Will Clinton Throw GOP a Lifeline?

The message from the GOP’s bungled impeachment proceedings is that the Republican Party is in far more trouble than President Bill Clinton and that 2000 could be a big Democratic election year. Even a global economic downturn might only indict the Clinton administration without revitalizing the sadly embarrassed party of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

It is too early to say the Republicans are threatening to imitate the imploding Whig Party of the 1850s, but it’s not too early to recall the analogy. If the GOP fails to hold the House and Senate in 2000, while again losing the presidency, party architects will have to worry about tumbling walls and crumbling institutional foundations.

Over the next few months, the impending Social Security debate may provide important early clues. The same voters who just proved how little they minded whether Clinton lied about Monica S. Lewinsky may prove a lot less tolerant if the president turns out to be fibbing in his current promise to save Social Security without cutting benefits. This controversy could be the first big debate over the 21st-century economy, and the Republicans, always vulnerable on Social Security, could conceivably lose as badly as they did on impeachment.

The irony, though, is that Clinton may want to cut a deal that pleases financial markets and big contributors--and gives the GOP a half victory that preserves them as the most reliably inept opposition ever to control Congress against a president of the other party. When the Republicans took over the House and Senate in January 1995, Clinton’s job rating was around 40% and Congress was riding high. Four years and three unimpressive Republican House speakers later, Clinton’s ratings are in the 70s and the Capitol Hill GOP is making the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey folks nervous about unexpected competition.

Following Clinton’s acquittal, frustration is eating at Republicans of all flavors. House moderates, who took a chance backing impeachment, now find themselves hung out to dry by the implosion in the Senate. Angry conservatives, in turn, insist they were right all along: Focusing on Lewinsky would not be enough and removing the president had to involve larger patterns of misbehavior, multiple cover-ups of predatory behavior toward women, “Wag the Dog” timing of Middle East airstrikes or similar actions.

But the Grand Old Party’s not-so-grand thinkers never got beyond Lewinsky, and the price may be steep because this is the second impeachment Republicans have botched. They were outmaneuvered a quarter-century ago in Watergate, when they were defending. Now, they have been outmaneuvered when they were prosecuting. Small wonder that some moderate Republicans have begun reregistering as Democrats, and some social-issue conservatives are wondering about a third party.

It is also a familiar disillusionment. This is the fifth time in four decades that the Republicans have flirted with catastrophe. That was the outcome of nominating Barry M. Goldwater for president in 1964. Then, in 1974, after Watergate, even Ronald Reagan considered the idea of a third party. Then there was 1992, when Ross Perot came close to fatally dividing the GOP coalition. In 1996, of course, the new GOP Congress became a laughingstock after trying to shut down the government.

The great impeachment screw-up of 1998-99, however, may be the biggest fumble of all, because it taps at two GOP fault lines: recurrent incompetence, and the deep intraparty divisions between upper-income, country-club sophisticates and true-believing Christian fundamentalists. Because of the recent incompetence, both wings are embarrassed.

Who could have imagined, back in January 1998, that Clinton would eventually be found to have lied to Americans about Lewinsky, that he would be impeached and that he would wind up gaining--gaining--15 points in the national polls from his January lows? But this is what happened. Whatever Clinton’s morals, and however much Americans didn’t like him, the president was bolstered by the poor strategy and worse credibility of Gingrich and Starr, two of the 20th century’s lowest-rated public officials. This bungle is big enough to support long memories and year-2000 recriminations.

Which is why Clinton and the Democrats come off the impeachment battle with a huge edge over the Republicans and the prospect of, almost literally, blowing them away in the coming debate over Social Security. What the Republicans hope is that Clinton will throw them a lifeline and compromise in a way that restores GOP credibility.

They just might be right. This, after all, is the style of governance that Clinton has perfected over the last four years: proposing liberal or progressive programs that he expects to compromise with the GOP Congress in directions popular with corporate, financial and upper-income constituencies. He thus kills two birds with one deception: Liberals and low-income groups applaud the initial pretense; corporations and big contributors approve the ultimate legislation.

The political and economic stakes in the Social Security battle are hard to exaggerate. For whose benefit will the 21st-century economy be run? Will the Social Security benefits promised to the elderly be cut to please the financial sector, even though the Dow Jones industrial average has risen by 1,000% since 1982?

At least Clinton’s initial proposals are bold enough. Social Security is probably solvent through 2032, but the president wants to commit $2.7 trillion from general revenues, if necessary, to ensure that planned benefits can be met through 2055. He favors only a limited program of individual savings accounts as a supplement to Social Security. Many in Washington, though, see this as nothing more than the cynical framework for another deal, one that would quietly reduce benefits and partly privatize Social Security in a Wall Street direction.

On the other hand, there is a chance that Clinton no longer wants to compromise but to deliver the same political knockout punch that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1935-36, before that era’s great Democratic election triumph. He even has the same issue at hand: Social Security.

The argument that America can’t afford to honor its pension promises doesn’t hold water. It’s just a question of priorities: whether pensions rate the same public assistance and taxpayer rescue granted to U.S. commercial banks, investors and foreign-currency speculators in the repeated federal bailouts of the last two decades.

Clinton’s possible $3-trillion price tag in the 2030s is meetable. Perhaps half the U.S. stock market’s current $11-trillion value, up from $2 trillion in 1982, is attributable to the periodic federal bank, investor and currency bailouts using taxpayer dollars. Without those rescues, the value of stocks might be much lower. Tapping some of that federally aided wealth for a Social Security rescue mission could be neo-Rooseveltian politics on a grand scale.

Last week, Clinton walked away from impeachment over lying to the American people about Lewinsky. Misrepresentation turned out to be acceptable politics. In the coming Social Security debate, however, the public’s toleration for calculated deception may be far lower.*