Outpouring of Ideas From Left, Right Reflects Parties’ Unsettled Agendas

Maybe it was the blowing snow in Washington last week that kept all but a few reporters away when the Heritage Foundation released its encyclopedia-sized issue agenda for the Republican Congress. More likely, though, the meager showing was explained by a gust of conventional wisdom: the widespread sense that the capital will spend the coming months battling over ethics, not policy.

It’s difficult to argue with that conclusion. Last week began with Paula Corbin Jones, the woman whose sexual-harassment case against President Clinton goes before the Supreme Court today, on the cover of Newsweek--and ended with the Democrats and Republicans bitterly squabbling over the penalty proceedings for House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s violations of House rules.

Yet beneath this numbing ooze, the past few days have also offered hints of something more fertile: an intellectual churning in both parties. While the ethical ordeals of Clinton and Gingrich dominated the front pages last week, an assortment of thinkers, legislators, think tanks and advisory commissions deluged Washington with an astonishing torrent of manifestoes, wish lists and policy proposals.

On Monday, one faction of a deeply divided Social Security advisory commission proposed a scheme that would mean the most sweeping changes in the program’s more than 60-year history. On Wednesday, a group of House and Senate “civic conservatives� began their effort to draft a new Republican social agenda. On Thursday, Heritage released its latest “Mandate for Leadership,� a groaning 760-page compendium of “lessons� and “strategies� for the Republican Congress.

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At the same time, only a few blocks away, the Progressive Caucus, an alliance of 52 liberal House members, met to thrash out an alternative to both the GOP and the Clinton administration. And today, the ideological bete noir for many on the left--the centrist Democratic Leadership Council--will release its book-length collection of “big ideas� for a second Clinton administration, inevitably if agonizingly titled “Building the Bridge.�

There’s something seasonal in this profusion. The life cycle of Washington ideas inverts nature’s cycle: Sprouts bloom in the winter and die in the spring. The frigid opening of every congressional and presidential term inspires a bounty of new proposals. But practical and political obstacles weed out almost all of them by the spring, when Congress and the White House decide which legislation might actually ripen.

The sheer volume of this year’s outpouring, though, reflects something more: an intellectual vacuum in both parties. Two years ago, congressional Republicans had their marching orders, virtually carved into tablets in their campaign manifesto, the “contract with America.� But with Gingrich weakened and the GOP divided over the lessons of the past two years, the Republican agenda now is much more unsettled. “On the one hand, you had this overambitious agenda [last time],� said Rep. James M. Talent (R-Mo.). “On the other, [now] you don’t have enough marked out.�

Still smarting from Clinton’s efforts to tag their “contract� agenda as extremist, Republicans are uncertain how much to sand down their edges. Heritage’s ocean of advice reflects the dominant--though by no means universal--view in the party, a kind of modified stay-the-course strategy.

In his introductory essay, Heritage Vice President David Mason urges congressional Republicans to pursue their goals more incrementally and remember that they need Clinton’s signature to make law. But undergirding the book is the conviction that reducing Washington’s influence should remain the core of the Republican message. “We did not come through the past two years and say something is wrong with the policy,� Mason said.

Indeed, the Heritage opus--like other recent conservative manifestoes--urges congressional Republicans to take the drive against Washington onto new terrain where Clinton is less likely to follow. At the top of that list: diverting Social Security payroll taxes into individual investment accounts, replacing the progressive income tax with a flat tax and launching a new drive to limit the authority of the federal judiciary, an idea rising like a bullet in conservative circles since the federal court decision shelving California’s Proposition 209.

Another group of conservatives holds that all these ideas for restraining Washington, while perhaps necessary, are insufficient to build majority support for the GOP. These so-called civic conservatives argue that Republicans need to show voters how they will replace the welfare state with a new nongovernmental safety net for the poor, stitched together from churches, charities and voluntary local organizations.

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Around that conviction, some of the sharpest conservatives in Congress--including John Ashcroft of Missouri, Dan Coats and Spencer Abraham of Michigan in the Senate and Talent, J. C. Watts of Oklahoma and John R. Kasich of Ohio in the House--are organizing into a loose affiliation that they call the Renewal Alliance. Shortly after Clinton’s State of the Union address, they hope to unveil an agenda including a tax credit to promote charitable giving, tax breaks to encourage inner-city investment, school vouchers and inducements for companies to offer workers more compensatory time off.

“There is a sense you have to disengage government from what it does poorly,� Ashcroft said, “but then you have to reengage the culture in what it does well.�

There is much intriguing in this approach (eloquently argued by Adam Meyerson in the Heritage volume), but, if the Renewal Alliance program moves forward, it will face serious questions. While faith-based charities have proved effective providers of specific social services--such as drug treatment--the major charities insist that they cannot substitute for rollbacks in the basic government guarantees of income, housing and food for the needy.

Before they get to worry about that, the Renewal Alliance Republicans have to prove that they can catch their party’s attention. Talent is optimistic, noting that Gingrich touted their agenda in his speech last week. But perhaps more revealing of their challenge was 1996 GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, who dutifully praised these ideas in one early campaign speech and then never mentioned them again.

If anything, the past few days demonstrated even more turmoil in Democratic ranks. In its slim new book, the DLC argues that Clinton won by demonstrating his willingness to reform government and topple liberal shibboleths and that the way to build a lasting Democratic majority is to accelerate in that direction. Like Clinton, but more so, the group envisions Washington shifting from designing central solutions toward providing “tools� that enable individuals and communities to confront their own problems.

In practice, that compass steers the authors toward an agenda that defies ideological pigeonholing. Though the book calls for balancing the budget and pursuing fundamental reforms in Medicare, Social Security and education, it also urges significant government initiatives, from massively expanding access to lifelong job training to funding a nationwide network of supervised “second-chance homes� for unwed teens.

“This incorporates some of the valid conservative critique of big government,� said Will Marshall, who runs the DLC’s think tank and edited the volume. “On the other hand, this is an agenda for public activism par excellence.�

Much of this may be more acceptable to liberals than they think. But the DLC vision--like Clinton’s “vital center�--is predicated on a retrenching of existing programs, which most on the left cannot abide.

With Clinton’s election now secured, liberals are much more willing to publicly say so. The Progressive Caucus seminar rang with ridicule of the president. “I say take a tip from Paula Jones: Dump Bill,� liberal essayist Barbara Ehrenreich declared to loud laughs and cheers. “This is not a time for party loyalty. If anyone has been disloyal to his party and what it stands for, it is Bill Clinton.�

In her absolutist disdain--cocktail party chatter masquerading as political strategy--Ehrenreich would fit perfectly in a Congress where Republicans and Democrats, battling over Gingrich’s punishment, are already describing each other with such words as “irrational� and “rabid.�

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On this nihilistic landscape, a competition of ideas might actually seem a break in the battle. But as long as the parties remain locked in a cycle of personal destruction, the idea merchants of left, right and center will enjoy about as much influence as poets in wartime.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every Monday.