As Political Voices Gravitate Toward Center, Some Long for Battles of Old

It’s getting to the point where someone in Washington is bound to stand up soon and announce that Rodney King got it backward. Tired of the two parties pledging to get along, a gathering chorus of contrarians is asking: Can’t we all disagree?

This recoil from bipartisanship is itself thoroughly bipartisan. On the right, it’s heard in voices like that of virtuecrat William J. Bennett, the former Education secretary, who last week accused Newt Gingrich--Newt Gingrich!--of “cozying up” to the left. And there’s Christopher Buckley, the witty conservative satirist who last week managed to work up a fine curmudgeonly lather against comity. “To paraphrase another memorable line in Clinton’s second inaugural,” Buckley wrote in the New York Times, “nothing big ever came of being nice.”

The left concedes nothing to this grumbling on the right. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the unofficial curator of the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kennedy brother legacies, has fired off several essays threatening the First Student in the White House with mediocre grades from history if he doesn’t confront the Republicans by crusading for a new wave of government activism. Schlesinger coined the term “the vital center” nearly 50 years ago, and he considers the agenda President Clinton has assembled under that label today a dilution of the bloodline. “The vital center from which to navigate the mysterious future does not lie in the middle of the road,” Schlesinger solemnly lectured the president in Slate magazine.

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Casual readers of the headlines may find all this anxiety a bit mysterious, if not misguided. On a daily basis, Washington seems to be suffering no drought of disagreement. The two parties are beginning a major struggle over a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. A sustained guerrilla war seems likely over campaign-finance reform. House Republicans in particular spared few adjectives in lashing Clinton’s new budget plan last week.

So ingrained is the reflex of contention that even seemingly unobjectionable ideas provoke it. Several Republican governors already have raised the cry of “unacceptable federal interference” over Clinton’s call for the federal government to develop national tests in reading and math--even though no state would be forced to use the exams. And after years of extolling the virtues of shifting responsibility from the government to organizations like churches and charities, the House Republican Conference had this to say about Clinton’s call for the mobilization of 1 million volunteers to help teach all third-graders to read: “Does the president’s proposal ask more of volunteers than they can reasonably be expected to do?”

All of this suggests that anyone who enjoys C-SPAN for what it has in common with American Gladiators will not feel entirely cheated this spring. But it doesn’t mean that those who suspect the distance between the two parties is shrinking are wrong.

On the central question that has consumed Washington for the last four years--the role and responsibilities of the federal government--the debate is converging. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is that the public is not willing to let either side restructure the government as thoroughly as it would like. Clinton’s efforts to dramatically expand government’s reach in his first two years prompted voters to turn toward the GOP in the 1994 election. The congressional Republicans’ efforts to rout the welfare state in 1995 were greeted with an equally powerful turn back toward Clinton in 1996.

Chastened by those parallel failures, both sides have visibly trimmed their sails this year. With Clinton offering an agenda defined by moderation (and often modesty), and Republicans still leery of being branded as extremists, the range of the politically possible has suddenly contracted into a narrow space just to the right of the political center. In this environment, the differences between the two parties are not trivial, but neither are they fundamental.

The fight over a balanced-budget amendment does qualify as a full-scale ideological dust-up; but the debate’s impact is bounded by the fact that both sides have already committed to balance the budget, however the vote turns out. And on the budget itself, notwithstanding the GOP criticisms (some legitimate), Clinton’s new plan marks the continuing narrowing of the distance between the parties.

Whether the federal government should write new educational tests is an interesting question, but hardly as basic as whether the federal government should retain an Education Department. Besides, that’s hardly universal: Michigan’s Republican Gov. John Engler has already told Clinton that he wants to be one of the first to implement the new tests.

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Even with the House GOP’s carping, it’s difficult to imagine a real firefight over other Clinton educational priorities, like expanding charter schools. The new conservative push (endorsed by the Christian Coalition among others) for more involvement by charities in the lives of the poor suggests that Clinton isn’t the only one now looking for less polarizing crusades.

As Bill Pascoe, political director of the American Conservative Union, puts it, almost all of the political debate is now occurring “between the 45-yard lines.” And that, he says, is not a very attractive space for ideologues of the left or the right “who want to play on the whole field.”

Nowhere is this symmetrical frustration more evident than in the debate over the budget. Although pleased with several of Clinton’s individual initiatives, liberals fret that his commitment to a balanced budget forecloses the possibility of meaningfully confronting problems like inner-city poverty.

On the right, the fiscal debate is taking an even more surprising turn. James K. Glassman, a leading conservative columnist, recently complained that conservatives were too focused on balancing the budget. His logic: The steady growth in federal revenue from an improving economy has made it too easy to reach balance “without making significant” reductions in existing federal programs--”and getting reforms is far more important than getting to zero.”

Glassman’s argument (echoed last week by Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot) makes explicit what is usually only implicit--that for many conservatives the balanced budget is only a means toward their real end: shrinking the federal government as much as possible. Helped by the brightening revenue picture, Clinton is confounding these activists by offering a budget that meets the GOP test of balance by 2002, without eliminating any Cabinet departments--indeed while increasing spending on education and training by 40%.

Clinton’s budget has glaring flaws--particularly his tendency to tilt his spending and deficit-reduction until 2001 and 2002. Public investment other than education and training continues to be squeezed--partly because Clinton remains cautious about squeezing entitlements. As a share of the economy, domestic public investment in 1998 will be the smallest in at least 35 years, while payments to individuals, mostly entitlements, will consume the largest share of federal spending ever, budget documents show.

Yet overall, the plan points toward a truce line in the war over government’s role--one to the right of where most Democrats would place it, but much closer to the center than conservatives prefer. At the height of the Republican revolution, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) called for eventually halving the size of the federal government--to 11% of the economy. Clinton’s plan envisions a federal budget in lasting balance at 19% of the economy--smaller than it is today, but far larger than Armey’s ideal.

Clinton’s endless balancing act leaves true believers on both sides in a permanent state of frustration. Yet their alternatives remain hazy. Liberals may chafe at Clinton’s emphasis on balancing the budget, but few are willing to publicly abandon the goal. Conservatives may poke holes in Clinton’s budget plan, but after the disastrous government shutdown last year, almost all recognize they cannot impose their own diktat.

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Most importantly, the ideological vanguard in both parties share a common vulnerability: Neither side can safely bet that if it marched back to the periphery it would carry along a majority of the country. That means however much they chafe against its boundaries, Clinton’s critics on the left and right alike may find themselves trapped in his “vital center” for a while longer.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space each Monday.