Moynihan respects Bill Clinton much more than he did during the 1992 primaries, when he supported Sen. Bob Kerrey. But he seems to view the president almost as a struggling student in one of those government classes he taught at Harvard-late with the term paper (“Where’s the plan?” he asks impatiently) and lacking full appreciation of powerful historical currents. All the same, he sees his public duty as advancing health reform and the rest of Clinton’s program, whatever it turns out to be.
That leaves Moynihan with little leeway to clean up the pig trough that is the Senate Finance Committee. With a lineup that’s only 11-9 Democratic, he’s reluctant to jeopardize votes for the Clinton plan by going after the tax loopholes that each member cherishes. Most of those loopholes-worth tens of billions of dollars-are nothing but giveaways to rich people and big industries that created no jobs during the 1980s. But the only way Moynihan will try to close them is if Clinton wants him to. For now, Moynihan says that he will do nothing more than try to prevent “old loopholes from corning back.” His view of fiscal policy is realistic, almost fatalistic: “When you pierce the veil of money you rarely return with your faculties intact.”
It’s social policy that still makes his eyes twinkle. One novel idea he is eager to float is that welfare be transferred out of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and into the Department of Labor. This is more than a bureaucratic shuffle. Clinton’s promise of welfare reform “drove our election,” Moynihan says. He’s right. Every time the Clinton campaign aired its tough ad on welfare, his numbers shot up. The president’s political advisers persuaded him last week to restate his belief in work requirements for welfare recipients. On the opposite side are what Moynihan calls “advocacy groups fixed in a time warp about welfare and work. They see [work requirements] as punitive … as slave fare.” One of those groups, the Children’s Defense Fund, headed by Marian Wright Edelman, Hillary Clinton’s mentor, has tremendous influence over HHS. But Moynihan’s main motive is structural: HHS is in the business of passing out checks; Labor is in the business of stressing work. New ideas like welfare reform require bureaucratic upheaval in order to kick-start them.
On social security, HHS can rest easy. When Clinton launched a trial balloon suggesting a one-year freeze on cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs), Moynihan shot it down with a bazooka. He must know that much of his fancy historical rationalizing for social security is intellectually flimsy. Even Franklin Roosevelt didn’t envision quite this level of sanctity for his creation; in fact, FDR wouldn’t have known a COLA from a Coke if his life depended on it. Moynihan is on more sensible ground when he argues that tampering too much with the system would simply be a political debacle for the Democrats. While he now says he will go along with higher taxes on upper-income recipients, the COLA freeze is dead. The long-term danger with tampering, he says, is that “If you don’t think you’re going to get it, you won’t miss it as much, then the one damn thing we [Democrats] did in the 20th century will be gone.”
OK, Senator, if neither closing tax loopholes nor restraining middle-class benefits is politically practical, where’s your big money for deficit reduction going to come from? Moynihan’s answer is simple: “The cold-war budget.” More than $100 billion over three or four years could still be slashed from defense spending, he says. Clinton wants to leave 100,000 troops in Europe. How many does Moynihan, onetime hawk, think we need? None. Now he’s bellowing. They don’t get it. “It’s over! It’s over! He [Clinton] has put people in who want to do it better rather than say ‘It’s over’.” Would his fellow cold-warrior, the late senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, have agreed? “His terms had all been met-he was never in the belly of the beast.”
Pat Moynihan’s strategy for avoiding the Washington beast lies in books and articles. He writes the way other people exercise; his seventh book since entering the Senate, “Pandaemonium,” a new study of ethnicity in international politics (about which he has been prescient), explains how badly the United States has misunderstood the future. If Bill and Hillary Clinton are thinking straight, they’ll let the senator be their tutor. Some lessons might be discursive blind alleys, making their hard choices even harder. But many others might illuminate their path.
