Warren Rudman

Warren B. Rudman, the former GOP senator known for his candor and strong opinions, minces no words about his close friend Bob Dole’s plan to cut taxes by 15%.

“We just flat disagree,” Rudman declares, insisting the proposal would drive up the budget deficit and wreck the economy. “One of the anguishing things in politics,” he says, is taking strong issue with a personal friend you generally support. “But if a friendship can’t survive that, then it probably isn’t much of a friendship.”

Rudman is a founder and co-chairman of the Concord Coalition, a private, bipartisan group crusading to end deficits. He signed a coalition ad just before Dole’s tax plan was unveiled, warning that a big tax cut would be “technical voodoo” that would damage the economy. Since then he has signed a second ad questioning Clinton’s record on the deficit, but again criticizing the Dole plan.

Yet, the friendship has endured. And Rudman, interviewed at his spacious 13th-floor law office on L Street, remains a Dole advisor. He still believes Dole would make “a great president,” but worries that the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign is faltering and President Bill Clinton “could win by a substantial amount.” He suggests Democrats also may recapture control of the House of Representatives, but says he would be “shocked” to see the GOP lose control of the Senate.

On the other hand, says Rudman, if the choice came down to a divided government or Democratic rule, he would select Democratic rule, because “at the end of four years, you’d either see progress or you’d see disaster, and the people could at least assess credit or blame.”

Rudman, who retired from the Senate in 1993, after 12 years, sees the failure of both major parties to address the budget crisis adequately as an open invitation for formation of a major third party. Indeed, he and other leading Republican and Democratic veterans of Capitol Hill have already discussed the idea privately.

A former New Hampshire attorney general, Rudman spoke out forcefully on several other issues during a conversation Wednesday, and also disclosed that, in 1993, he declined appointment as the original independent counsel for Whitewater. Rudman recommended Robert B. Fiske, who held the post until 1994, when a three-judge federal panel replaced him with Kenneth W. Starr, a conservative Republican from the Bush administration.

Rudman criticizes the replacement of Fiske as “a political move that is not good for the federal judiciary.” A Whitewater indictment before the election, he said, could hurt Clinton, but it would also be widely viewed as political because Americans “are very suspicious of mixing the legal system with elections.”

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Question: You’ve said any presidential candidate proposing a large tax reduction when the budget deficit is so large would be pandering. Is a 15% across-the-board cut pandering?

Answer: I’m not sure in Bob Dole’s case it’s pandering. For him to make that kind of a change, to me, is remarkable. He’s always been such a deficit hawk. Let me just make a point here. There were some very interesting pieces written by some very respected people, most notably Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate, who writes that the plan will work. . . .

The problem with the Dole plan, with all these plans, is the following: This year, roughly 85% of the budget will be made up of entitlements, defense spending and interest. That leaves about 15% for so-called discretionary spending. Unless you’re willing to do some major reform in entitlements, there is no way you can do this . . . . It is politically and practically impossible to get the range of spending cuts.

Q: Essentially, you thought Dole’s tax proposal was a mistake?

A: I thought it was a mistake, because I thought it would open him up to serious criticism . . . .

But I find it interesting that Bob Dole has proposed three 5% cuts, instead of one up-front. I believe that if this plan were to pass and the spending cuts were not to happen, Bob Dole would pull back, because I do not believe that Bob Dole would allow the deficit to mount as it did in the early 1980s.

Q: You’re co-chairman of the Concord Coalition that not only opposes tax cuts, it recommends a 25-cent-a-gallon tax increase on gas, increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and a $20,000 limit on tax deductions on home mortgages. So how could you rationalize any tax deduction when considering the deficit?

A: We don’t. We as a coalition, and I, personally, believe the nation would be better served by proving that we can cut discretionary spending. Then if we can cut taxes, that’s something else.

Q: President Clinton is way ahead in the polls. What have Dole and Kemp got to do to come from behind and overtake him?

A: They have to convey to the American people a recognition of the No. 1 problem that Americans are faced with today: anxiety about their economic future. The people have to be convinced that this is a team who not only understands the pain that’s being felt out there, but that has solutions. That is going to be hard to do against Bill Clinton, who is the world’s gold-medal holder in having people feel that he understands their pain.

Q: What is the main problem facing the Republican Party today?

A: In this election, it is the enormous gender gap, including among women of our own base, and the Republican ticket has to recapture that to win this election.

Q: How do they do that?

A: I think Kemp will help a great deal in doing that, because Kemp has been out front on a number of those issues, and Bob Dole, for some reason, has not made much headway on that.

Q: In ‘94, you said the Democrats were more responsible than Republicans in terms of deficit reduction. Since the deficit has come down under Clinton, do you think that Clinton and the Democrats are in a better position than the Republicans on deficit reduction?

A: I think they are, because they have convinced the American people that they did more than they actually did. The deficit came down for several reasons. One, of course, was Clinton’s tax increase on the top 1% of earners. But he was quite irresponsible in contesting very serious Republican initiatives to reform Medicare; he demagogued that issue.

