More of Same, From the Evil of Two Lessers : Will a free-range Bill Clinton lay better eggs? Put aside those voting-booth fantasies.

It’s sometime in July, AD 2000, the final year of Bill Clinton’s second term, and the battle rages over Social Security and Medicare. The bipartisan commissions that President Bill suitably stacked with Wall Streeters and icons of the planned shrinkage crowd have issued their collective and predictable judgment: Only by fierce cuts can these entitlements survive. The national press and big Washington think tanks launch a strident campaign promoting the “crisis.”

After prolonged battles, both Senate and House vote for cutbacks. Clinton deliberates whether to sign the bill. At the very moment when fierce pressure from the liberal public-interest groups in Washington seems to be pushing Clinton into a veto with every chance of success, Vice President Al Gore issues a passionate plea: Don’t destroy party unity, or expose the party to charges that it is once again hostage to “the special interests.” The bill is signed, the last fragments of the New Deal are destroyed. The Democrats remain united. The liberals sit on their hands. Al Gore . . . well, that’s another story.

The focus here is on what happens in the years between now and the next national engagement with the ballot box.

Stay with the opening scenario. On Sept. 19 of this year, Bill Clinton announced, via his chief of staff, that he wants his “legacy” to be Social Security and Medicare reform. He says that he’ll appoint bipartisan commissions.

Here’s what will happen in the case of Social Security: The bipartisan commission will take the most pessimistic assumptions of the trustees of the Social Security system in their annual report. Read the fine print and you find that the worst-case projection assumes the economy growing by 1.4% a year over the next 75 years, which is half the rate of the past 75 years and worse than the rate in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it was 1.9%. Figure even a modest growth rate of 2% and the system will stay solvent.

None of this will emerge on the editorial pages or the talking-head shows. There’ll be lots of virtuous cautions about “stealing from our children” and bingo!--the bipartisan commission proposes that the retirement age be hiked to 72, at which time Dr. Kevorkian administers the final rites.

The alternative will be a very severely scaled-back government pension scheme, with all sorts of alluring tax incentives to encourage people to invest their retirement savings in the mutual fund industry. Meanwhile, the other bipartisan commission will be making similarly lunatic assumptions about Medicare insolvency.

In other words, they’ll cook up exactly the same statistical flimflam and Malthusian doom talk about entitlements as they did in the case of welfare “reform,” which Clinton successfully shoved down the throats of the liberals last summer.

People cling to lesser-of-two-evilism with pathetic tenacity, hoping for a Bill-free-to-be-Bill in his second term. This notion that there is an inner and spiritual liberal essence of Bill Clinton yearning to cut loose is as silly as hoping that there is an inner and spiritual Keynesian essence to your bank manager, yearning to pump free money into your account. Both Bill and the bank manager answer to the same bosses. The only presidential candidate who doesn’t is Ralph Nader.

But aside from quadrennial moments, there’s the matter of what happens the rest of the time. The great disaster of the past four years was the absence of any effective countervailing force from the progressive end of the spectrum. The liberal advocates bought in, sold out, kept their mouths shut.

The historian Howard Zinn put it well the other day in Rolling Stone:

“People need to start thinking outside the two-party system. It’s one thing to support Clinton for the three seconds it takes to pull a lever in the polling booth. It’s another to speak for him, to support him in his perfidy, in his hypocrisy, in his Republicanism. Ultimately, if change comes to America, it won’t come through the voting booth. Change will come through tumultuous movements . . . so strong that whatever party is holding power has to respond.”

In the meantime, cherish no illusions. Too many did in 1992. All you have to do in 1996 is read of how Clinton’s sees his “legacy” in reforming Social Security and Medicare. Of course, Clinton said the same thing about welfare in 1992. People didn’t listen, or persuaded themselves that “welfare reform” was camouflage for a national jobs program. Don’t say, this time around, that you haven’t been warned.