Saves $5 billion a year by increasing costs roughly 20 percent for 4.9 million students.
In addition to principal loan payments, someone who borrows $17,000 during college would pay about $500 more per year in interest. At the same time, the COP wants to cut taxes by $500 per year for many families. The net effect: a shift of money from students to their parents. Republicans argue that these young people don’t need the subsidy since, by getting a college education, they will earn more in the future. But some poorer students might end up not going to college at all if the cost of loans rises too much.
title: “And Now The Spiro Strategy " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Michael Olsen”
With no balanced-budget plan of his own, and a legislative agenda consisting mostly of veto threats and an antiterrorism bill, Bill Clinton’s early re-election game plan is now, as Nixon used to say, “perfectly clear.” Aide George Stephanopoulos blandly calls it “definitional work . . . cultivating the ground, getting the field ready.” But this isn’t sowing seeds; it’s laying mines. And the goals are reminiscent of Nixon-Agnew a generation ago: demonize foes, link them to “extremists,” attack with piranha-sharp sound bites, portray your administration as the last citadel of law, order and the American Way.
Clinton himself is said to be uncomfortable with this “definitional work.” Maybe so, but he’s surrounded by advisers who have no such trepidation. The newest, and suddenly quite influential, is Dick Morris. A politically ambidextrous consultant from New York, he was a key adviser in Clinton’s 1982 campaign to reclaim the Arkansas governorship. Morris’s ideology is vague, his love of combat total. His role model: the late GOP chairman Lee Atwater. Morris worked for Democrats and Republicans in the ’80s, offering each side knowledge of the other’s weaknesses. One wonders what he’s saying now: a client is GOP Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, one of Clinton’s most articulate foes.
Morris now consults informally (and for free) with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Lately he’s been sharpening some Clinton speeches, including a recent one on trade in which the president accused the Japanese of endangering American jobs by erecting a “brick wall” against imports. “What Clinton is doing is pure Dick Morris,” says Charlie Black, a former Atwater partner who has worked with Morris on Senate campaigns. “You make the other side the issue–the only issue.”
The Morris strategy dovetails with the predilections of other top advisers, though their rationales differ. Some, like top re-election aide Harold Ickes, are New Yorkers moved by an old-fashioned liberal distaste for all things conservative-Republican. Others, such as consultants James Carville and Paul Begala, are proud survivors of the rhetorical wars the COP so often won in the Reagan ’80s. They think they’re now entitled to return the fire. “Payback time,” says Begala.
The Spiro Strategy is, in part, an inside game, helping Clinton fend off an intraparty challenge. He can pose as defender of the Democratic faith without having to spout traditional ideology or promise to spend money. Fear is cheap. Denouncing the foes of Dr. Henry Foster, as the president did again last week, is a three-fer: popular with blacks, liberals and pro-choice women. Doubling duties on Japanese luxury cars, to take effect this week, shows solidarity with labor. Portraying Republicans as ghouls eager to rip IV tubes from aging veins–the Democratic budget theme–well, that plays. At least no one has proved it won’t.
But the real virtue of the name-calling, the theory goes, is that it makes the often supine Clinton seem feisty: a combative believer in something. “When you’re fighting, you’re showing strength and resolve,” says Democratic consultant Mark Mellman. In America today, he adds, you are what you despise. “Plus, if you attack, it’s easier to get coverage from you guys.”
Republicans don’t seem terribly frightened by the attack-dog Clinton. When a president rims for re-election, he’s inevitably the issue, says GOP consultant and Bush-campaign alumnus Mike Murphy. The Clinton game plan, Murphy says, reminds him of George Bush’s in 1992, “I know what’s going on in their meetings,” he says. “When they’re asking what Clinton stands for, silence. When it’s about the other side, a hundred voices.”
Sound bites aren’t a philosophy, or even a clear identity. Clinton flip-flops endlessly on the importance of a balanced budget. He was for sweeping medical-care reform in 1993 and yet is proposing none this year. Ironically, if he stands for anything, it may be resistance to rapid change: a one-man House of Lords. “The 1992 candidate of change is going to be the 1996 defender of the status quo,” predicts GOP analyst William Kristol.
By failing to openly defend his party’s core principles, Clinton may quietly administer liberalism’s last rites. The analogy, again, is Nixon, who attacked liberals yet countenanced the largest expansion of federal power since FDR. Clinton is the mirror image. He attacks conservatives, yet may preside over the largest contraction of federal power in decades. Now even the Supreme Court, in its term-limits decision, is questioning the basic constitutional grounds for Washington’s primacy. “I wish Clinton would at least make the case for liberalism,” says Kristol. “That debate would be useful to us all.”
Don’t hold your breath. Clinton aides promise that they’re just “getting the field ready” for the high-minded stuff that will follow: the philosophy, the list of Clinton accomplishments. Perhaps, but these days the White House is scouring the ground for Agnew-style photo-ops. Plans are in the works for one of Clinton’s favorites: a swearing-in ceremony for a new batch of “crime-bill cops.” Agnew won’t be invited, but he’ll certainly be there in spirit.
