Gore Gambling on Cautious Steps Toward Bigger Role for Government

Compared with Bill Clinton’s first-term effort to reconstruct the American health care system, the plan Al Gore announced last week to expand health coverage for uninsured children and working adults doesn’t seem very ambitious. But compared with the health care agenda that Clinton offered during his reelection campaign in fall 1996--which amounted to guaranteeing unemployed workers six months of health coverage--Gore’s proposal looks like a little bit of Lyndon Johnson.

That’s not an isolated example. Across a full range of issues, Gore is betting he can sell the voters a more energetic role for Washington than Clinton has been willing to risk since the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994. Gore is still following Clinton’s “New Democrat” model of balancing new programs with promises to restrain and reform government (the vice president, for instance, has already pledged to keep the budget in balance). But in areas from gun control to education and health care, Gore is turning the dial toward a bigger role for Washington.

The resulting product may not envision quite as great a burst of federal activity as Clinton hoped for in 1992--when his plans (many of them frustrated during his first two years) included universal health care. But, with little fanfare, Gore has moved far beyond the micro-initiatives of V-chips and volunteer reading tutors that headlined the president’s reelection campaign.

This positioning could help Gore resist the challenge in the Democratic primaries from former Sen. Bill Bradley--who has accused Clinton and Gore of lacking big ideas. But if he makes it to the general election, Gore’s swarm of new proposals (more than two dozen already) could open him to old Republican attacks against big-spending Democrats that Clinton has largely buried since 1994.

Gore’s 2000 agenda builds on Clinton’s own quiet shift in direction. Clinton’s willingness to propose new federal programs has followed a U-curve. At the first peak was Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Though he promised a heavy dose of reform in 1992 (such as cutting the federal deficit in half), Clinton also proposed a surge of new spending.

After many of those plans crumbled during his chaotic first two years--and helped fuel the GOP landslide in 1994--Clinton retrenched. Pinched by his promise to balance the federal budget--and leery of challenging the anti-government tide that had propelled the GOP breakthrough--Clinton, in his 1996 reelection agenda, was reduced mostly to the defense of existing programs and the memorable declaration that “the era of big government is over.”

Since 1996, though, the political environment has changed in two key respects. One is that the booming economy has swelled federal revenues to the point where it’s possible to propose new spending while still balancing the budget. Meanwhile, the strong economy has diluted the anti-Washington fervor of the early 1990s. “When the economy is doing as well as it’s doing now, people want government to do a little bit more,” says public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

How much more remains the issue. Since the low point of 1996, Clinton has steadily inched back up the other side of the U-curve. In 1997, he proposed voluntary national tests in education and math (which Republicans blocked) and a $24-billion program (which passed) to provide health coverage for uninsured children. In 1998, he added proposals to raise the minimum wage; hire 100,000 teachers to reduce class sizes; provide a $21-billion package of subsidies for child care and allow the near-elderly to buy into Medicare.

Since the Republican Congress rejected almost all of those ideas, Clinton resubmitted them this year--along with proposals to hire 50,000 more police officers, establish federally subsidized retirement accounts for working families and create a prescription drug benefit for seniors.

Although the stalemate with Congress has continued, the length of that legislative list shows how far Clinton himself has moved since 1996. On most fronts, while endorsing Clinton’s ideas, Gore wants to go further. Already, among other things, he’s proposed hiring enough teachers to reduce class sizes all the way through 12th grade (Clinton’s plan for 100,000 teachers would cover only the first three grades).

Other proposals include providing universal access to preschool; quadrupling spending on after-school programs; expanding the children’s health insurance program--as well as using it to cover the parents of eligible children; and creating more empowerment zones.

Gore hasn’t explained how he would pay for all this. But in conversation with his advisors, much of the answer emerges. Sources say that Gore has privately committed himself to maintaining Clinton’s proposed allocations from the budget surplus over the next 15 years for defense, Medicare and Social Security and domestic spending. Moreover, he has already pledged to cut, not raise, taxes. That, aides admit, means the only place Gore could find the money for his initiatives is by slashing the $540 billion Clinton wants to spend through 2014 on the federally subsidized USA (universal savings account) retirement plans.

That’s a revealing decision. Despite all the initiatives Clinton has proposed since 1997, he still wants to lavish nearly two-thirds of the operating budget surplus on retirement programs (Medicare, Social Security and the USA accounts). That reflects, in part, a political calculation that more voters would accept retirement spending as an alternative to a GOP tax cut than would accept major new efforts on health care, education or poverty.

Under pressure to attract Democratic primary voters worried about precisely those problems, Gore is quietly renouncing that play-it-safe strategy. His hope is that his promise to keep the budget in balance--and his intent to pursue his objectives mostly through nonbureaucratic means like tax credits and grants to states--will blunt Republican efforts to tag him as a big spender, while his new programs will undermine Bradley’s effort to portray him as a small-timer.

Threading that needle may be Gore’s most delicate challenge in 2000.

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