Republicans have done awfully well in statewide and municipal elections around the country in the past couple of years. But as a national entity they are beginning to resemble in some respects the Democratic Party in the heyday of its explosive and unforgiving ideological struggles. Internal tensions that have existed for decades between wings of the party and which periodically reappear in new incarnations, for a time seemed to have been resolved. But they show up again now in talk of “takeovers” of state parties by the far right, in irreconcilable and profoundly felt differences on basic social, cultural and religious issues. For now the many faces of the Republican Party create a problem, not a free ride, for Clinton and his party. Different strokes for different (GOP) folks – that is what is required of them, and they don’t always get it right. When they don’t, they harm themselves, not the Republican opponent.
The first rule for the Democrats in the White House, whose words are inevitably amplified mightily by virtue of where they’re speaking from, ought to be: be leery of making generalizing attacks; the Republicans you are really aiming at won’t care at all (in fact, they’ll probably enjoy the attack and turn it into stupendous direct-mail profits), and the ones you hit by mistake could cost you dear. For example, there appears to be a really fanatic group of Republicans in Arkansas who hate Clinton and are passionately dedicated to ruining him. They are who they are, however. They are not Bob Dole or Nancy Kassebaum or John Chafee or innumerable other Republican officeholders. Goaded on by the sting of assaults from their single-minded tormentors at home, the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton and some of those who speak for them tend recurrently to lash out indiscriminately and with a surprising, often misplaced, rancor at Republicans in general – “the” Republicans, whom they accuse as a collectivity of the most vile, irresponsible conduct.
Yes, I know that this practice works both ways and that we are not talking about some pathetic, innocent victim to be thought of as the poor little Republicans. My point is that this generalizing type of assault has two real disadvantages for the Clinton presidency. The first disadvantage is that on all the business the Clinton government conducts, foreign and domestic, it needs the cooperation of at least some Republicans and usually more than just some. Given the broad spectrum of views from left to right of the Democratic Party at the moment and given Clinton’s particular place on that spectrum, he cannot conceivably govern with the help of his own party colleagues alone. Nor, except on a few distinctive issues, can he expect Congress’s Democrats by themselves either to muster the unity or provide the votes to get his business done. And in any case, he needs a wider consensus for much of the program he hopes to enact and institutionalize, as well as for any foreign policy that is to be successful.
Forthis reason casual charges of malevolence and bad faith leveled against the other party as a whole can have a cost. Though in recent days the White House has taken to speaking well of some of those Republicans who were trying to craft an alternative to its health bill, over the months it recurrently blasted Republicans as elitist obstructionists who care not at all about people’s well-being or health. But Clinton needs the help of some of the very folks whose motives the White House thus questioned. If those who speak from the Democratic White House need a general rule to follow in this matter, here is one: try not to say anything meaner about the Republicans in Congress than you say about Kim Il Sung, since he is considerably worse than they are.
The second main disadvantage of careless, hostile generalizing about the Republicans is that it can become a delusion and a crutch. This was true, for a time, anyway, in relation to the health-care bill and has been true of other Clinton White House projects. When such projects get in trouble, either in Congress or with the public, there is a temptation to blame the devilishly clever and malicious manipulations of the other political party. But sometimes, importantly, thinking this is merely evasion of reality, a way of explaining out of existence genuine problems with some policy or proposal that has got into trouble. I believe that the delayed reaction of the Clinton White House to the difficulties facing its original health plan was in large part due to this habit of mind. The bill could only be in trouble, the supposition went, because some Republicans of bad faith, acting at the behest of the insurers and others, were sabotaging it. The belief that that was the whole story got in the way of undertaking the necessary critical scrutiny of the bill.
I’m not saying all or even most Republicans come into the public-policy arena brimming with good will and a sacred commitment to doing the right thing at any political cost – far from it. I’m not even saying that some of the Clinton White House’s darkest mutterings and suspicions are not true. I’m only saying that there are Republicans aplenty there for the administration to work with, Republicans they need, who can help and want to help, and that the politically shrewdest and most devastating thing Clinton could do to the GOP would be to get the good of them for his purposes. ..MR.-
I made two mistakes in my last column. Clare Boothe Luce withdrew from the ambassadorship to Brazil in the Senate uproar over a remark she made following confirmation. The Gore-Perot debate took place Nov. 9, 1993.
