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« Back to Is this a New, New Deal? main page    Transcript for: Is this a New, New Deal?Think Tank Transcripts: The Republican Congress: Is It a New Deal? ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, arecipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen,bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide throughbiotechnology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. MR. WATTENBERG: Hello. I'm Ben Wattenberg. More than six decadesago, President Franklin Roosevelt offered Americans a New Deal,ushering in a political era which changed America in fundamentalways. Some say the New Deal didn't end until January 4th, 1995, whenthe Republicans finally took over Congress. Does that really signalanother political earthquake? Joining us to sort through the conflict and the consensus areDavid Gergen, former special adviser to President Clinton andsoon-to-be visiting professor at the Terry Sanford Institute ofPublic Policy at Duke University; Catherine Rudder, executivedirector of the American Political Science Association; Walter Berns,resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professoremeritus at Georgetown University, author of 'After the People Vote';and former Republican Congressman Vin Weber, vice chair of EmpowerAmerica and senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the Universityof Minnesota. The topic before this house: The Republican Congress -- Is it anew New Deal? MR. WATTENBERG: Certain elections mark new political eras: the oneof 1800, 1860, 1896, and of course, Franklin Roosevelt's landslidevictory in 1932. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: (From videotape.) When there is no vision,the people perish. MR. WATTENBERG: Many historians say Roosevelt's New Deal was thegreatest political shift in America during this century. Devastatedby the Depression, the American people let the federal governmentassume vast new powers. Roosevelt instituted Social Security, the regulation of financialmarkets, unemployment insurance, and an array of jobs programs. Likeit or not, more government. In 1952, some Republicans hoped President Dwight Eisenhower wouldroll back the New Deal. Instead, he made it bipartisan. In 1964,President Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society. Building on theNew Deal, he expanded the federal writ, including a war on poverty,Medicare, civil rights, job training, new environmental and educationprograms. Like it or not, yet another big role for government. But by 1980, many Americans thought that Great Society programswere creating more problems than they were solving. Ronald Reaganpromised to get the government off our backs, but he was oftenstymied by Democratic opposition in Congress. Then on November 8th, 1994, Republicans swept into power,capturing a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in40 years. Newt Gingrich, the new speaker of the House, has promisedto complete the Reagan revolution by dramatically cutting the sizeand scope of the federal government. Within the first hundred days, according to the 'Contract withAmerica,' Republicans plan to vote on welfare reform, a tougher crimebill, and a balanced budget amendment, with lots more to come afterthe contract is dealt with. Let's go around the horn once quickly. Vin Weber, is this really anew New Deal? Is it of that magnitude? MR. WEBER: I think that the New Deal was rejected in thiselection, and probably the best way to see that is not just throughthe election results, but by looking, in my view, at the health caredebate, how the American public reacted to the Clinton health careproposal, and then what happened in the fall elections. What you saw was really a rejection, in my view, of the New Dealapproach to problem solving, a rejection of centralization ofauthority, a rejection of bureaucracy. That seems to me to be anenduring characteristic of our politics today. Whether or not it means a realignment in a partisan sense, Ithink, is an open question yet. And I do think you have to go backand look at the 1992 election, only two years ago, actually, andremember that at that time the voters rejected the Republicansbecause they didn't think they were activist enough in solvingproblems. So the American people are saying, we don't like traditional NewDeal, big-government problem-solving. They're not saying, we want apassive government that lets problems simply fester. MR. WATTENBERG: Walter Berns. MR. BERNS: What is different, I think this time than in the past,is the fact that parties don't occupy the same importance as in thepast. And one doesn't know exactly what's going to happen. Is theRepublican Party the Republican Party it was in the past; theDemocrat Party it once was? And are the people loyal to parties, asthey were in the past? That's a question. And essentially what your question is is whether this election issimilar to the elections of 1800, 1860 and essentially 1936 -- thatwas the really decisive Roosevelt election. And it may well be. Itmay well be. We'll see. MR. WATTENBERG: David Gergen. MR. GERGEN: Well, it's certainly a new day. And I think it's thebrightest day for Republicans, and for conservatives especially,since Ronald Reagan was elected. This is really a second wave ofReaganism, I think, that's sweeping our politics. And I must say, theRepublicans ran a very brilliant campaign and are off to a very faststart, so they may fulfill the promise of this new era. But whether it's a serious turn in our politics, whether itrepresents a new