Anyway, back to awful. Good crowds, like St. Louis, mean nothing in a fall campaign; bad crowds mean a lot. The crowds I saw were thin at best. The Dole staff tried to combat their candidate’s ancient, distant image by staging “Listening to America” seances, in which the nominee fielded marshmallowy encomiums from carefully selected audiences. BOB DOLE LISTENS stickers were distributed, which seemed wishful thinking. He didn’t, much. At a session near Detroit, he received three actual questions amidst a dozen or so pep talks from neo-desperate Republican officeholders. He blew all three. A woman asked how he’d counsel her children to be good Americans. He cited the 10th Amendment. Another woman asked what he’d do about health care. He talked about his tax cut. And an old Russell High School classmate named Ray Leonard asked what he’d do about Social Security. Dole reminisced about the Social Security deal he made in 1983, said it would keep the system solvent until 2012. “Then we’ll have to take another look at it.”
Afterward, Leonard wanted to give his old friend the benefit of the doubt. “I felt he answered it,” he said. Really? I asked. “Well, he didn’t give any specifics. I’m not worried about Social Security being there for me. I’m worried about my son. But that’s hard, I guess. No one’s talking about that.”
No one at all (except a few stray op-ed sorts). The press, which usually harps on the entitlement monster, has pretty much given both candidates a pass–in part, no doubt, because it’s futile to ask. Clinton and Dole are worse than ridiculous on the issue. Clinton continues to insist last year’s modest GOP Medicare proposals were a dagger pointed at Granny’s heart; Dole wants to roll back Clinton’s entirely responsible tax on Social Security payments to middle-class seniors. But the press reticence also has to do with a subterranean buzz: that these issues will, finally, be dealt with by a bipartisan commission, appointed by the next president soon after the election. Both Clinton and Dole (and, equally important–Newt Gingrich) have made vague noises in support of this. But will it actually happen?
“Oh, it’s got to happen,” says Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who cochaired the last bipartisan entitlements commission. Kerrey makes a compelling case: both the Clinton and Republican “balanced” budget schemes are phonies. Both have $60 to $80 billion in unspecified discretionary spending cuts. “To do it, you’re going to have to cut the space station, Energy, a lot of other things we’re never gonna do,” Kerrey says. “Hell, [Veterans Secretary] Jesse Brown got up before a committee and said he wouldn’t even make next year’s cuts, much less the big ones coming four years out. Clinton can’t find the money he needs for this year’s budget.”
Kerrey knows where the money is. He’s been liberated by his commission’s report. He can say what his colleagues can’t: that we won’t be able to run even the crudest, bare-bones government–and worse, we’ll tax our children into poverty–unless we get control of Medicare and Social Security. His commission, cochaired by former Missouri GOP senator John Danforth, produced what most reasonable people consider a proper road map back toward sanity. Medicare would be means-tested (that is, the more money you have, the less government support you’d get). Social Security would move slowly from the present, anachronistic system to a mandatory payroll-savings plan similar to the ones succeeding in Chile, Singapore and other developing countries. “We can ac- tually help people become wealthy [through invested savings],” Kerrey says.
But the Kerrey-Danforth Commission report vanished instantaneously. Why? And why should the next bipartisan commission be any different? “Well, we got caught in a revolution,” Kerrey says. His report was issued in December 1994; it didn’t have the Gingrich imprimatur. And the president, never likely to give his 1992 rival much support, was too battered to help even if he’d wanted to. In 1997, Kerrey argues, there may be a critical mass in favor of bipartisan action. May be, if two conditions are met. First, intense presidential leadership. Second–though Kerrey disagrees–a divided government. If Democrats control both the presidency and the Congress, Republicans will be too tempted to potshot the findings (especially after what Clinton did to them on Medicare). Bill Clinton, deeply concerned with his legacy to history and to his daughter’s generation, may be ready to provide the leadership. The irony is that if he beats Dole too badly, and drags in a Democratic Congress behind him, he may cripple the most important effort of his second term before it begins.
