With Best of Intentions, Candidates Still May Fail to Keep Their Promises

If New Year’s resolutions were easy to keep, there wouldn’t be so many weight-watcher ads in the newspaper every Monday. Everyone may set out with the best intentions. It’s just that making promises is usually a lot less arduous than keeping them.

It’s not that different for presidential candidates. More than they are usually given credit for, the ones who get to the White House do try to keep almost all the promises they make along the way. But they can’t always persuade the country and Congress to go along.

The need to build a broad coalition for any major change is often forgotten at this early stage of the presidential race. Indeed, the need to court the party loyalists who dominate the voting in the primaries often compels the contenders to make promises that are difficult to fulfill precisely because they are so targeted toward one narrow slice of the political spectrum.

Much of what the major candidates are discussing this year--from George W. Bush’s plan for more state testing in education, to Al Gore’s call for expanding access to preschool--could have bipartisan appeal and a real shot at implementation in 2001. But, as always, the candidates have also made their share of pledges that promise political headaches down the road. In the spirit of the doomed New Year’s resolution to start reading Shakespeare instead of Tom Clancy on the bus, here’s an admittedly subjective list of seven promises from presidential candidates that might be the toughest to keep--ranked roughly in the order of difficulty.

1. Gays in the military: Like Gore and Bill Bradley today, Bill Clinton in 1992 also pledged to let gays serve openly in the military. Clinton didn’t abandon the pledge; he just couldn’t push it past determined opposition in Congress and the military--nearly capsizing his presidency in the process. Times have changed somewhat since, but almost certainly not enough to reverse the result if Gore or Bradley tried again. No Republican presidential candidate has endorsed open gay service, which suggests the pressure Republican legislators would face to resist it.

2. The flat tax: Admittedly, a Steve Forbes presidency committed to replacing the progressive income tax with a single-rate flat tax does not look like an especially high probability right now. But Sen. John McCain of Arizona says he’d like to move toward a flat tax too. Here’s a bet: a President McCain, after taking the temperature in Congress, would move very modestly toward the idea. Few if any Democrats want to abandon the principle that the rich should pay higher income tax rates. And Republicans have grown more enthusiastic about using the tax code to reward favored groups (parents with small children) and activities (such as charitable giving). Put it together, and the flat tax looks like a cause that is flat-lining.

3. Campaign finance reform: Gore, Bradley and McCain would all have a genuine opportunity to ban unlimited soft-money contributions to the national political parties; such a ban passed the House this year and drew a majority of votes in the Senate (though not enough to overcome a filibuster). But Bradley wants to go a huge step further by creating a public financing system (like that used for the general election in the presidential campaign) for congressional elections. That’s asking incumbents both to unilaterally surrender their fund-raising advantage and to open themselves to charges of using taxpayer dollars to finance their own reelections. Don’t bet on many raising their hands to enlist in that crusade.

4. Licensing and registering handguns: Even with a grisly series of shootings as the backdrop, the National Rifle Assn. has stymied a relatively modest bill to impose background checks on purchases at gun shows. Licensing handgun owners (Gore’s idea) or registering handguns (Bradley’s) cuts to the primal NRA fear that government will catalog all gun owners so that it can someday confiscate their weapons. Any such change would probably require years of building support and even then would be an epic struggle because so few rural and Southern Democrats could safely support such measures.

5. Minimum wage: Bush has tried to thread a needle by saying he’d support a minimum wage increase if states are allowed to opt out. Good luck. With the AFL-CIO unwaveringly opposed (it would require them to fight 50 state battles instead of one campaign at the national level), Bush would have a better chance of being tapped for Mensa than attracting enough Democratic votes to break a Senate filibuster.

6. Bradleycare: The basic structure of Bradley’s plan to provide coverage for the uninsured--giving people subsidies to purchase private insurance--has considerable appeal to conservatives. But as now constructed, it would probably face a squeeze of resistance from left and right. Like Gore, many congressional liberals would probably oppose Bradley’s idea of eliminating Medicaid and sending off the poor to replicate its services in the private market. Republicans and moderate Democrats would bridle at the plan’s overall cost. That might force a President Bradley to abandon his call for subsidies to improve the coverage of low-income workers who already have insurance, and to accept a cap on his prescription drug benefit for the elderly.

7. Permanently banning Internet taxation: McCain has won applause (and opened wallets) among the e-commerce set by proclaiming that the Internet should remain forever free of sales taxes. But the governors, understandably wondering how they will replace the lost revenue if retail sales flee into cyberspace, aren’t keen on the idea. Given both parties’ interest in slavishly courting the e-tycoons, a ban isn’t out of the question. But when was the last time the governors got rolled on something they truly cared about?

Don’t read the wrong lesson into this list. It doesn’t mean the next president and Congress can’t accomplish anything. It does mean they are most likely to approve ideas that can attract support from both parties in what is almost certain to be a precariously divided Congress. “Unless we have a cataclysmic change no one is foreseeing,� says Marshall Wittmann, director of congressional relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “in order to make something happen, you have to have some bipartisan support--that’s the critical element.�

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