Who is to blame? - campaign finance and political rhetoric - Column

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

On the program 60 Minutes, a half-dozen retiring legislators submitted to friendly interrogation inquiring into the reason for their decision to give it all up, go home. Most of their complaints we are familiar with. Unquestionably the most searing is the business about money: Senator Alan Simpson reported that a senator has to raise a minimum of $10,000 every week, which is a heavy load. When you consider 10 thou times 52 times 6 that adds up to over $3 million -- which is only one-third of what retiring Senator Paul Simon had to spend to get back into the Senate.

Is that situation inherently corrupt? Not a bad question. One senator put it this way. He gets back to his hotel at 10 P.M. after a hard day of electioneering and he has twenty telephone messages, all of them from strangers. But one name he does recognize, because that goodbody had donated $1,000 to the senator's campaign. The senator has the energy left, at that time of night -- after such a day -- to make one phone call, so whom does he call? Right. And even if it happened that the caller's message was, Please vote in favor of Measure X, and the senator goes out and votes against Measure X, it still remains that the only person who got through to him was a Measure X enthusiast, and enthusiasms have a way of communicating themselves, not least when fueled with thousand-dollar bills. Is there a way to stop all that? No, not under our system. It could be changed only by going to a parliamentary system on the British model.

But a less conventional complaint of some of the retiring gentlemen had to do with the under-celebrated art of compromise. People just don't understand, one man put it, that politics is -- you guessed it, the art of compromise. The gentlemen being interviewed were too polite to say it in exactly as many words, but what they were criticizing was the Gingrich House. To use bald figures, one had the impression that if Gingrich would simply give up on tax reform, he'd get substantially what he wanted in the way of tax reform.

And of course compromise is the civilized approach to most controversies, but the operative word in that sentence is "most." And the entrenched mood of the congressmen who do not wish to compromise with Mr. Clinton is reinforced by the rhetoric used by Mr. Clinton and his satellites. It could be that your call to reduce medical expenses by $270 billion in seven years could be adulterated a little, say to $250 billion in eight years, that kind of thing -- do it, take a deep breath, and sigh resignedly over the rough nature of democratic compromise.

But to engender receptivity for the compromise mode requires rhetorical adaptation at the other end, and this President Clinton is ostentatiously declining to do. He speaks instead of Republicans wishing to cut medical services for the aged and the indigent, using words appropriate to a situation in which Congress was planning to sequester a million people every year in a huge federal compound and let them die there of starvation and exposure. Slowly.

Even the most dogged defenders of state welfarism here and there break under the strain. The New Republic's editorialist, remarking on the success Mr. Clinton is having with his phony scare tactics, lays the final blame on the voting public. "The only people being fundamentally irresponsible in the recent -- and continuing -- budget battle are the American people. They are, to borrow a phrase from our colleague Michael Kinsley, big babies. A year ago, in a realigning election, voters ushered in a Republican Congress that had pledged, in complete candor, to balance the federal budget. In the days before that election, voters backed Republicans over Democrats by a 2.8 percent margin. Then the Republicans made a fatal error: they tried to deliver on their promise. The result is that in the last few months, the party positions have been completely reversed. The Democrats now lead by 2.4 percent."

But then whom do you blame for the people's immaturity? The editorialist suggests it is the people themselves who are to blame, for wanting one thing and authorizing another. "Speaker Gingrich, for all his failings, is the first American politician actually to confront the public with the reality. For that, he gets an approval rating of 27 percent." Any effort to bail out the American people for this act of irresponsibility would have to reason to the people's ignorance for believing what their President has been telling them, six times a day, for the past six weeks. If the voters believe Clinton is correct -- that passage of the Contract with America will result in agony and death for uncounted hundreds of thousands of Americans -- then they are right to say no to Mr. Gingrich.

And the problem becomes: What to do about demagogues in the White House? Vote them out of office? Yes, but what will inform the voters that that is the thing to do?