era, I think I would agree with Vin and with Walterthat I don't think we know the answer to that. I think theRepublicans have the opportunity to make it that, but a couple ofthings. One is, there is enormous volatility in our politics right now,just as there is in almost every industrialized nation. Theconservatives need to remember, after all, in Canada that theConservative Party went from 151 seats to 2 seats like that, in oneelection. And our politics are whipping around right now. And in part, ourpolitics are whipping around because we have these very deep-seatedproblems that are driven in part by the new economy, where themajority of our workers now find themselves. And to go to Vin's point, if Republicans can address those issues,I think they have the chance, just as the Democrats still do, tobecome a long-term majority party. But if they are unable to addressthose issues successfully, I think our politics will remain volatile. MR. WATTENBERG: Catherine Rudder. MS. RUDDER: Well, I agree with the whole panel. (Laughter.) MR. WATTENBERG: We can all go home now. MS. RUDDER: No -- well, not quite. This is an opportunity for theRepublicans. And if we're looking for stability over time, I think itwill be very hard for the Democrats to recapture Congress for sometime to come, and that is some stability and some major change. Whether there has been a realignment in the American electorate --not yet; there might be. I think I would ask Dave whether he thinks the 'Contract forAmerica' possibly does address the question you raised, that is, thefundamental economic questions, and I wonder if it does. MR. GERGEN: I think it addresses a preliminary question, and thatis that many Americans want government to be more efficient, and theywant it to be -- they want to be able to trust government more thanthey do now. Trust in the government is at extraordinarily lowlevels. And until that happens, I think Republicans can restore that trustby doing the kind of things they started doing on the first day, andthat is to clean up Congress, to make Congress smaller. I think theDemocrats missed that opportunity. You know, one of the turning points now, looking back over thelast two years, was the day that Tom Foley and Dick Gephardt andGeorge Mitchell went to Little Rock during the transition and talkedPresident Clinton out of the promise to reduce the size of Congressby 25 percent, and talked him out of essentially pursuing campaignfinance reform as a major, major initiative. Had the Democrats done that, I think they could have maintainedsome of their momentum. But I think Republicans now have thatopportunity. But those kind of reforms do not address the underlyingeconomic issues. MS. RUDDER: Right. MR. GERGEN: And that is -- I'm not sure yet how the Republicansare going to get at that. I don't think the contract fully addressesthat. MR. WATTENBERG: What do the Republicans have to do to make thecase that they are doing something? MR. WEBER: Ben, if I can build a little bit on David's answer toCathy's question -- and I agree with that. I think the contract isbasically just the very first step. The Republicans are demonstratingthrough the contract that they are not what the American peoplerejected. The American people have become, as we all know, in the lastseveral years, very cynical about both parties, about allinstitutions of government. And the contract was sort of anextraordinary means of saying that we're not all the same; you know,it's not going to be business as usual. But it really doesn't say anything, at least to me, about agoverning philosophy of Republicanism that addresses the kind ofproblems that Dave Gergen talks about. However, I think, as aRepublican -- if you want to look optimistically, I'd look atGingrich's speech in accepting the speakership. He said a veryimportant thing, really an historic thing, saying, after we do thecontract, he has two goals. We're going to pursue a balanced budget,and we're going to reform the liberal welfare state and replace itwith something else, which he refers to as an 'opportunity society.'And then, remarkably, said -- MR. WATTENBERG: You are one of the original formers and members ofthe Conservative Opportunity Society, with Gingrich and -- MR. WEBER: We formed it in 1983. It would sort of lead to thisday, we hoped. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. WEBER: But the remarkable thing that he said is that thesecond of those goals was more important to him than the first,meaning replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society wasmore important even than balancing the budget. That's unusual for a Republican. And to accomplish that, he isgoing to have to come up with -- and they are going to have to comeup with a philosophy of problem-solving that involves government atsome level and involves leveraging resources at some level and sortof rejects an old-line Republican view that this simply is not theprovince of the public sector. MR. BERNS: Let me add something to this. One of the signs that maybe visible in the future that this is indeed the kind of realignmentelection, that we have a new New Deal here, is the fact that what isbeing discussed in politics is no longer what was being discussedbefore. It's now going to be something else, and that's what we'llhave to see here. Have I made that point clear? I mean, take the election of 1860.From that time on, we were no longer arguing about the extension ofslavery. That issue was settled, and the Civil War settled it, andthe party competition from that time on was no longer what it