One Hint of Leadership Would Be a 1996 Budget : Dole and Clinton should take care of old business first

With his primary victories in four Midwest states this week, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole has secured enough Republican convention delegates to lock up his party’s nomination for president. Still to come is next Tuesday’s California primary, but even moving it up by more than two months this year hasn’t spared it from once again becoming largely a sideshow in the primary process, lacking much relevance or excitement.

Excitement could, however, be much in evidence at the GOP convention in San Diego in August. Patrick Buchanan, still campaigning in California, intends to press his claim as the flag bearer of the party’s populist-reactionary wing in an effort to influence the GOP platform and Dole’s choice of a running mate. It could make for interesting theater, not least in contrast to what is shaping up as a tightly managed Democratic convention that will renominate President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

His 35 years in the House and Senate have defined Dole as a hard-working, toughly partisan, conservative and acerbic political professional who knows how to conciliate and compromise to move legislation. The candidate’s run for the Republican nomination has not been notable for substantive content, with Dole sticking closely to safe, conservative, patriotic generalities. His campaign for the presidency must of necessity be more daring and complicated. The Kansas senator must try to win the support, however grudging, of Buchanan supporters--around 30% of those who voted in the primaries--without buying so heavily into the right-wing agenda that he alienates moderate supporters. He must find a way to energize Republican women, who voted in unusually small numbers in the primaries. And as the only Senate majority leader ever to be nominated for president he must demonstrate his skills as a legislator able to get things done.

The best place to start is by reaching an agreement on the budget with the White House, that budget being not the one for fiscal 1997 that Clinton just sent up to Congress but the one for fiscal 1996, which, let it be recalled, began last October. Partisanship on both sides has been responsible for the budget deadlock, though polls indicate that the public, when it bothers to pay attention, is more inclined to blame the Republicans for the impasse.

There has been some talk that the November election should serve as a plebiscite on federal programs and spending priorities. But for Congress and Clinton to let the issue slide until then--which effectively could mean until next January at the earliest--would be utterly irresponsible. Clinton and Dole should cooperate to end it, and movement Wednesday on some key GOP issues showed they understand that.

If they don’t reach a budget? Ross Perot has signaled that he’s again ready to run as an independent candidate and an unsparing critic of political gridlock in Washington. Four years ago he took 19% of the vote. The prospect of Perot II in a race that bodes to be close ought to alarm both Dole and Clinton. The best antidote to Perotism might well be a display by the leaders of the two major parties that they in fact know what leadership now requires.