limits and benefit reductions. But a minority insists that setting such inflexible federal rules violates conservative principles; they would rather devolve welfare to local governments--perhaps in a swap where the federal government would assume the full cost of Medicaid and give states total freedom to run welfare, food stamps and infant-nutrition programs. If Republicans try to redesign welfare from Washington, says Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), who has proposed such a swap, “we’ll weave ourselves right back into the same web.”

But any divisions between Republicans on reforming government pale beside the gulf with Clinton. The President also wants to reinvent government--but so that it can take on new tasks or perform old ones with new vigor. Clinton’s philosophical foundation remains the belief that government can serve “as a catalyst to empower people to make more of their own lives” through programs that link opportunity and responsibility, like his national service plan. “We cannot get very far in this country thinking our government is intrinsically bad and always makes things worse,” he said in a recent interview.

As shown in a post-election survey by his own pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton fatally obscured his reform message by pushing the Brobdingnagian health care plan. That failure has immeasurably complicated his task of convincing ordinary Americans that government can be reformed to work for them; Clinton will have an even tougher time marshaling evidence for that case in the next two years because congressional Republicans are likely to choke off funds for potentially popular new initiatives like national service.

But the Republicans may also find their argument more difficult to sell as the debate moves from the popular abstraction of limiting government to the thornier details of reducing specific programs and protections. One early signpost: An election-night survey of voters found strong demand for deficit reduction--but majority support for just four of 25 options for blotting the red ink. While resisting new programs, the public also resists changes in the old.

As Gingrich forthrightly acknowledges, less government will mean more responsibility for individual Americans. But does that mean Americans will have more personal responsibility for the health care costs of aging parents, or ferreting out dangerous chemicals at work, or contributing more of their money and time to charitable organizations flooded with poor families denied public assistance? The election ensures a renewed drive for government reform; but until Americans sign off on the fine print in the Republican plan, it’s too early to say that Gingrich’s vision alone will guide the process.

What Would You Cut?

Voters want Washington slimmed down. But when it comes to most specific proposals for reducing the deficit support drops:

% OF VOTERS SUPPORTING A PARTICULAR MOVE Increasing the cost of Medicare for high-income seniors: 71% Cut food stamps: 55% Cut farm price supports: 53% Cut defense spending: 53% Cut public housing: 45% Tax more Social Security benefits: 42% Cut aid to cities: 39% Cut AFDC: 39% Decrease home mortgage deduction: 27% Reduce Social Security COLAs: 26% Cut college loans: 24% Increase the income tax: 23% Cut education aid: 19% Cut Medicaid: 17% Cut Medicare: 8% Source: Kaiser/Harvard poll of 1,200 adults nationwide who said they voted in Nov. 8 election; the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.