The press will shriek doomsday. Leon Panetta will come of the White House and say, “Stick it.” Newt Gingrich will come out of the speaker’s office and say, “Stick it.” Everyone will cry like it’s the end of the world. Then we’ll get a deal. That’s the way it works; it’s called politics. Sure, the House freshmen won’t want to compromise. You come here to save the world. They’ll learn the hard way that you don’t get anything done ff you don’t compromise. The president will get lost in the labyrinth of the night tracking polls. But my hunch is that the White House’s surveys will soon tell Clinton that the people are mad at him for not producing an honest budget, and he will want a deal before Christmas.
Truth is, it’s not so hard. The consumer price index we use to estimate the cost-of-living increase for social security and Medicare is overstated. The Democrats know that. Cutting it by haft a point should be as easy as falling off a log. We’re only a few bucks apart on what people should pay for Medicare coverage of their doctors’ bills. The premium is now $46.10 – only a third of the true cost. Who pays the rest? All taxpayers. Wage earners pay two thirds of the premiums for the wealthiest, and we’re worried about raising them a fewbucks? It’s bizarre, but it’s also politics.
So we’ll wring our hands and predict calamity. Then Bob Dole will come by, jabbing that pencil into his dosed fist and chuckling the way he does, and he’ll say, “Got it all solved?” He’ll come back an hour later and smile: “Got it solved?” And then he’ll come back again and say, “This has to be done. We can’t fool around at Christmas when we’re also sending troops to Bosnia.” He’ll tell us that’s it, and we’ll get it resolved. Then, of course, the media will start in on “Who sold out?” politics has changed a lot since I started out in the Wyoming Legislature in 1965.
You used to be able to have a drink with a reporter and not read about it in the paper the next day. Reporters now just wait for a gaffe, a boneheaded statement, a profanity, then they chop your head off – and love it. But that’s not why I’m leaving here after 18 years. I’m leaving because I don’t want to spend another six years flying East from Wyoming every other weekend instead of being home with my family. The press is all lathered up that the Senate is losing its moderates. But there will still be a center. It’s an ever-renewable resource. I think it’s all going to work out now for a simple, solid reason: it always has.
The house was very different when I got here in 1973. The old bulls of the Democratic Party ran everything, but there was more give-and-take across the aisle. Jerry Ford was the Republican leader; I talked to him on the floor. In fact, I knew Ford better and had more dealings with him than I did with some of the hidebound Democrats on my side. Today, there’s this cadre of right-wing freshmen Republicans. Congress runs on compromise, but that’s not in their vocabulary. You never have the feeling they think you’re a colleague–they think you should be road kill.
They have an attitude about Washington; to them, it’s an evil city. (Although they do think it’s a nice place to shake down lobbyists for campaign cash.) They don’t want to touch anyone who’s been around here a while. They’re all about ideology now, and I think many Republicans are so in love with their tax cut that I doubt they can back away from it. If you give up the tax cut, however, you can begin balancing the budget.
The hard-core guys really wouldn’t mind shutting the government again. But there are just four basic issues here: cutting the deficit, Medicare, education and the environment. Even ffyou hate government, you probably know that the air and water are cleaner because of Washington. People are beginning to think we shouldn’t trash all of these programs.
True, the Democrats’ biggest failure is that we became the party of government of the government, by the government and for the government. We forgot the people. The Republicans’ big mistake is that they hate the government – but they’re forgetting the people, too.
Congress is changing, and most of the retiring Republicans are moderates, which is very troubling. The new breed is smart, and they’ve learned how to distract people. Part of it is the money. If I were running C-Span, I would put a caption underneath each member detailing how much they’ve gotten from different industries. You sit there in the conference committee and think, “Oh, that’s the one that got umpty-ump thousand from such-and-such an interest group.” It’s outrageous.
I promised myself when I got here that I wouldn’t spend my whole life on the Hill. And I woke up one recent morning and said, “Schroeder, you’ve gone from toilet-training your children to menopause in this place. You’re getting real close to being a lifer.” Unfortunately, the Washington I’m leaving is meaner than it was when I arrived – and that’s not good for any of us.
