Bush Wants to Dish Up Big Change, but Will Voters Have an Appetite?

These past 10 years have not been a big decade for big ideas.

Almost every call for radical change, from left or right, has landed with a big thud. Think of Bill Clinton’s universal health care plan in 1994, or the GOP plan to downsize government in 1995. Or, for that matter, the Republican tax cut of 1998 or Bill Bradley’s health-care proposal this year. When Congress did pass two big ideas--packages to hike taxes and reduce the deficit in 1990 and 1993--each inspired a stinging electoral backlash.

Several factors have reduced the appetite for big changes: narrow congressional majorities that demand bipartisan compromise; public distrust of government (which makes voters leery of following politicians on large leaps), and, lately, a contentment with the country’s direction that’s diluted the demand for any change. All of this has converted both parties to the joys of incremental progress.

For better or worse, Vice President Al Gore has internalized this lesson. Cumulatively, his agenda is far more ambitious than Bill Clinton’s in 1996, with significant proposals on education, health care and poverty. But no single Gore initiative involves a major shift in a program Americans now rely on; it’s a big wall of relatively small bricks.

Surprisingly, the candidate most challenging this consensus is George W. Bush. Because he shares the family difficulty in expressing large concepts from the stump, Bush doesn’t seem overly burdened with policy ambitions. And his education agenda, which builds on the experience of other GOP governors, fits the decade’s step-by-step pattern. But in three other areas Bush is proposing big departures: the largest tax cut since Ronald Reagan in 1981, partial privatization of Social Security and a restructuring of Medicare.

At a time of contentment, all of these ideas will test the public tolerance for change. Anyone who watched Gore use Bradley’s health-care plan the way a pit bull uses a terrier knows these proposals will also test Bush’s ability to win a complex policy argument. “Gore is going to attack Bush on these things unmercifully,” says Steve Moore, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, “so Bush better start . . . making the case for himself.”

Of the three ideas, only Bush’s call for an across-the-board cut in income tax rates has been extensively debated--and on this front Bush hasn’t yet met Moore’s test. Polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans prefer to use the budget surplus primarily to pay down the national debt and strengthen Social Security and Medicare (as Gore urges) rather than for a large tax cut. Gore has wasted no time in painting Bush’s tax plan as a threat to education, Social Security and Medicare, as well as the overall economic expansion. If Bush can’t change the terms of this debate, his tax cut could prove more an anchor than a sail.

Social Security reform has received much less attention, partly because Bush hasn’t detailed his plan. But he says he wants to allow workers to divert part of their payroll tax (he hasn’t said how much) into individual accounts they could invest themselves.

By tapping into the stock market’s dynamic growth, individual accounts could help younger workers accumulate more assets for retirement. The risk is that market fluctuations could leave more Americans dangerously short on cash when they retire. This debate hasn’t ripened yet; Bush could strike a chord with younger workers, but he’ll have to convincingly rebut Gore’s charge that partial privatization through individual accounts would “destroy Social Security.”

The Medicare debate is even less developed because the issue almost never came up in the GOP primaries. But Bush has endorsed a plan by Sens. John B. Breaux (D-La.) and Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to fundamentally restructure the massive health-care program for the elderly. And that guarantees fireworks with Gore.

Today, more than 80% of Medicare recipients receive care in a traditional fee-for-service system where Washington directly compensates doctors and hospitals under a complex set of rules. Under the Breaux-Frist plan endorsed by Bush, Washington would instead provide seniors a fixed sum with which to buy private insurance from a menu of approved plans. (Low-income seniors would receive extra subsidies, and those with higher incomes could use their own money to buy better coverage.) The fee-for-service Medicare option would still be offered, but its monthly premiums would likely rise high enough to compel many seniors to shift into a managed care option (especially if they wanted prescription drug coverage).

This plan aims to save money over time, both by increasing competition and by collecting more in premium revenue from higher-income seniors. Bush also insists this approach would “empower seniors to be able to make choices for themselves.” But critics warn that this plan could lead to sharply higher premiums and create “a two-track system,” as Gore puts it, that would provide the most affluent with the best care.

When House Republicans last week proposed a tax cut less than half the size of Bush’s, that suggested the political challenges his tax proposal would face. Likewise, the Senate Finance Committee will offer an early gauge on the political viability of Bush’s Medicare agenda when it votes on the Breaux-Frist proposal (probably by early May).

Breaux says he believes the committee will approve his plan and, if it does, “the chances of getting something like that passed [in the full Senate] are fairly decent.” But other close observers doubt that the Finance Committee will take such a leap in an election year--especially with its chairman, William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.), facing a tough reelection challenge. If the committee rejects the idea, it would give Gore another arrow to use against Bush.

On entitlements, Bush gets credit for acknowledging what Gore still mostly obscures: that these programs need to be constrained before they swallow the budget when the baby boomers retire. And on all these issues (as well in the education debate), there’s a risk to Gore of seeming to simply defend the status quo. But Bush will have the greater burden to prove he’s struck the right balance between expanding individual choice and protecting the safety net that Medicare and Social Security now provide. That won’t be easy in an era when most voters see little virtue in big changes.

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

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.