DEBATING THE ISSUES

October 4, 1998
	October 9th looms as the deadline for passage of appropriations bills needed to keep the federal government running. This legislative battle has the earmarks of a critical preview of some of the issues shaping the fall campaign.

Oct. 4, 1998: Election '98: The National Report Oct. 4, 1998: A full report and debate on the politics of impeachment. Oct. 4, 1998: A look at two open seat contests. Oct. 4, 1998: How impeachment is impacting two races. Oct. 4, 1998: A conversation between voters in Denver and Members of Congess.   The House Budget Committee. The Senate Appropriations Committee. The House Ways and Means Committee. The House of Representatives The United States Senate.	JIM LEHRER: Kwame Holman updates that story.
	A budget in the black.
	KWAME HOLMAN: Going into this fall's elections Congress finds itself in somewhat uncharted territory. Over the last 30 years members of Congress have had to contend with annual budget deficits. This year, however, there's actually a surplus of revenue. And depending on which member you ask, the best idea is to spend it -- save it -- or give it back. REP. KAREN THURMAN: One, let’s see what's going to happen with this economy and, two, let's go ahead and keep this surplus at this time. REP. J.D. HAYWORTH: If you have a surplus and you fail to return it to the American people, Washington spends it. KWAME HOLMAN: However, the surplus currently is under the protection of last year’s Balanced Budget Agreement approved by a majority of Republicans and Democrats and signed by the president. The new law set strict limits on how much money Congress could spend over the succeeding five years. But a continued strong economy has pumped 70 billion dollars of unanticipated revenue into the Treasury, the cause for another White House ceremony earlier this week. PRESIDENT CLINTON: This is the largest surplus on record and as a percentage of the economy the largest one since the 1950’s.
	The Senate and House debate priorities.
	KWAME HOLMAN: But as Congress goes through its appropriations ritual, deciding the government's spending priorities for the new fiscal year, the budget surplus can look very tempting. SEN. KIT BOND: We have to do something or we're going to destroy the agencies that can take care of people in their homes when they’re elderly or disabled. It's an outrage! SEN. TOM HARKIN: The overall level of resources allocated to our subcommittee is seriously inadequate. We can't even fund programs at last year’s levels. KWAME HOLMAN: Senators Tom Harkin and Kit Bond sit on the appropriations subcommittee that allocates money for labor, health and education programs. Despite their complaints, they say they've still done a better job of dividing up available resources than did their colleagues in the House. SEN. TOM HARKIN: Our House counterparts responded to this problem by completely eliminating funding for summer jobs and heating assistance for the elderly and working poor families. KWAME HOLMAN: Any differences between Senate and House versions of spending bills have to be worked out in a conference between the two bodies. But they'll have to do it by trading off one program against the another. The budget surplus is off limits. REP. CHARLES RANGEL: I think this debate has gone on long enough. KWAME HOLMAN: Still, when members of the House Ways and Means Committee sat down recently to debate the Republicans' proposed 80 billion dollar tax cut , most of the talk was about the surplus. REP. WILLIAM THOMAS: If we we’re calling it a surplus and you call it a surplus, so we'll call it a surplus. KWAME HOLMAN: The surplus is where the money to pay for the tax cut was going to come from. REP BILL ARCHER, Chairman, Ways and Means: This plan is called the 90-10 plan because it sets aside 90 percent of the surplus so we can save Social Security and it uses 10 percent of the projected surplus to cut taxes now. KWAME HOLMAN: But Democrats argued that surplus money actually is the Social Security trust fund. REP. CHARLES RANGEL: Why 90 percent? This isn’t -- American taxpayers didn't put 90 percent of their money into the trust fund; they put 100 percent into the trust fund. KWAME HOLMAN: With Democrats outnumbered on the committee, the tax cut plan sailed through. However, there appears to be little support for tax cuts on the Senate side this year and the plan is expected to die even before the President gets a chance to veto it. And so the budget surplus appears to be safe for the time being. Without dipping into it, though, members of Congress face some difficult spending decisions and soon. Most of the 13 appropriations bills for the next fiscal year have yet to be cleared by Congress. And any department that doesn't have its funding approved by midnight Friday automatically will shut down. JIM LEHRER: What impact will the policy issues now on the table in Washington have on the fall campaign? Margaret Warner follows up. MARGARET WARNER: I’m back with Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times and our two political consultants, Republican Bill McInturff and Democrat Bob Schrum.
	Are there issues in this year's elections?
