Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: COVER STORY Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 11:35:36 EST Message-ID: \SE COVER STORY \HD Clinton and Congress: Who's in the Driver's Seat? \BY Eric Felten \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Like Jimmy Carter before him, Bill Clinton was a Southern governor with little national experience. The similarities end there. President Carter was at loggerheads with his fellow Democrats in Congress, but President-elect Clinton has forged strong alliances on Capitol Hill. It could mean the end to legislative stalemate. TEXT: Come January, the Democrats will control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue - the first time one party has ruled in 12 years. Gridlock is over, the American people have been told. But who will be directing the traffic that now promises to whiz back and forth between the White House and Capitol Hill? Hopes ran high in 1976 that President Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress would dissolve the conflict and controversy of the Nixon and Ford years. It didn't work out that way. Carter quickly earned the enmity of Capitol Hill, and his party's lawmakers in turn helped reduce his presidency to a shambles. Congress didn't know Carter; Congress didn't work with Carter. Bill Clinton is no Jimmy Carter. What has Clinton learned from the Carter years? Above all, that he will not be able to govern without Congress. Indeed, the chances are high that Congress will govern him. Throughout the campaign, Clinton quietly developed or renewed ties to key lawmakers, suggesting that he thinks his best hope for a successful presidency, or one perceived as such, is to become Congress's front man. Carter went to Washington with no particular mandate from the voters. He pitched himself not as the bearer of an agenda but as the candidate of personal virtue, the outsider untainted by the machinations of the Capitol. This was not just packaging. Carter had not participated widely in national politics. Although Carter served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1974, it did not help him build the relationships he needed to work with Congress. The freshman Democrats elected in the wake of Watergate also had run as outsiders and did not harbor much loyalty to party institutions like the DCCC. When Carter arrived in Washington, he had little leverage with Congress. He could neither threaten lawmakers with the public's wrath (because the election was not seen as ratifying any policy ) nor look to many supporters with whom he had long-standing alliances. Had Carter recognized how little leverage he had, he might have made the best of it by going along to get along. Instead he made matters worse, staffing the White House with Georgia pals and imagining he could simply dictate legislation to Congress. Nine months into his administration, Carter's budget director and principal adviser, Bert Lance, was forced to resign under congressional pressure for financial conflicts of interest, and the president's bellwether legislative proposal - the overambitious energy plan - was foundering in the Senate. After the Lance affair, Carter's White House lost its image of heartland virtue, and the president, weakened, was soon seen as incompetent, hopelessly tilting against a Congress he could not best. Carter never recovered. Clinton will not make the same mistakes. "Everybody learned from the Carter experience," says Mark A. Peterson, associate professor of government at Harvard University. Clinton and Carter share some superficial similarities - they were governors of Southern states with relatively small populations and ran as moderates against weak incumbents - but the resemblance ends there. To begin with, as Peterson points out, Clinton was governor of his state for much longer than Carter. He also suffered defeat after his first term and learned how to make the compromises needed for reelection. Perhaps more important, he will not be bringing with him truckloads of Arkansas advisers. Carter was surrounded by his "Georgia mafia," says Peterson, but Clinton "is at the center of an enormous network of people, built on friendships he developed at Georgetown, Yale and as a Rhodes scholar." That network includes lawyers, academics, businessmen and government officials - people from "all walks of life," says Peterson. "But most of them are tied to the Washington policy community." With Washington insiders staffing the White House, Clinton will be poised to work smoothly with Capitol Hill. It is a relationship that the power brokers in Congress anticipate with relish and one that Clinton has been cultivating for months. (Washington veterans have been reminiscing about the legislative steamroller following LBJ's 1964 victory.) During the campaign, however, the congressional leadership kept a low profile. The object of voter scorn and contempt for various scandals and embarrassments, congressmen were not a plus at the podium. About one-third of the Democrats in the House and Senate were at the Democratic National Convention in New York, there to cast votes as superdelegates. But few were anywhere to be seen in the media