As Bush Is Forced to Move Toward Center, He Defines Where Center Lies

For decades, it’s been a truism in U.S. politics that the Supreme Court follows the election returns (at least, in the old days, before the court determined them).

But who knew it also was true for the Federal Reserve Board?

When Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan last week endorsed tax cuts--after earlier championing debt reduction as the best use of the federal budget surplus--he highlighted one of the subtlest yet most effective weapons a president can employ: the power to change the boundaries of the possible. Maybe Greenspan had an entirely legitimate change of heart. But it’s also possible he concluded that, with the new president committed to tax cuts, he was better off trying to shape the package than resist it. One hazard of being as “influential” as Greenspan is that you never want people to publicly ignore your advice; better, instead, to change your advice.

In a country and a Congress so narrowly divided between the parties, President Bush won’t get all of what he wants on any of his priorities. In the House, he may be able to peel off enough conservative Southern Democrats to pass his ideas without much compromise. But to attract the 10 Senate Democrats he will need to break filibusters in the upper chamber, Bush--far more often than not--will have to make substantive concessions to the other side.

Yet, as Greenspan’s sudden epiphany suggests, these concessions will take place within a range of options defined more by Bush than by any other single player. Put another way: Even if Bush has to give ground, most often he will be doing so on his side of the field. Indeed, the president changes the shape of the field. In this era of political parity, presidents, no matter their ideological preferences, may ultimately be compelled to tilt toward the center. But as just the first week of the new administration demonstrated, the president can help define the center.

That’s most apparent in the debate about taxes. With the economy slowing, even former Vice President Al Gore, had he won the election, might have been compelled to propose a larger tax cut than he campaigned on. But Bush’s victory has compelled a much more fundamental rethinking about taxes in Democratic ranks.

Even before Greenspan’s testimony, freshman Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) joined with Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) last week to introduce legislation embodying Bush’s full $1.6-trillion tax cut. Miller’s unequivocal embrace of Bush’s plan is likely to remain an anomaly among Democrats. But, even if less dramatically, other Democrats are being pulled in Bush’s direction.

Most important, the coalition of centrist Democrats from both chambers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council has signaled that it is ready to abandon the targeted tax cuts that Democrats have emphasized in recent years and support the across-the-board rate reductions that Bush and Republicans prefer. Sure, rate reductions may provide more economic stimulus than the new credits for retirement savings or college tuition that Democrats touted during the campaign. But even so, it’s hard to imagine these DLC Democrats spontaneously awakening to the allure of rate cuts if Gore had won.

That doesn’t mean the centrist Democrats will endorse all the specifics of Bush’s plan. They will push him, for example, to moderate the large reduction he has proposed in the top rate. But once a critical mass of Democrats accept the premise that rate cuts are the best way to reduce taxes, all that’s left is an argument over arithmetic (how much) and distribution (who benefits). Those decisions undoubtedly will produce intense conflicts. But in the broad sense, they are choices at the margin--a broad reduction in tax rates now seems all but inevitable. And that might not ever have become a serious option if Gore had won.

The same presidential power to shift the terms of debate was apparent last week when Bush introduced his education blueprint. On education, Bush’s thinking is closer to Gore and former President Clinton than on most issues. Most significantly, Bush shares with Clinton and Gore the belief that the federal government should try to leverage local reform (which puts all three at odds with conservatives who say the best thing Washington can do is simply get out of the way). Yet Bush operates with a very different model of how Washington can encourage local improvement.

Clinton and Gore believed that on education--and most social issues--Washington should use carrots and sticks to proliferate promising reform ideas that had taken root in a few communities but not yet spread widely. Sometimes they argued that Washington should provide grants to encourage communities to replicate those ideas (such as hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes in the early grades). Sometimes they insisted that Washington should require local communities to adopt the reforms (such as providing principals with more authority to hire and fire teachers without regard to tenure) as a condition of receiving federal funds.

Bush begins with a very different premise. He insists that the best way to encourage local reform is to give states and cities more flexibility--but to impose on them greater accountability. Rather than providing grants to spread specific ideas, Bush wants to give local educators more freedom to spend existing federal education dollars as they see fit--but he would withhold funds if they fail to improve student performance.

Bush’s support of that approach has empowered a group of congressional Democrats with similar ideas. Last year, an alliance of centrist Democrats led by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh of Indiana introduced legislation built around virtually the same principles. While Clinton held the White House, they were somewhat marginalized. Now, Bayh and Lieberman are in position to be the deal-makers on education. That too wouldn’t have happened if Bush hadn’t won the White House.

In Washington, the tendency (especially among the press and true believers on both sides) is to focus on the hole, not the doughnut, on the concessions a president inevitably makes to Congress, and not the other way around. Yet, as Bush goes through good days and bad in the months ahead, the only true way to measure his progress will be to constantly remember how few of the ideas dominating the headlines--tax rate cuts, block-granting federal education programs, launching a missile defense shield--would be under discussion at all if he were still in Austin, Texas.

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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.