GOP, White House can find common ground on reform

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 30, 1995 | by Josette Shiner, | Ralph Z. Hallow

Speaker Newt Gingrich sometimes is portrayed as a partisan powder keg, but in an interview he discusses how Republicans and Clintonites can cooperate without compromising values or blurring ideologies.

Question: President Clinton has said that, with the change in the old order in the Congress, that the logjam that existed over new ideas may be broken. He also has said that you and he, sharing an interest in ideas, can now lead the country in a productive debate, provided you are interested in leading rather than seeking partisan credit.

Answer: If you look at my role in GATT, NAFTA, in the space station, helping Russia and in the Mideast process, I'm clearly more interested in leading than in partisanship. I would have hoped the president would say, if Gingrich is interested in leading, then we have an option to be partners in solving things, not competitors.

I don't see any automatic reason to compete over good ideas. Ideas ought to be an effort. How do you replace the culture of poverty with the culture of productivity? Or provide better health care with lower cost and greater choice for senior citizens? I would hope that the president and I could have a dialogue - rather than a debate - and that as a result of that the country could actually have an opportunity to make progress without regard to partisanship.

Q: It is fascinating that some Democrats who are interested in change see the Republican victory as a possible positive step, in the sense that the old, entrenched power structure in Congress - the one that blocked any new ideas - has been opened up. That real change is finally possible, regardless of partisan interests.

A: No question that the power structure that rose between Vietnam and Watergate and the present had ... ossified into a straitjacket. That is not partisan or ideological - these guys and their staffs had networks of power and networks of relationships and habits and things that they just weren't going to break for a mere president. They'd ignored Nixon, Ford, Carter. They had blocked Reagan and beaten Bush ... and they were quite prepared to stop the president.

The most important single event in Clinton's first two years was that after he was elected, [Senate Majority Leader George J.] Mitchell, [Speaker Thomas S.] Foley and [House Majority Leader Richard] Gephardt flew down to Little Rock and had dinner with him. They set down the fact: Don't be a Jimmy Carter; don't take on the Democrats in Congress; we'll carry your water - and by the way, we'll define the water.

I've always thought that's the crisis of the Democratic president. That a guy like Clinton - he's a very smart man, and he knows as much about Kafka and [quality management guru W. Edwards] Deming as I do, or more. And [Vice President Al] Gore certainly knows more about communications technology and has a lot of good ideas about reinventing government and rethinking how you electronically would do things. But they then run into [this block].

Generationally, Gore and the president and I are actually fairly close together. We're all able to talk to each other, pretty club-around-guys-at-school-type people. You know, you sit around and have a bull session, you have big ideas, you talk about books you've read. We are all three of us into the world market, the information age. My guess is that they're both very familiar with [Alvin] Toffler's works. Clinton said after one of our recent meetings that when Gore, he and I are at the State of the Union, it'll be the heaviest collection of policy wonks since Woodrow Wilson gave a speech by himself.

Q: So how does that work practically?

A: In dealing with the president and the Democrats, I suggest that there are three boxes. There's the box we know we're going to disagree on. But let's not get trapped as if this were the only box.

There's a second box, areas of potential agreement, of what could turn out to be pretty big things. I'm encouraged, for example, that he's agreed to meet with the governors on this welfare thing. If the president decides to be more like a governor and less like a national Democrat, you could suddenly have a breaking of the logjam of welfare reform, that would decentralize welfare back to the states, in a way that's breathtaking.

And that's certainly where I'm at. And I get the sense that the president may be coming more this way than the liberals are ready for.

Then there's the third box, which I would describe as the 1,000 building blocks. There's no reason we could not pass guaranteed portability of health insurance as a freestanding small bill, and for 85 percent of all Americans. We would improve the quality of their life and lower their anxieties. Now, that's a deal I think the president can agree to, and we need his help in the Senate, so we don't have a Democratic filibuster. We could agree in advance to pass this tiny bill.

Q: But, as you know, many Republicans feel they won the fight and now is not the time for compromise or cooperation. It is time to push through their agenda.