was.And the same sort of thing can be said after 1930, '32, '36. Incidentally, one point I ought to have made at the outset was, ifthis is a realignment election, it's the first realignment electionthat didn't occur in a presidential year. And we'll see about that. MR. WATTENBERG: Catherine, you're a student of the Congress. Isthat right? Is this a congressional government we're getting intonow? Is Bill Clinton becoming irrelevant to the process? MS. RUDDER: The president is never irrelevant. And it's verydifficult, as I'm sure Vin will remind us all, for Congress to leadas an institution. We're really talking about 435 -- in the case ofthe House -- individual members. And one of the reasons I think NewtGingrich has been so brilliant in his leadership is he's given asense of coherence to his side. And for a while, he will be able tobenefit from that. But over the long haul, I think we can see some splintering thatinevitably has to go on, because members have to respond to their ownconstituencies and not just the leadership of the party. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, let me ask you a question, because you and Iover this last weekend were having some discussions about this, whichI wrote about. The idea that Gingrich and company, the Republicans,can have some unilateral control without Bill Clinton is verycomplicated, but very potent. I wonder if you as a former congressmanand a student of Congress could describe what we're talking about,because it seems to me that gives one man or a small part of oneparty enormous leverage. MR. WEBER: As long as the agenda is reducing the size and scope ofgovernment -- and we've just talked about the fact that that isn'tthe totality of the agenda, but for now that's the agenda -- yeah,the House Republicans, if they act, as I put it to you, Ben, withnerve and discipline, can really accomplish a great deal of theiragenda through the appropriations process. At the end of the day, the government cannot spend money unlessthe House of Representatives votes to spend it. And as long asthey're willing to use the appropriations process to zero outagencies that they want to eliminate and simply hold firm, at the endof the day, the president and the Senate really are going to have togo along, because the alternative is simply fundamentally to shutdown the entire government. MR. WATTENBERG: If they decide to defund the Corporation forPublic Broadcasting, which funds the public broadcasting system andother public broadcasters, if they dig in their heels and do it,there is nobody that can undo it. MR. WEBER: That's exactly right. And understand what will happen.The president will be sent a bill that includes funding not just forthe Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but I believe that thatappropriation is part of the HUD Independent Agencies bill. So you'll have all the funding for the programs of the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development, and you'll have NASA and you'llhave all these other things. And then where is the line for theCorporation for Public Broadcasting, it will simply say zero. Thepresident, if he doesn't like that, has the alternative of vetoingthe whole bill, in which case there is no funding for anything in thebill. And Republican presidents found the opposite side of this coinwhen the Democrats controlled the Congress. The Democrats would sendthem bills that spent too much money or reflected differentpriorities than the president. Us young, inexperienced members ofCongress said, 'Veto it, shut the government down.' Of course, at theend of the day, they couldn't do that. MR. WATTENBERG: Dave, does this process and what we're seeing nowmake President Clinton irrelevant or somewhat irrelevant to theprocess? I mean, if they have unilateral control to cut out programs,never get to the president's desk, does he become sort of a, youknow, maybe a syndicated columnist or something, and comment on it?(Laughter) MR. GERGEN: Absolutely not. Beyond the powers that he retains inthe foreign affairs area, Ben, he can rally the country on some ofthese issues that haven't yet been squarely faced. Just on the issuesthat don't spend a lot of money, whether it be public broadcasting orthe arts, you know, there's going to be a hornet's nest of oppositionto that. There are going to be a lot of folks in this country who aregoing to oppose that. And I don't think we have yet faced up to the-- MR. WATTENBERG: Including a lot of -- MR. GERGEN: Moderate Republicans. And indeed, some conservativeRepublicans. MR. WATTENBERG: And conservative Republicans. MR. GERGEN: I think that's right. MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, you go out on the speaking circuit and -- MR. BERNS: I have my doubts about that. MR. GERGEN: Well, we'll see. MS. RUDDER: We're talking in the larger picture, though. Itstrikes me that you have to keep in mind that there's the Senate,which will surely be a cooling mechanism to the House, and will putback in funding, maybe -- perhaps not in an individual case, but inmany cases, they will. And there will be negotiations between theSenate and the House. And in addition, there are many members of the House, Republicanmembers of the House, who simply won't be able to tolerate some ofthe spending cuts being proposed. MR. GERGEN: Let me come back to the more fundamental point, Ben,because we're going to have some preliminary arguments now overdiscretionary programs. But once the Republicans pass, if they do,the balanced budget amendment -- and the president indicatedapparently that