Okay, the often-reliable Eric Pianin of the Washington Post has
a book review in the front section today on the new book by former
House Budget Chairman John Kasich that offers a skewed version of
history. First, while Kasich deserves a lot of the credit in the
successful fight to balance the budget, he never deserved quite SO
MUCH of the amount of credit he was given then and that Pianin
gives him today. Pianini writes: “Kasich was responsible for
translating into reality the GOP’s plans for balancing the budget,
reforming welfare and slashing taxes.” Not exactly. Kasich helped,
but the budget committee is merely responsible for a broad fiscal
outline. The nitty gritty is done by the Approps Committee and by
the Ways and Means Committee; with a large GOP majority, the Budget
Committee’s work was the easy part. Go back and look at how many
subcommittee hearings and how many pages of legislation Approps and
W&M produced in 1995, versus the much lighter number from the
Budget Committee, and you’ll see what I mean. The credit,
therefore, belongs more to Approps Chair Bob Livingston (my former
boss, who REALLY did major heavy lifting to cut $50 billion in
actual dollars in domestic discretionary spending in two years) and
W& M Chair Bill Archer — along with, on welfare, W& M key
member Clay Shaw of Florida, who far too long has been an unsung
hero and gotten far too little credit.
I would disagree with Pianin that Clinton joined the GOP in
“want(ing) to balance the budet, but the question was how to get
there.” That’s just bullfeathers.Clinton never once, all through
1995, submitted a balanced budget to Congress. All he did was
continually veto or otherwise block GOP legislation to accomplish
that task. In fact, the FY 1996 budget that Clinton gave Congress
in early 1995 called for $200 billion deficits as far as the eye
could see. That was his official, and ONLY, actual submission of
numbers. After that, all he did was say no and no and no again, all
while claiming to want a balanced budget, until he finally accepted
a plan the GOP gave him while at the same time warning that it
still was too draconian. In other words, he had his cake while
eating it too.
Pianin also said that the government shutdown in 1995 not only
was a “colossal blunder for Republicans” (generally accepted
wisdom, but at least semi-debatable, although it would take too
long to outline the debate here) that “hurt Bob Dole’s 1996
presidential campaign” (which is, sort of, true, but as an
explanation for Dole’s loss is way overblown) “and cost the GOP
dearly in the 1998 midterm House races — forcing Gingrich’s
deprture from Congress soon after.”
It is that last claim that is utterly tendentious nonsense. The
1995 shutdown had as much impact on the 1998 races as the 1940
pledge by FDR to “keep us out of war” had to do with the elections
of 1942. By 1998, the gov’t shutdown was just about the farthest
thing from voters’ minds. The loss of five House seats by the GOP,
in fact, had more to do with the Republicans’ SURRENDER to big
spending in the fall of 1998 than it did to the fight against big
spending that it waged in 1995. It also had to do, of course, with
the utterly hamhanded way Gingrich and company handled the early
part of the impeachment process, turning what had been a big
negative for Clinton into a net positive for the Dems because the
GOP looked as if it had bloodlust and a high degree of
prurience rather than a sober concern about the seriousness of
allegations of presidential perjury and obstruction of justice.
Indeed, the elections of 1998 were all about those two things:
1) The middle and left were turned off by the overeagerness for
impeachment—NOT, mind you, by the very thought of impeachment, nor
of punishing Clinton for misdeeds, but by the overzealous attitude
of Gingrich and Company, expressed in both word and deed, the deeds
including a rejection of what actually was a fairly reasonable
proposal from Gephardt to govern how the impeachment inquiry was to
be conducted. 2) The right was demoralized by the capitulation on
spending (which in turn was Gingrich’s trade-off to House GOP
moderates in return for holding their feet to the fire on EVERY jot
and tittle of his impeachment plans). Hence the result of a five
seat loss, when almost every pundit in America was predicting at
least a 15-seat GOP gain in the House that year, while Gingrich
predicted a 25-seat gain. In fact, if the 1995 government shutdown
were responsible for the loss, why did all the pundits not PREDICT
the loss for weeks leading up to the election?
Here I run the risk of self-aggrandizement, but feel I need to
establish the bona fides of the analysis above of the 1998
elections. You see, unless I misremember, and unless the Post’s own
Al Kamen missed it, Eric Pianin never saw the GOP loss coming back
in 1998. Nobody in print saw it (with the exception, very late in
the game, of, if I remember correctly, Mark Shields, who predicted
an exact net wash, no gains or losses for either party in the
House), EXCEPT YOURS TRULY. Kamen actually wrote about it the
Friday after the election, noting that I seemed to be the only
person in print in the entire country to get it right — and not
only right that the GOP would lose any seats at all, but the exact
number lost, namely five.
How did I get it right: By using, well in advance (as early as
late September of that year) the exact analysis above, regarding
the energizing of the Demo base and the moderate independents
combined with the demoralization of the GOP base by the spending
capitulation. And, to the point here, with regard to the Pianin
book review, to repeat: THOSE RESULTS HAD ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH
THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN BATTLE THREE WHOLE YEARS EARLIER; WAY TOO
MUCH HAD HAPPENED IN THE MEANTIME FOR VOTERS WITH SHORT MEMORIES TO
CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH THE 1995 EVENTS.
Why is this important? Because the myths about the
destructiveness of the 1995 shutdown continue to have profound
effects today, because politicians, unlike most voters, have long
memories — especially for useful myths. By swallowing the myth,
hook, line and sinker, that the entire idea of fighting for smaller
government in 1995 was disastrous for Republicans, today’s
congressional Republicans (and the majority thereof since the
spending binge began in 1998!) have given themselves cover to give
up the fight against big government and become K Street lackeys and
pork specialists. Deflate the myth of the supposed “Disaster of the
Shutdown,” and the GOP may well regain a collective spine.
Pianin is a good reporter. But his take on the history of all
this is not just mistaken, but (unintentionally, I believe)
damaging to conservatives’ causes.
