But the early outlook is not promising. While Clinton has wandered the Asian Pacific and worried over a new national-security team, the real issue of the second term is likely to be the future of entitlements for the elderly–the $650 billion-a-year question Clinton deftly dodged during the campaign. And though the president is searching for a Republican to put in the cabinet, he shouldn’t skimp on cultivating Lott, who as Senate majority leader has eclipsed Newt Gingrich as the pre-eminent GOP player on the Hill. Without the Mississippian, Clinton will make little progress on the most important domestic issues of the next four years–Medicare, Social Security and welfare.
Nothing is more critical–and politically charged–than entitlements. Consider Medicare. The program’s fund to pay hospital bills will be bankrupt in five years. A decade after that, when the oldest of the baby boomers reach 65, enrollment in Medicare will explode. Saddled with unfunded liabilities, Social Security could also be in crisis by that time. Clinton wants to dump the whole question onto a bipartisan commission sometime next year (page 31). But Lott is furious about the Democrats’ “Mediscare” campaign–Clinton repeatedly claimed that the GOP would slash the program rather than trim its rate of growth. He says the president must step up to the issue by himself first.
“Mediscare” has been a potent weapon for both parties. Republicans used it to help gut the Clinton health plan in 1993-94, telling seniors that the administration would jack up premiums, prohibit choice of doctors and close community hospitals. Last year the GOP gave Clinton a perfect opening for political payback. It tied $270 billion in reduced Medicare spending (slowing annual rates of increased outlays from 11 percent to 7 percent) to a $245 billion tax break for the affluent. The move helped Clinton become the first Democrat since Truman to win senior-rich Arizona and the first since Mondale to carry Florida. Raw Republican feelings have made the Lott-Clinton honeymoon short-lived. “He’s misled people. He’s misinformed them. It’s been disingenuous,” Lott says. Before there’s any discussion of a commission, Lott says, Clinton has to admit that Medicare’s problems are far more serious than the president has acknowledged.
Commissions have a spotty history. They do offer political cover for elected officials to take on difficult issues. The independent panel on military-base closures, for example, worked because Congress was required to vote yes or no on the commission’s entire package of recommendations–no amendments or special pleading allowed. That was also the secret to the success of the 1983 commission chaired by Alan Greenspan that staved off Social Security’s insolvency. But other blue-ribbon panels haven’t fared as well. The 1994 Kerrey-Danforth commission declared entitlements “unsustainable.” But it was only an advisory panel, and the president ignored it. The experience left one of the cochairmen a nonbeliever. “Without political leadership, commissions are traps,” says former GOP senator John Danforth.
There will be no commission for welfare reform. But there will surely be a fight. Clinton has promised to try to soften the bill’s impact on legal immigrants and disabled children. The White House says it isn’t retreating from the central objective of the bill, which is to move welfare recipients onto payrolls. But according to a leak to The New York Times, Clinton wants fixes totaling $13 billion–about a quarter of the $55 billion the bill is projected to save. Republican leaders say they’ll never agree to that. “I don’t want them fiddling with that bill,” Lott says.
A senior White House aide describes Clinton’s relationship with Lott as “circumspect, but with potential.” It’s potential that the president will need to develop. Bob Dole is gone. Gingrich is hobbled by ethics investigations. If the legacy-sensitive Clinton wants a real place in history, he will have to face up to entitlement reform. And Trent Lott will be the man to see.