coverage of convention events. Clinton might have been tempted by this turn of events to ignore Democratic lawmakers during the fall campaign, assuming that they were so weakened by scandal he could roll over them if elected. He resisted that temptation. Though top legislators were not the sought-after campaign trail celebrities they have been in election years past, Clinton was busy building ties with them. Before the convention, the candidate began meeting and consulting with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, the soft-spoken liberal from Maine who has emerged in the past four years as the prime power broker on Capitol Hill. According to a Democratic Senate staff aide, Clinton and Mitchell coordinated their campaign and legislative strategies and have been "sharing ideas about what will be a new legislative environment." It was not just with an eye to his first 100 days that Clinton met with Mitchell. Congress helped keep an embattled George Bush pinned down well into the fall by sending the president bill after bill that would embarrass him whether he signed or vetoed them. The urban aid package, for example, contained enterprise zones - a program Bush has touted to combat inner-city poverty and could have bragged about passing - but it also was shot through with tax increases that would have allowed Clinton to paint Bush a liar had he signed it. Democratic lawmakers proved to be valuable allies in Clinton's campaign. The president-elect also has close ties to House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt. Clinton campaigned hard in and won Missouri, Gephardt's home state, and met frequently with the congressman while there. Though he never wholeheartedly endorsed Gephardt's protectionist views, Clinton did moderate his support of the free trade agreement with Mexico, promising to limit its effect. Even before the campaign, Clinton had ties to Gephardt. Both are prominent members of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group created to win back the moderate label for the Democratic Party. George Stephanopoulos left Gephardt's staff to become the communications director and chief spokesman of the Clinton campaign. Add Clinton's track record in Arkansas to his chumminess with Democratic leaders in Congress, and it becomes clear that the next president will not battle it out on the Hill, Carter-style. "As a president, I think, [Clinton will] be the kind of guy who will be calling legislators, seeing them and bringing them into his office," says Arthur English, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "I think he will work very closely with Congress, because that's in the political culture down here in Arkansas." English calls this the "politics of intimacy." Clinton is famous in Arkansas for his political intimacy. As he will in Washington, he enjoyed one-party rule there. Yet he never took that majority for granted, courting state lawmakers in an extended charm offensive. David Matthews, once the governor's point man in the Arkansas General Assembly, described for the Washington Post how Clinton never stopped wheedling legislators who didn't back him, "even following them into a bathroom." As governor he was not afraid of compromise and worked hard to find consensus positions. This taste for collegiality doesn't mean Congress will give Clinton what he wants. Even more so than Carter, Clinton will arrive in Washington lacking a clear legislative agenda. Instead he has offered volumes of policies and programs, elaborate analyses with five prongs here and nine points there. These might win high grades on term papers at policy schools, but simple principles are the stuff mandates are made of: Ronald Reagan was able to bully Congress in his first year because he could point to his election as a referendum on two clearly stated goals: a strong defense and tax cuts. Clinton also will enter office with only a plurality of the popular vote. He survived his own high negative ratings in the public opinion polls only because his rivals were deemed even less sympathetic. By contrast, nearly all of the legislators whom Clinton will have to work with won their contests outright, with a majority of the vote. Though Congress as a whole was badly battered in this anti-incumbent year, individual lawmakers who won easily will negotiate from a position of strength. A cooperative, collegial relationship with Congress may very well mean giving them what they want. If Clinton facilitates powerful lawmakers and their agendas, he is likely to look successful. As long as a president does not make life difficult for legislators, they will try to make him look good. Unless Congress wants to court another Reagan-style assault on Washington four years from now, it's in its interest to promote the image of one-party rule as the solution to gridlock. But if Clinton and Congress come to blows, both sides know Clinton will suffer most. If Clinton cannot bully lawmakers, what clout will he have with them? "There are two main ways a president can persuade Congress," says Allen Schick, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. "The first is intimidation, but that's not Clinton's style, and he's