Right Makes Might

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Clinton had called a postelection press conference for Wednesday afternoon, and as he prepared for it -- all morning and into the afternoon, requiring an hour delay -- he was bombarded with what a White House aide called "a thousand ideas," with conflicting analysis and advice and poll data. That helps explain Clinton's comment, when he finally entered the East Room and addressed the nation, about the message from voters: "I think they were saying two things to me. Or maybe three. They were saying -- let me -- maybe 300." For weeks, right through Wednesday morning, Stephanopoulos and some of Clinton's other leftish aides tried to spin the Republican onslaught as good news because "the voters still want change" -- ever the vague mantra of Clintonites -- just as the voters wanted change in 1992. Some aides tried to keep Clinton on that line, despite its obvious pitfall: the officeholders that voters cashiered were all Democrats. During his press conference, Clinton seemed by turns contrite and defiant. He held that voters agreed with him. Then, on specific issues, he conceded they did not. He kept trying out different analyses of what had befallen him and his party, piling one explanation upon another without pausing for breath until, out of the fog of words, it was clear that what Clinton said of Bush now was true of Clinton: he just didn't get it.

This was most evident on the front-burner issue of the growth and intrusiveness of government. Clinton claimed that he is already delivering a smaller government by cutting 70,000 federal jobs through his program of "Reinventing Government." One of his centrist advisers says Clinton "thought we were doing just fine by just downsizing government" through work-force reductions and regulatory reforms and "did not understand until this election" that the public is demanding more radical reductions that would lighten the tax burden. Another official added that even now, few White House officials understand how their overreaching on health reform has undermined Clinton's other accomplishments and tarred him as a Big Government liberal.

The Republicans promise to make smaller government a reality. But so far their promises don't add up. Gingrich vows that in the first 100 days of the Congress that takes office in January, he will ram through votes on the central tenets of the "Contract with America" that he and his House candidates signed last September on the Capitol steps. The document is heavy on popular goodies like tax cuts and new defense spending. It is light on specific cuts in federal spending that would finance these apple pies without swelling the budget deficit, pushing up interest rates and leaving the bill for America's grandchildren. The Republican answer to this quandary is a device called the Balanced Budget Amendment: a proposed constitutional amendment that purports to force across-the-board spending cuts. Despite its many practical problems, the amendment stands a decent chance of winning the two-thirds vote required for passage and transmittal to the states for ratification. Other key elements of the G.O.P. contract also look likely to pass: a measure that would let the President veto individual line items in the budget, a tax cut for capital gains on investments and some sort of tax cut for families with children.