No Future For Congressional GOP

by Alexander Cockburn

The president said that it was his hope that in the new millennium no older American would live in fear of penury or hunger. The Democrats applauded, and the cameras turned to Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who sat grimly with arms folded. The president hailed America's fighting men and women and looked forward to a more peaceful world. The camera picked up the empty seats of Republican legislators like Henry Hyde, who'd chosen to stay away.

One could see the Republicans' desperation not only in Armey's graceless pose and Hyde's contemptuous absence but also in the formal party response to Clinton's address by House Republicans Jennifer Dunn and Steve Largent. In the old days, they would have showered any Democratic president with ribald invective about tax-and-spend liberalism, but Clinton spiked those guns long ago. So Dunn and Largent used most of their allotted spans prattling about their normalcy and their children. Perhaps the idea was to strike a contrast with the satyr of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but if so, it didn't work. To beat Bill Clinton at the game of launching America to an even more prosperous future, you need an orator of equivalent effrontery and political hucksterism, like Newt Gingrich.

But Newt, who loves gassing about the 21st century as much as Bill, is gone, and the Republicans are clearly in dire straits. To watch them these days is like observing a gambler mortgaging everything in one rash bet. In the Republicans' case, it's the hope that after a year of steadily mounting evidence to the contrary, some new disclosure, some toxic affidavit from Jane Doe, an appearance by Monica Lewinsky as witness at the impeachment hearings will turn the tide.

Maybe it will happen, but the chances seem dim. Meanwhile, Clinton's speech Tuesday night shows the political mess they're in, quite aside from the unpopularity of their attempts to kick Clinton out of office. If there's a president who has managed to touch more political buttons in one speech, it's hard to recall him.

For liberals and the AFL-CIO, there was the president's call for the minimum wage to go up by a dollar. For Wall Street, there was the overture to the great goal of privatizing Social Security and handing it over to the mutual funds industry. Law-and-order types got the pledge to keep people in prison till they are drug free, and the military got its promise of a hike in defense spending. Women got language about an ending of discrimination (plus a joke about the female president in a hundred years), and gays got a pledge on hate crimes.

To be sure, Clinton's speech was ripe with brazen affronts to reason and justice. His proposed "reform" of Medicare included an injunction to sick old people to be smart shoppers. He permitted himself a populist sneer at international trade agreements and then threw in a plea for presidential fast-track authority to make them. The man who spoke in emotional tones about "humanizing" international trade agreements is the same Bill Clinton who once hoped to push through the inhuman Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

One could go on like this, with a radical riposte to every second paragraph in Clinton's lengthy address. America's precious heritage? This is the administration that's throwing the rest of Alaska's Arctic plain to the oil industry. But here again, the Republicans have saved Bill Clinton from the consistent criticism from he deserves. Who -- among the liberals and leftists -- wants to be on the same side as the Republican house managers? Rhetorically speaking, the president does well when he is in peril. It was the same last year, just after the Lewinsky scandal broke. One simply has to admire his resilience. After all the narrow shaves and premature political death notices down the years, Clinton clearly believes in a visceral sense, far more profound than balanced political assessment, that he's going to make it.

This brash life force shines through, and to judge by the polls, most Americans admire such determination to survive on the political stage. And here again is the Republicans' problem. Clinton's great love for the future is beyond the scope of Ken Starr's investigations. And since they have bet all on Starr, what can they do?