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Democrats have spent the past six years -- ever since Republicans took over Congress in the 1994 elections -- employing a host of political tactics and defensive maneuvers to avert the GOP's drive for across-the-board tax cuts. That this long effort ended in failure yesterday was provoking dire forecasts for the future of the activist government that Democrats seek.
It also invited second-guessing by Democrats about how and why the Clinton legacy on fiscal policy could be so quickly overturned by a new president with at best a modest electoral mandate.
Some liberals noted what for them is a painful irony: The 1993 budget package passed by Democrats helped eliminate chronic deficits and eventually produced large budget surpluses. But the fruit of these surpluses is Bush's tax cut -- not the new "investments" in universal health care, education, and other social programs that were the original goal of the Clinton administration eight years ago.
Robert Reich, a labor secretary under Clinton, said Democrats can blame themselves. Confronted with the GOP's plans to cut taxes sharply and reduce the size of government, Clinton offered smaller alternatives, such as targeted tax deductions and credits for education.
He made rhetorical concessions, such as his 1996 declaration, "The era of big government is over." And he tried to turn the tables on the opposition, such as his 1998 warning that Washington should "save Social Security first" before considering tax cuts.
But these moves, however shrewd as political maneuvers, amounted in Reich's view to fancy footwork -- "the triumph of tactics over long-term strategy" -- and were no substitute for confronting the public forthrightly with an argument for what government should do and the need to pay for it. All of Clinton's defensive moves, Reich said, "stemmed the tide temporarily, but didn't build a bulwark against a large tax cut."
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