not in a position to do it. The second is to offer inducements." That is, lawmakers can easily be seduced by programs that provide some baubles for the home district. Carter's energy bill faced opposition not only because he presented it without consulting congressional powers but because it entailed sacrifices rather than opportunities to dispense largess. Not so with a jobs and economic stimulus program, likely to be the first major legislative package presented by Clinton. He will get quick action because a broad spending program allows lawmakers to dispense favors. "He will get his good, strong jobs package," says one Democratic House staff aide, "though of course each proposal will come back complete with three desserts." And it's unlikely that Clinton will want to turn down the sweets. He's "a skilled enough legislative practitioner," says the House aide, "to realize that if you're all rowing in the same direction, it doesn't matter if people bring their own oars." Mitchell and Gephardt will help to highlight Clinton's jobs plan; it is expected that the program will be the first legislation offered by the 103rd Congress, carrying the coveted label of S 1 in the Senate and HR 1 in the House. Further lending an aura of success to the Clinton administration in its early days will be a flurry of legislation that has awaited only a Democratic hand on the presidential fountain pen. "There is a whole set of bills that Bush vetoed that Congress can bring up quickly," says Peterson, pointing to the family leave bill and legislation prohibiting replacement of strikers. "If those bills are passed and signed - boom, boom, boom - Clinton will have some momentum." Whether that momentum is maintained will be up to the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, leaders to whom Clinton already owes much for his election win. In the early seventies, Congress passed reforms that broke up the power of the committee chairmen and led to the fragmentation of power in the House. In recent years the Democratic leadership has refocused that power by gaining control of House proceedings. As committee chairmen were weakened, members gained opportunities to alter legislation by offering amendments on the floor. At the bidding of the Democratic Caucus, the House Rules Committee has reasserted the power of the leaders by controlling what amendments can and can't be offered. Clinton will have little success in getting the legislation he wants without the cooperation of congressional leaders. That cooperation will likely entail buying into a backlog of 12 years of frustrated legislative proposals. For starters, there is a list of perennial bills, most of which have impeccable liberal pedigrees and the backing of such old-line liberal powers on the Hill as Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Reps. John Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California. These include pro-labor legislation, trade protection bills and more expansive environmental laws. In those areas where Republicans are able to mount significant opposition to new legislation, Clinton will be able to oblige his congressional allies by giving them more say in the drafting of regulations by executive branch agencies. The past 12 years have seen a constant struggle between Republican regulators and Democratic congressmen, fighting over the drafting of details to fill in what is left vague in vast legislation such as the Clean Air Act. What cannot be gained in the legislative arena due to public scrutiny can often be won in the careful writing of regulations, which are drafted far from the limelight by bureaucrats. To stiffen antipollution laws, for example, Democrats won't need to pass a new Clean Air Act; they can simply have Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency write tougher rules. Though some kind of health care reform was a touchstone of Clinton's campaign, that issue promises to end up on a back burner. The problem is that leaders in Congress have not worked out among themselves a favorite approach. "It seems like there are more health plans on the Hill than there are Democratic members," says the House aide. An early indication that Clinton wants to lead Congress rather than simply follow will be if he stakes much of his reputation and popularity on sorting out the competing health plans. This too-many-cooks problem is the main risk Clinton faces with a government driven by Capitol Hill. Congressional government is government by committee, complete with all the perversities and inconsistencies that come from cobbling together the druthers of hundreds of players. Letting Congress lead will no doubt get Clinton a jobs program - and any number of other bills for him to sign. Congressional government, however, offers little hope for spending discipline. As the House aide says, "It will be the legislative equivalent of 40 acres and a mule: Everybody will get his own piece of turf." Not that he thinks that will be new for Congress. "When was the last time we saw a coherent piece of legislation?" Reporting by Robert Schmults This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. 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