he would not fight that, we're going to have somemuch, much larger questions in this country about whether the countryis prepared to take the kind of cuts in the entitlement programs thatare going to be necessitated by a balanced budget amendment. And whether the country is willing to roll back these programs, orknock the props out of programs such as Medicare, or indeed SocialSecurity, down the road, I'm not at all clear that our politics haveyet reached the point where people are willing to do what it takes. MR. WEBER: I just recently heard Leon Panetta reacting to thebalanced budget amendment, saying that we should have a plan tobalance the budget in five years. I was on the Budget Committee for a while, and I retain somefamiliarity with that. The decisions that we as a society will haveto make to balance the budget in five years absolutely will require aradical transformation of the way government does business. And it'snot possible in my view, Dave -- and I'd be interested in knowing ifyou agree with this -- not possible to do it without touching SocialSecurity and Medicare in a very substantial way. MR. GERGEN: I don't think you can do it. And I think that SenatorPete Domenici has made it clear that the programs that theRepublicans are now contemplating, as serious and significant as theyare in changing our politics, go only about 40 percent of the waytowards solving the problem if you really want to balance the budget.I think we should balance the budget. I think we should be moving inthat direction, but I don't think we ought to kid ourselves about howradical the changes and how you have to go after Social Security andMedicare. MR. WATTENBERG: But the cuts that would be necessary in thoseprograms to lead you that way are far less than Draconian. I mean,you can just reduce the cost of living adjustment by, what, 1percent, and you get enormous billions of dollars from it. MR. WEBER: I agree with that, Ben. I think that making cuts inSocial Security -- this is one of the ironic things about this wholeargument -- this third rail of American politics, as they call theSocial Security that we can't touch really can be reduced at a farless disruptive impact on people's lives than some of the otherprograms that we're going to eliminate -- cutting welfare, stuff likethat, because, you know, when you send out 40 million checks everysingle month, very small adjustments in those checks add up tobillions and billions of dollars in savings. But up to now, any approach to Social Security at all has been sopoliticized that people can't cut one penny out of one check. MS. RUDDER: But I would add to your point about the difficulty ofreducing the deficit. We have to add now another 200 or so billiondollars for tax cuts. I mean, we are -- even if one can make some ofthe decisions you're talking about, Ben, it seems to me this is justan enormous task for Congress. MR. WATTENBERG: Walter, what is the history of this thought thatCongress can govern? Didn't we have an era in American life whenCongress was in fact more important than a president? MR. BERNS: Well, yeah, sure, and that led to Woodrow Wilson'scampaign to revise the Constitution and increase the power of thepresidency. And to some extent, of course, he did. The presidency isno longer what it once was. But that period where Congress was really so important was aperiod without the kind of political problems, I think, that we face-- MR. WATTENBERG: What was that time frame, and who were the people? MR. BERNS: Well, the latter part of the 19th century, extendinginto a few years in the 20th, I suppose. MS. RUDDER: That's correct. MR. BERNS: And you had very powerful speakers of the House at thattime. And this is the sort of thing that disturbed someone likeWoodrow Wilson, who wanted a kind of parliamentary system, led by --MR. WATTENBERG: And these were the speakers that ended up with theirnames on those congressional office buildings. MR. BERNS: Yeah, sure. MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, like Cannon and Longworth. MR. WEBER: What a -- to step back for a second -- what aremarkable turn of events that the man who has probably been the mostconfrontational, harsh, bomb-throwing critic of the Congress in ourlifetimes, Newt Gingrich, is now maybe in the process of restoringthe Congress to a position that it had prior to the turn of thecentury. I don't know if that's going to happen or not. I'll tell you one thing that he's already done, and this is purelypolitical, it's not policy-wise. But he has transformed theRepublican Party, which has been a presidentially focused party allof my life, into a congressionally focused party. Republicans aroundthe country are far more interested in what's happening in theCongress today than they are in who's going to be nominated forpresident. And that's brand new in the Republican Party. MR. BERNS: Yeah, but supposing we get a Republican president in'96, or as a result of the '96 election. What effect will that haveon Newt Gingrich's -- MR. WEBER: Well, it depends on who it is. MR. WATTENBERG: It might be Newt Gingrich. MR. BERNS: That's possible, but not likely. I do think, if thereis a Republican president, whoever he is, it's going to have theeffect of refocusing our attention on the White House. