Dole was much better several nights later, when he gave the Republican response to Clinton’s speech. He had a hilarious prop, a map of the health-care bureaucracy the president was proposing. He talked sense. But the metaphoric transition from Clinton’s warm, optimistic and redemptive Baptist pulpit to Dole’s drafty, dour Kansas insurance office was jarring, uncomfortable. (The next morning, incoherent once more, Dole was flummoxed by Paula Zahn on CBS, unable to explain the difference between universal health-care “coverage” and “access.”) Taken together, these three appearances represent a particularly acute commentary on the State of the GOP: dire.
“We once were found and now we’re lost,” said William Bennett, whose impolitic candor is a rare virtue. “If somebody takes your ideas, begins to sound like you and tries to implement them, the only possible response is to say, ‘This is a very good thing. Well done’.” Bennett is not at all convinced that Bill Clinton will deal effectively with crime, “values” or welfare reform, but he knows a losing hand when he sees one: the president has the Republicans boxed on domestic policy. “They sound like we did 10 years ago,” says a White House aide, “when the best we could do was root for a recession.” Actually, the GOP’s situation is more frustrating than that: on crime, welfare reform and-especially-health care, Republicans will push the administration toward sanity but receive little credit for their contributions.
The crime bill Clinton signs this spring-after House liberals are dragged kicking and screaming into compliance–is largely Dole’s doing (Janet Reno’s fogbound, knee-jerk Justice Department has opposed more cops, more prisons and tougher sentences since day one). Welfare reform is on the agenda only because Daniel Patrick Moynihan–and House Republicans–forced it there. The final health-care package is more likely to reflect the GOP’s incremental insurance and malpractice reforms than the administration’s vast social-engineering project. But Bill and Hillary Clinton will be the heroes when the president inevitably backs off his veto threat and signs a bill that promises universal coverage as a “goal” but takes immediate action against what Moynihan has accurately called a “health insurance crisis”–guaranteeing portability and coverage for pre-existing conditions, reforming paperwork and malpractice law. Democrats will run for re-election in 1994 on the strength of the Clinton crime and health-care plans-welfare may have to wait a bit–and Republicans will be forced into defensive compound sentences: hey, those would’ve been awful bills, if not for us.
Well, there’s always foreign policy. Republicans are good at that-although the public could care less … until something goes wrong. Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary, probably couldn’t name five things he’d do as president, either, but he’s begun a steady plod toward the White House, picking Clinton apart on national-security matters–and he has the makings of a credible argument: Clinton isn’t comfortable in the world. He doesn’t know how or when to use force. The wan foreign-policy section in the State of the Union Message reinforces Cheney’s point, as does a little-noticed recent screw-up. Several months ago, as the Korean crisis intensified, Clinton was supposed to deliver a message: America wouldn’t allow North Korea to become a nuclear power. Instead, he said America wouldn’t allow North Korea to develop a nuclear bomb. The distinction was small, but telling: U.S. intelligence sources were convinced the Koreans already had the bomb, but no way to deliver it. Clinton’s message was supposed to be: don’t even think about finding one. This was dangerously sloppy. (Clinton would never be so imprecise on a domestic issue.) Once again, the absence of anyone who can think and speak with authority on foreign policy in this administration became painfully apparent, a bizarre and dangerous state of affairs.
Last week’s elevation of Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry to run the Pentagon is likely to add to Clinton’s long-term problems. Perry is said to be smart, tough and perceptive. He is respected as a mechanic. “He knows everything there is to know about the military,” says one national-security expert, “except how to use it.” He adds another quiet man to a silent sector: neither Perry nor Warren Christopher nor Anthony Lake is likely to step forward and explain the pain in the Ukraine if civil war erupts there and the Russian Army moves in–a scenario the intelligence community regards as probable. Indeed, it is more likely that Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger–or Cheney– will get to the cameras first to decry the “naivete” of Clinton’s Russia policy. If the president is seen as incompetent in the world, his ability to finesse the Republicans on domestic matters won’t count for much. His opponents won’t have to be very clever, either. They won’t need “new” ideas. They’ll only have to seem mature, dependable, prudent. Dick Cheney is waiting.
