My life

Now that they controlled the Congress, the Republicans had gone too far in the other direction, underestimating economic growth and revenues and overestimating the rate of medical inflation, even as they promoted HMOs as a surefire way to slow it down. Their strategy appeared to be the logical extension of William Kristol’s advice in his memo to Bob Dole, urging that he block all action on health care. If they could cut funding for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, middle-class Americans would see fewer benefits from their tax dollars, feel more resentful paying taxes, and become even more receptive to their appeals for tax cuts and their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns.

President Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, had acknowledged that his administration had intentionally run huge deficits to create a crisis that would “starve” the domestic budget. They succeeded partially, underfunding but not eliminating investments in our common future. Now the Gingrich Republicans were trying to use a balanced budget with unreasonable revenue and spending assumptions to finish the job. I was determined to stop them; the future direction of our nation hung in the balance. On November 10, three days before the expiration of the continuing resolution, Congress sent me a new one that threw down the gauntlet: the price for keeping the government open was signing a new CR that increased Medicare premiums 25 percent, cut funding for education and the environment, and weakened environmental laws.

The following day, just a week after Rabin’s assassination, I gave my radio address on the Republican attempts to pass their budget through the back door of the CR. It was Veterans Day, so I pointed out that eight million of the seniors whose Medicare premiums would be raised were veterans. There was no need for the GOP’s draconian cuts: the combined rates of unemployment and inflation were at a twentyfive-year low; federal employment as a percentage of the overall workforce was the smallest since 1933; and the deficit was down. I still wanted to balance the budget, but in a way that was “consistent with our fundamental values” and “without threats and without partisan rancor.”

On Monday night the Congress finally sent me an extension of the debt limit. It was worse than the CR, another backdoor effort to pass the budget cuts and weaken environmental laws. The legislation also stripped from the secretary of the Treasury the fund management flexibility he had had since the Reagan years to avoid defaults under extraordinary circumstances. Even worse, it lowered the debt limit again after thirty days, virtually ensuring a default.

Gingrich had been threatening since April to shut the government down and put America in default if I didn’t accept his budget. I couldn’t tell whether he really wanted to do it or whether he simply believed all the press coverage during my first two years that, in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, had portrayed me as too weak, too willing to abandon commitments, too eager to compromise. If so, he should have paid more attention to the evidence.

On November 13, with the existing CR scheduled to expire at midnight, the negotiators met one more time to try to resolve our differences before the government shutdown. Dole, Gingrich, Armey, Daschle, and Gephardt were there, as were Al Gore, Leon Panetta, Bob Rubin, Laura Tyson, and other members of our team. The atmosphere was already tense when Gingrich started the meeting by complaining about our TV ads. We had started running ads in targeted states in June to highlight administration achievements, beginning with the crime bill. When the budget debate heated up after Labor Day, we put up new ads targeting the proposed Republican cuts, especially in Medicare and Medicaid. After Newt carried on for a while, Leon Panetta tersely reminded him of all the terrible things he’d said about me before the 1994 election: “Mr. Speaker, you don’t have clean hands.”