George W. Bush is losing his working majority in Congress. The only surprise is that it took so long. As recently as a month ago, the new administration imagined that its tax package would just sail through on a tide of media torpor, Republican discipline, and bipartisan gesture.
No longer. As the details of the president's not very popular program seep into public consciousness, Republicans are starting to desert. So far the Senate has just one reliably faithless Democrat, the politically androgynous Zell Miller of Georgia [see "Zellout," by Joshua Micah Marshall, on page 14]. Other conservative Democrats who were expected to defect to the Republicans have voted with their own party leaders. Republican moderates, however, are crossing the aisle with impunity.
The basic problem with the Bush budget, substantively and politically, is that it puts unpopular tax cuts ahead of public outlays that most voters want. Bush would divert hundreds of billions from the Medicare trust funds, causing the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to face bankruptcy in 2010. The Bush budget would underfinance a prescription drug benefit, slash funding that provides health care for the uninsured, cut already depleted amounts for housing, and shortchange child care. Bush does propose a modest increase in education funding--but offsets it with cuts in job training, services for the elderly and disabled, and money for early childhood learning.
Adjusting for inflation and population growth, Bush's real cuts in domestic outlay total $300 billion over 10 years. All of these rollbacks, on top of the excessive reductions mandated by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, are necessary only to finance a gigantic and regressive tax giveaway. The more that the proposed tax cuts are juxtaposed against popular uses of public outlay, the more Bush's support will erode.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a spiteful and panicky editorial that began: "The Senate voted Friday to slash President Bush's tax cut by 20 percent, and we thought you might like to know the reasons. Their names are Senators Jim Jeffords, Lincoln Chafee and Ben Nelson, and what they want is a lot more of your money to spend." The Journal added bitterly, "The spending senators don't give a rip about the debt or the faltering economy, only about passing out more cash to buy more votes."
In fact, the Bush budget does little for the faltering economy. It's the Democrats who are pushing a front-loaded, downward-tilted tax cut, as economic stimulus.
This kind of overheated rhetoric from the Journal is a reliable sign that Bush is on the ropes. But the Journal's premise that senators can be bullied by reference to a popular tax cut is as mistaken as it is futile. Outside the country club set, America is not clamoring for this tax relief. And spending the surplus on Medicare, on education, on child care, and on other social needs is not "buying votes." It is addressing outlays that the majority of voters support. That's how a democracy works. It's charming to read the Journal rail against the buying of votes. Judging by its editorialists' views on money and politics, the Journal evidently favors buying votes the old fashioned way, with campaign contributions.
Another factor has led to the unraveling of the Bush program. Democrats in Congress have awakened from their post-traumatic coma. Social outlays and a progressive tax system, it turns out, are good politics. It doesn't take particular courage for senators to stand behind Social Security, Medicare, good schools, and early childhood education. If anything, it takes courage of a sort to urge tax breaks for the top 1 percent or 2 percent of voters at a time when ordinary people can't pay drug and medical bills. It takes courage to urge that multimillionaires be spared paying a nickel in estate taxes while minimum wage workers pay payroll taxes. If Republicans persist in this sort of political courage, voters will reciprocate by electing more Democrats.
A liberal senator recently asked what "new ideas" the group around The American Prospect had to express progressive values in more up to date form. I'm not sure I buy the premise. The best liberal ideas are pretty well established: A market economy needs social counterweights. The private sector is not competent to provide such social goods as education and health care. Full employment is the working person's best friend. Big money needs to be kept in its place or it will swamp democracy. The fairest way to finance government is via a progressive tax system. We want industry to succeed but recognize that its antisocial tendencies must be tamed via regulation in the public interest. Democracy itself needs to be deepened and broadened.
Over the past two decades, self-styled New Democrats have contended that a party still stuck with Depression-era imagery needed more modern ideas. Most of these turn out to be either variations on Republican ideas or mere gimmicks. In his recent investigative piece about the Democratic Leadership Council ["How the DLC Does It," TAP, April 23, 2001], our Washington editor, Robert Dreyfuss, pointed out the strategic damage done by DLC ideology. Every time somebody proposes an affirmative and popular use of the public sector, a New Democrat can be counted on to say, "That's just big government again."
The voters, it turns out, value government--if it serves their needs. And effective government programs, coupled with strong democracy, are the glue of the progressive majority coalition. George W. Bush is learning that the hard way. Democrats never should have forgotten it.
The American Prospect Vol. 12 Issue 8 May 1st, 2001