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask this. You know, when the New Deal camealong, it really changed life for everyday Americans. They hadsuddenly pensions, they had unemployment insurance. I mean, therewere big changes. Let's say this Gingrich-led Republican revolution actuallyhappens. How will Mr. and Mrs. America, Joe and Jill Sixpack, howwill their life be changed in everyday terms, because that's what apolitical revolution should do? MR. WEBER: I think that the answer to that question is, despitethe $200 billion problem you talked about, the Republicans cannotdecide that they're not going to cut taxes, at least somewhere. Idon't know if they have to do everything they promised in thecontract. But I guess I'm old-fashioned politically. I don't thinkyou can only deal out pain and sacrifice to people. And the only way the Republicans in this revolution can reallymake large numbers of Americans feel right now that they arebenefitting from it is through the tax system, whether it's the childtax credit that they've talked about or the president's idea ofdeducting college tuition, which Speaker Gingrich has said they oughtto look favorably on or at least give a hearing to. They have to dosome of those things, it seems to me. MR. WATTENBERG: Cathy, is that of a magnitude of Social Securityand unemployment insurance and those kind of things? MS. RUDDER: No, it's not, but it's important. And I would say,notice the tax cut he mentioned. He didn't mention capital gains taxcut or depreciation for business investment tax cut. MR. WATTENBERG: Shame on you. MR. WEBER: I'm for it, though. MS. RUDDER: I'm sure you are. MR. WATTENBERG: Money for the rich, right. MS. RUDDER: But instead, he mentioned the child tax credit, and Ithink a child tax credit would go a way toward helping averageAmericans think that the Republican Party is doing something forthem, even though that may be relatively small. It's family-oriented.It's a credit, so it's fairer. It's across the board; everybody getsthe same amount, which is a really smart move on the part, I think,of the Republican leadership, to propose such a thing. And so I think that can have an impact on the average person, evenif it's relatively small. I think it really does say, we care aboutyour family, we know it's tough, it's tough to raise children. Andwe're going to -- and it's not just for rich people. MR. WATTENBERG: Walter, how about this? Let's hear your view. Howdoes everyday life change in America? MR. BERNS: Let me answer your question by suggesting that's a goodway of posing the original question. It's a lot harder to identifynow than it was, say, in 1936 what is going to come out of thisalleged revolution. It was easy in 1936 to identify what peopleexpected if Roosevelt were to succeed. Now it's not so easy, is it? I also have the feeling that there is a great deal of unfocuseddiscontent in the country that really has not been involved -- exceptwith the crime issue -- involved in Washington politics. People havethe sense that there is something seriously wrong with this country,and -- MR. WATTENBERG: Might it be that the change this engenders, ifit's successful, is really more psychological than political? I mean,it says to people, you know, government isn't big daddy. It's stillthere, it's still the safety net, but you've got to figure out how todo it yourself. And that would be a change away from what people --some people claim has been ailing us. MR. BERNS: Well, one way of stating that is, people would like toget control again of the education that takes place in their localschools. Is that a political issue now? There is a great deal ofdiscontent about education in this country, a great deal ofdiscontent about the conditions of life in this country, a great dealof discontent about these social things, the condition of the family.You know, when -- well, I won't go through the statistics here, butthey are alarming. Are these things going to be touched by this -- MR. WEBER: I think that's the right question. I think what you'retalking about is -- if I can give an advertisement for the HumphreyInstitute -- the issue that we're looking at there is the dissolutionof community, which seems to me to be what Walter is referring to.And I think that there are certain governmental impacts on that, butin many ways, that's not an issue that can be reached totally bygovernment action. But I think that's what people have to look at. Yeah, there is amovement in the country, the citizenship movement, that's gainingconsiderable force. It has people on the left, people on the right,the communitarian movement, talking about, in a non-governmental way,how do we rebuild community close to where people live and wherepeople actually relate to the society around them? I think that that is an important part of our future, and it's anon-governmental approach to problem-solving. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Catherine Rudder, David Gergen,Vin Weber, and Walter Berns. And thank you. Please send your questions and comments to: NewRiver Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Suite 1050, Washington, DC, 20036.We can be reached via E-mail at thinktv@aol.com. And do check out ournew home page on the World Wide Web at www.thinktank.com. For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER:This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, inassociation with New River Media, which are solely responsible forits content. 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, bringing better,healthier lives to people worldwide through biotechnology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. BEN WATTENBERG Return toThinkTank Online Home Page Think Tank ® is a Registered Trademark of BJW, Inc. All Content © Copyright 1995 New River Media, Inc. 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