	Ron, how much are real substantive issues driving this campaign? RON BROWNSTEIN: Well, at the moment they’re being largely overshadowed by – particularly by the Lewinsky scandal, because the press is so focused on it. But if you look around the country, there’s a great irony. Democrats everywhere have been running away from Bill Clinton. On the other hand, they are almost all running on the agenda they laid out in the State of the Union. Left, right and center, Democrats everywhere are running on the same trinity this year of protecting the surplus for Social Security, reducing class sizes in the early grades, and regulating HMO’s. Republicans have a more mixed message so far. A lot of the incumbents are focusing on their achievements for the last few years, particularly balancing the budget. Challengers are much more scattered. MARGARET WARNER: You aware of his assessment of your party -- BOB SCHRUM: First of all, we’re trying to run on issues almost everywhere. And I think there is a reluctance on the part of Republicans to engage on any of those three issues, with the possible exception of education, where the Republicans do have some ideas. There is a tremendous tendency when we say Health Care Bill of Rights, they say Lewinsky. When we say save the surplus for Social Security, they say Lewinsky. When we say raise the minimum wage, they say Lewinsky. I mean, I think the Republicans – I hope this is not an unfair characterization -- are hoping that this scandal has the differential impact in this election and helps deliver then ten, fifteen, twenty seats in the House of Representatives. I think their calculus may be wrong. BILL McINTURFF: I think an issue, number one, I think Ron’s right, very little has gotten across in the sense that the president acknowledged on August 17th he misled the American electorate. But in terms of what Republicans will say, what we’re going to say is look, there’s a four year track record. In the four years since Republicans took the House, we have the first balanced budget in 30 years, the first federal tax cut in a decade. People have to work to get welfare; tougher crime sanctions, and in this cycle what we’ve done is stop the IRS abuses, which worked very well with a lot of our voters, and lastly, we’re the party that last week said for the first time ever take 90 percent of the federal budget surplus, put it into a brand new account, and then that brand new account cannot be spent on anything, other than saving Social Security, and that’s what you’re going to hear Republicans talking about the last 30 days.
	A problem of contentment?
	RON BROWNSTEIN: Besides Lewinsky, there’s a second problem that the Democrats have faced trying to define an issue environment in this election, which is that people are basically pretty content with the direction of the country, with the performance of Congress, and even though they may lean toward the Democratic position on some of these issues, there’s not an enormous intensity there or feeling that Congress has to get these things done, or else things are going to sort of fall off the edge in the country. MARGARET WARNER: In the 94 election, the last off-year, the Republicans came up with their Contract With America, their set of promises; there was a lot of voter unhappiness, and there was really an agenda. Is there any kind of national message from either party that voters could say, okay, if I want A, B, and C, I can vote this party and I know I’ll get it? BILL McINTURFF: I think the Democrats are going to try to nationalize the election. And that’s what’s been lost by this presidential story. And the best example of that is the campaign finance vote in the U.S. Senate. In any other normal election the amount of interest and intensity and topic and discussion there has been about the U.S. Senate voting to stop that finance bill would have been a big story all through September. Instead, it happened. It was a blip. Nobody noticed. And it was the most powerful way to explain how this story about the president essentially squelched any ability by either political party, but especially the Democrat challengers, to try to nationalize this election around those topics. BOB SCHRUM: Republicans, I think, have a strategy of not talking about issues, despite Bill’s effort to reel off some of them like balanced budget, which I think the country gives the president a lot of the credit for. And what they want to do is get a low electorate with a high intensity that is exactly what happened in 1994, by the way.
	MARGARET WARNER: What impact, though, will this election have on issues that voters say they care about? RON BROWNSTEIN: That’s the point. It really begs the question if, in fact, Republicans do make gains in this election, which historically they should do. What they will do when they come back -- in 1998 the Democrats had a relatively ambitious agenda, which the Republicans shelved. The Republicans were quite a bit more uncertain about what they wanted to do. What Republicans will want to push in 1999, if they, in fact, make gains, apart from the investigation of Bill Clinton, I think remains very uncertain after this election. MARGARET WARNER: What do you think are the prospects for cooperation between the President and Congress based on the election results in ’99? In other words, if you were a voter out there and you said, I want some issues addressed, no matter which issues they are, I want real issues addressed, what are the prospects for that? RON BROWNSTEIN: I think that voters are ration deciding – you know what I want – I want a Democrat for president and a Republican Congress and I want the Democrat president to keep their eyes on Republicans on these two or three issues, and I want the Republican Congress to keep their eye on the president on these two or three issues, and I’m happy there’s a stalemate. The more they get – in fact, if they have to agree, what I know is if they agree on something, it must be the right idea. So I wouldn’t ignore the fact that real voters are saying I want what we’ve got. BOB SCHRUM: What they want is a Democratic president. And what they’re going to get, if they give more power to the Republicans, I think, is a Republican Congress that’s trying to throw him out of office. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thank you all three very much.

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