It’s crisis time at the White House. A president whom many think unfit for office finds himself opposed by a Congress that has lost all respect for him. The ideas for which he’s lobbied have gone nowhere, and now his entire legislative agenda has stalled.
We’re talking about Bill Clinton, of course. And however dim things seemed for him in 1994, today he’s remembered as the most successful post-Reagan president.
Donald Trump should take a page from his book. When the voters repudiated the Democrats in the 1994 congressional election, when all of Clinton’s shiny new ideas had been trashed, he brought in Dick Morris and did a pivot. He reached out to Newt Gingrich’s Republicans. He triangulated.
He signaled his strategy in his 1995 State of the Union Address. He boasted about cutting a quarter of a trillion dollars in spending and more than 100,000 positions from the federal bureaucracy.
He said that nothing undermines our sense of common responsibility more than our failed welfare system, and that we have to give people incentives to go back to work. He asked Congress to reduce income taxes and took credit for a very tough crime bill.
Then, in the 1996 State of the Union, Clinton announced that the era of big government was over. Later that year, he signed a highly successful welfare reform bill, and that fall he was re-elected. In 1998 he was impeached, but somehow we’ve forgotten that. We remember instead a highly successful presidency.
That drives Republicans nuts. Yes, we emerged from the ’90s with budget surpluses, they admit, but for that we can thank Gingrich. Or the tech boom. Or a pre-9/11 holiday from history. Clinton was just lucky. The luckiest guy since Ringo Starr.
Maybe so, but it took more than luck to reach out to the Republicans. Barack Obama, the first Democratic president since Clinton, didn’t do so.
Clinton faced a Congress controlled by the other party. That’s not the case for Trump. But then the Republicans are really two or three different parties, and after the health-care debacle the White House must realize that, if it wants something passed, relying on congressional Republicans to do the heavy lifting may not suffice.
Trump needs a Dick Morris who can reach out to Democrats. Of course, the Democrats don’t much like Trump. But then neither do congressional Republicans. And the smarter Democrats — like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — realize that to get elected they need something more substantive than “we’re not Trump.” Triangulation can work for them, too.
Clinton could triangulate because, in the end, all he cared about was himself. Trump is also focused on success, on winning. But unlike Clinton, he does have an agenda.
That wouldn’t get in the way of an outreach to the Democrats, however, since Trump’s policies, his ideas for what he called the Republican Workers Party, aren’t nearly so hard-core right-wing as those of the Paul Ryans in Congress. And it’s his set of policies that proved a winning ticket for a Republican candidate for the presidency.
Last week, I asked Kellyanne Conway why Trump didn’t reach out to the Democrats on health care. “We tried,” she said. “We said we’d be happy to talk to them.”
That’s not enough. Mohammed should go to the mountain. Trump should offer to pay a visit to Capitol Hill to meet with Schumer and the Democratic leadership. That’s the logical next step. It’s what Americans want. And the Democrats will have to take the meeting, if they want to retake the Senate and House.
Had Trump done so last week, he’d have told Republicans they don’t hold all the cards, that they couldn’t ignore him with impunity.
John McCain was right: Health-care reform should be bipartisan. We shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of 2009, not over that, not over tax reform and not over the rest of Trump’s agenda. And health care will come back as an issue, not this year, but likely next year as ObamaCare comes crashing to the ground.
F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His most recent book is “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”