Q: Why are you a Republican, since so many of your positions seem to be so at odds with much of the party’s positions?

A: I totally disagree with the predicate . . . . When I was growing up in New Hampshire, it was a Republican state. If you take the issues of abortion and prayer in school, and put them aside, my position on defense, on foreign policy, on fiscal policy is very Republican.

Q: Except not today’s fiscal policy.

A: That’s true. Not this presidential campaign.

Q: What do you see as the major issues in this campaign and which issues do you think are working in Clinton’s favor and which in Dole’s favor?

A: On the social issues, I think the Republicans are absolutely on the wrong side of the abortion issue, and have been for awhile. This year’s convention will be the last one in which we’ll have relative peace, because the great majority of Republicans do not agree with that party platform, do not agree with the Christian Coalition and do not agree with the leadership of the party. The second thing, it seems to me, is the economy. And Clinton’s on the right side of that. The economy has done very well. Now, whether he deserves credit for it, I’m not sure. But we know if it was bad, he’d be blamed for it, so I guess that’s fair.

Q: What about Medicare and Medicaid, though, and the other issues . . . Do you think Clinton happens to be on the popular side of all these major issues, including gun control, tobacco?

A: Medicare and Medicaid, but particularly Medicare--it’s very interesting what happened during this last Congress. Republicans made a responsible proposal, including means-testing. They made the terrible mistake, in my view, of tying it to a tax cut. They didn’t tie [the proposal] to it, but they had it in the same package. Clinton picked it up and, in a very clever way, demagogued the issue and said the Republicans are going to pay for the Medicare cuts. They weren’t cuts at all, they were slower growth.

Q: Should character be an issue?

A: Absolutely.

Q: So, should the Republicans exploit Whitewater and the Starr investigation and whatever other ones?

A: I don’t think so, and I don’t think Dole will. He’s not comfortable with that sort of thing. I think that people are well aware of whatever flaws there are in Bill Clinton’s character, and I think they’re pretty well aware of the kind of person Bob Dole is.

Q: Would a Whitewater indictment at this stage of the election process involving the White House be viewed as a political development?

A: It could hurt the Clintons. On the other hand, a lot of Americans are so cynical about government they would assume that a Republican independent counsel brought that for political reasons. So I don’t think it would have a major effect.

Q: You’ve heard a number of people speculate that Hillary Clinton might be indicted.

A: I have. I have no idea whether there’s any basis for that whatsoever, and I would not believe, knowing Ken Starr as I know him, being the careful, deliberate and fair person that he is, that he would ever bring an indictment against the first lady unless it was truly a major violation of law. In other words, not for some technical violation, where her testimony before a grand jury didn’t quite synchronize with other testimony some place . . . . I do not believe he would use his power as an independent prosecutor . . . to benefit a Republican candidate for president.

Q: You have written in your book, “Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate,” that about a third of the senators really knew what was going on, were serious about their jobs and knew how to get things done. Who would you put into that category?

A: I’m going to leave some out, of course, but I’m talking about people like Bob Dole and George Mitchell, Pete Domenici, Sam Nunn, Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, Bill Cohen, Nancy Kassebaum, Allen Simpson, Paul Sarbanes, Joe Lieberman, Ted Kennedy, John Chafee, and Bennett Johnston.

Q: Is it time for a third party?

A: It may be getting closer than we think, and I’ve been against third parties. . . .

Q: But you’ve got a third party in Ross Perot already.

A: It’s not really a third party. It’s Ross Perot’s party. He owns it, lock, stock and barrel. That nominating process this year was a farce. But I would make the observation that if neither of these political parties address the economic issues to the satisfaction of the American people . . . I wouldn’t be surprised [if others didn’t make an effort to form a third party].

Q: As a former state prosecutor, what do you think of the impact of special prosecutors treating so many political cases as criminal cases?

A: I think we’re all too quick to run and get a special prosecutor. I think it’s made the system much meaner. I think the late Vince Foster said that it was a sport in this town to ruin people’s reputations.

Q: Do you agree with that?

A: Yes, I do. I think many political mistakes have been criminalized when they shouldn’t have been; I think we’re too eager to run for violations of law, no matter what. I think it’s a bad idea, and I think that everybody ought to do something to yank it back, because you never know whose ox is going to get gored next.

Q: What about replacing Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation?

A: I have to come clean on that because I was approached about that myself, originally by the Justice Department, by the attorney general. I had no interest. I had just left the Senate in ’93. But I recommended Fiske very strongly. I was one of the people who recommended him when they asked me for names.

Q: What about replacing Fiske, though?

A: Starr is a first-rate guy, but I didn’t think Fiske should have been replaced; he was a first-rate man.

Q: A lot of people thought it was a political move to replace Fiske.

A: I don’t know how else to read it . . . . And I, frankly, think that is not good for the federal judiciary.