Clinton, Congressional Leadership Begin Talks

President Clinton and congressional leaders met Tuesday for the first time since the election to explore what sort of deals may be possible on the highly divisive matters of the budget and campaign finance reform.

For more than an hour, the two sides sized each other up in the White House Oval Office. Eventually, Democratic and Republican lawmakers emerged to provide upbeat--if carefully hedged--predictions of bipartisan progress on issues that have split the White House and Congress bitterly in the past.

“We were able to cooperate a great deal in the last two months of the last session, even with an election underway, and we produced a lot of really good legislation the American people wanted,” said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “And so we have a model of how to get the job done.”

Just how much cooperation is likely between the recently warring parties is a leading question in Washington and the answer will have great influence on the nature of Clinton’s second term and what the next Congress can achieve. On Tuesday, political leaders sent all sorts of signals in a somewhat ambiguous display of unity.

The president, who long has opposed a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, sent one of those signals himself, hinting that his opposition to an amendment has limits. “If we have it, it ought to be able to be implemented in a way that actually works and gives the country what it needs to manage a recession,” Clinton said.

At the same time, it was clear that the path toward conciliation is not lacking in obstacles. Republicans feel wounded over Democratic attacks about the unsuccessful plan they offered last year to restrict the growth of Medicare spending. This time, they essentially told Clinton to put out his own plan--and take the heat for it.

“The president will need to make it clear that we have important and tough decisions we need to make in that area,” Lott told reporters. “And when he lays out the problem and suggests some solutions, we are certainly going to be prepared to work with him then to come to the proper result.”

A combination of mutual dependence and post-election ceremony seemed to bring the two sides together. To achieve some of his biggest goals, such as balancing the budget while preserving key social programs, Clinton will need help from congressional Republicans. And as they learned last year, members of Congress will need to work with the president if they are to avoid the extremist stigma that haunted them until last summer.

Still, it is too early to know how the two sides will deal with certain unresolved matters that could have far-reaching political consequences. One example: campaign finance, an area in which Clinton has called for legislative reforms but which remains fraught with potential embarrassments for the Democratic Party and perhaps the Republicans as well.

GOP leaders sent a decidedly mixed signal on the issue: “I think there’s a feeling that there are some areas you want to hold hearings, there are some areas you want to look at,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). But, he added, “you want to do it very carefully and very systematically and without breaking up the sense of bipartisanship and the sense of getting things done.”

Earlier in the day, Clinton offered a seemingly modified description of his views on a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, a measure that he has opposed but that remains ardently sought by conservatives in Congress.

In response to a reporter’s question, Clinton said that he opposes such an amendment because it could tie his hands during an economic downturn. “You don’t want to wind up with a Congress someday in a recession raising taxes or throwing unemployed people off health care,” Clinton said.

He added, however, that his goal and that of amendment advocates may not be in opposition. Congress and the White House should agree to balance the budget without an amendment, he said, to get “the desired economic effect,” and “then, whatever happens with the amendment will happen.”

White House aides said that the president’s change of tone on an amendment was a bow to political reality after Republicans gained two seats in the Senate for a 55-45 advantage over Democrats.

“It looks like they’re going to do it,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said. “The question is how they’re going to do it.”

McCurry said that the president “sees a great danger in writing national economic policy in the Constitution” but “we recognize reality here.”

Such talk is “good news to us,” Lott said, alluding to Clinton’s remarks. “And now we just need to see how that’s actually going to be done.”

House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) told reporters that participants in the White House meeting saw eye to eye on three principal things: “We all agreed that we weren’t 100% happy that the elections turned out the way they did. We all agreed that we were glad the elections were over.

“And we all agreed that we have now at least a year where we can turn our attention away from politics and to policy.”

Said Gingrich: “I think there’s a real desire on the part of everybody to find a way to spend a year really working on solutions, getting them passed in a bipartisan manner and doing the work of the American people.”