President Agitates for the Achievable

If there were few ringing declarations and no bold lines drawn in the sand in President Clinton’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, in a way that was the point.

In its measured tones, pleas for bipartisanship and carefully bounded ambitions, Clinton’s speech marked the narrowing of the political debate in a capital seemingly exhausted with ideological crusades after four bruising years of unrelenting partisan warfare. It was a call to arms for a politics that wishes a farewell to arms.

As Clinton’s speech made clear, the two parties still have plenty to argue about, from campaign finance reform to the chemical weapons treaty stalled in the Senate. A chorus of Republican boos at Clinton’s denunciation of the proposed balanced-budget amendment underscored the potential for continuing acrimony on select issues.

But compared to 1993--when Clinton arrived in Washington determined to reinvigorate government--or 1995--when the new Republican congressional majority surged into power committed to drastically retrenching it--the range of their disagreement has measurably reduced.

With neither side now holding a clear majority of public support and both cautious after their missteps over the previous four years, Clinton and the Republican majority find themselves almost inexorably converging on the central questions of government’s size and scope.

“The circle has contracted,” said Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based Democratic pollster. “You just see a lot fewer options available for either abolishing the government or expanding it.”

For a president who once hoped to deploy the federal government to guarantee universal health care, it was a mark of the new era that his most dramatic proposal Tuesday night involved the federal government as a facilitator only--in designing national reading and math tests that states would be free to use or ignore.

But the Republican response was equally revealing. Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) was strikingly conciliatory, echoing Clinton’s call for bipartisanship and touting conservative proposals to bolster the poor by strengthening charitable and religious organizations.

Gone was the barbed ideological tone of Bob Dole in last year’s Republican response to Clinton--or the strutting confidence of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who once vowed to cooperate but never compromise with the Democrat in the White House.

Tuesday night’s speeches marked the opening of a new round in the ongoing joust between Clinton and congressional Republicans--a contest that finds both sides now nursing wounds. Though Clinton was brisk and confident in laying out his agenda, he remains besieged by proliferating questions about his role in Democratic National Committee fund-raising last year--a vulnerability that helped explain his call for Congress to send him campaign finance reform legislation by July 4.

Meanwhile--as Watts’ engaging but temperate remarks suggested--Republicans remain palpably uncertain about how to respond to Clinton’s success at seizing the center over the last two years. “It is clear to me we haven’t figured out how to deal with Clinton,” said Bill Pascoe, political director at the American Conservative Union.

Clinton’s speech made it apparent that he has no intention of ceding that ground. As Clinton tacked to the center before his reelection, some liberals hoped--and many more conservatives feared--that he might tilt back to the left if he won a second term. If the speech did nothing else, it finally should have interred that notion.

Clinton placed himself firmly on the tracks that he rode to his victory over Dole. While liberals grumble that he is glossing over entrenched problems--like the persistence of child poverty or the sluggish progress of middle-class incomes--the president was relentlessly optimistic. “We face no imminent threat,” the president declared. “We have much to be thankful for.”

As during the campaign, Clinton emphasized bipartisanship and praised national unity. And he renewed the effort he has undertaken over the last two years to define “a new kind of government” that accepts public skepticism about government’s capacity yet retains an activist role for Washington.

Even many conservatives agree that Clinton has threaded that needle more effectively than they expected. Notwithstanding his declaration in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” Tuesday night he continued his ongoing call for government to assume bite-sized new missions--from requiring childproof safety locks on handguns to requiring insurance companies to cover 48-hour hospital stays for women recovering from mastectomies.

On the budget itself, Clinton on Thursday will issue a plan that defends many Democratic priorities--particularly in education and training--even while blunting the ideological contrast with the GOP by bringing the federal books into balance by 2002. And even while operating under that constraint, Clinton proposed to expand Medicaid coverage to about 5 million uninsured children.

Yet, seen from another angle, that Medicaid proposal illuminates the ground that Clinton has had to concede in his political recovery. Clinton’s initiative fell well short of calling for the government to ensure health care for all children--as many liberals are urging--much less his original proposal to ensure health care coverage for all uninsured Americans. Likewise, the expansion of Head Start that Clinton touted was a shadow of his original ambition of ensuring that all eligible children could participate in the program.

Similarly, though some of Clinton’s proposals called for direct federal action, many more involved Washington only in more diffuse roles--as an exhorter, model-builder and spark to action by other parties.

Clinton did call for substantial increases in federal investments in higher education--both through an expansion of Pell grants and new tax credits for college tuition. But much of his agenda was based on the federal government spending relatively small sums as catalysts for state and local actions--from the mobilization of volunteers to teach young children to read, to the development of new national tests that states could adopt to measure students on reading and math.

Though some conservatives may recoil from the national tests--and others are questioning the design of his higher education tax breaks--nothing in this agenda is likely to provoke the sort of ideological firefights that were routine in Clinton’s first two years in office. Indeed, almost every educational idea he advanced in his speech has been praised by one Republican governor or another in their state of the state speeches over the last month.

Activists of left and right are chafing at this convergence--which leaves little room for the kind of bold change they want. Yet at a moment when the two parties confront each other in a precarious electoral parity, bold change may be beyond the reach of either. In this fractured and conflicted political environment, the greatest strength of Clinton’s millenial “call to action” may be its own lack of purity--its embodiment of Americans’ own profound ambivalence about a federal government that they distrust and look toward in roughly equal measure.