Washington Is Freezing Into Its Usual Blocs, but Some Positions Are Sliding

Almost every debate in Washington repeats itself, rarely as tragedy, frequently as farce. Forget Broadway: Nowhere are revivals as popular as on Pennsylvania Avenue. Given the choice between learning new lines or reheating old arguments, most leaders in both parties will find the stove every time.

On some issues--prominently crime, welfare and the deficit--the two parties intermittently have managed to junk the old scripts and forge fresh agreements over the past five years. The period from the spring of 1996 (when Trent Lott succeeded Bob Dole as Senate majority leader) through this summer marked an apex of creative compromise that produced deals on the minimum wage, welfare reform, health care portability and, ultimately, the balanced-budget plan. But these breakthroughs always have been fleeting. Like the tide, intellectual conformity invariably creeps back in.

It is creeping in again now. Under fire from conservatives disillusioned with the budget deal, the Republican congressional leadership is orchestrating a series of ideologically polarized confrontations with the president on issues from abortion to education. President Clinton, predictably, is responding with a mounting list of veto threats. The prospect is for a winter of icy relations, with both sides frozen in familiar disputes.

Yet even as this frost hardens, two intriguing cracks in the ice have recently emerged. One comes from the left, the other from the right. Each suggests life beneath the sheet of orthodoxy now spreading over both parties.

The crack on the left is a growing interest in school choice for inner-city neighborhoods. The choice debate has long been one of the most predictable in American politics. Conservatives say that if parents were given public vouchers to send their children to private or parochial schools, public schools would be forced to improve to meet the competition; liberals (and the teachers unions) say all that such a program would do is drain resources and students and undermine public education. End of discussion.

So far, the left’s arguments have proved more persuasive--every time a broad-scale voucher program has been offered in a state referendum, it has been rejected. But the ground is shifting on a more precisely drawn question: Should government offer vouchers to students in poor neighborhoods with the most troubled public schools?

Rumbles of change were evident in the Senate late last month when Republicans fell just two votes shy of breaking a filibuster blocking their proposal to test vouchers in the District of Columbia. Revealingly, four Democrats voted with the GOP in support of the vouchers; a fifth, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), held back but warned that without better performance from the public schools he might soon reconsider.

Another rumble should come next week when House Republicans intend to bring to the floor a $310-million plan to test vouchers in 100 low-income communities nationwide. That legislation is sponsored by Republicans J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and James M. Talent of Missouri, as well as Floyd H. Flake, a black Democrat from New York City. “The objective is not to destroy public education,” Flake said. “It is to make public education more responsive.”

Within Congress, Flake remains the exception among Democrats--his office expects only 10 to 15 party members to join him in backing the voucher test. More movement is evident elsewhere on the left. A group of left-leaning, African American and Latino religious leaders (including Cecil Murray of Los Angeles’ First AME Church) last month released a manifesto calling for widespread voucher testing.

“Devastating problems demand daring experiments,” wrote the group, known as Evangelicals for Social Action. “We refuse to abandon the children of our poorest families to substandard education.”

The voucher test is likely to clear the House, but it faces uncertain prospects in the Senate--and the virtual certainty of a Clinton veto if it gets that far. But the conversion of the leftish evangelical group symbolizes a creeping intellectual realignment that could tilt the balance down the road--especially if public schools continue to lag behind parochial schools in producing results for inner-city children.

Across the ideological spectrum, a similar intellectual insurrection is stirring against the GOP’s assumption that it can build a national political majority solely around the cause of shrinking the federal government.

Bill Kristol and David Brooks of the conservative Weekly Standard recently fired the first fusillade in this rebellion when they wrote: “An American political movement’s highest goal can’t be protecting citizens from their own government.”

Now, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett and John J. DiIulio, a polymathic Princeton University sociologist, have extended this case in a forceful Commentary article hitting the stands this week. Bennett and DiIulio share the conservative hostility toward big government, but they offer a reality check to their allies who dream of fundamentally dismantling it.

Devolving power to the states is worthwhile, they say, but a guarantee of “neither” reduced spending nor improved results. Engaging more churches and charities in the delivery of social services is a fine idea, but such groups lack the capacity to truly “substitute for government.” And while the public is dubious of many federal government activities, it clearly prefers something approaching “the status quo . . . to radical retrenchment.”

Rather than fantasizing about demolition, they counsel, conservatives should push for “limiting government and making it more effective.” Like Kristol and Brooks, Bennett and DiIulio remain a bit vague on exactly what federal activities fit the definition of limited yet effective government. But even to open that question constitutes a bold step in a party increasingly trapped in reflexive opposition to the exercise of national power.

Like the liberal supporters of inner-city vouchers, these “national greatness” conservatives still represent only a minority within the GOP. But these twin heresies should remind each party that many of their favorite quarrels appear increasingly anachronistic to an electorate hungry for new answers.