Tuesday, May 20, 1997

Spinning a balanced budget bargain

By MARSHA MERCER

Media General News Service

WASHINGTON - Most people like the idea of a balanced budget - but they doubt the budget plan the White House and Congress are cooking up will actually do the job. They think Washington's numbers are phony.

That's no surprise to Gene Sperling, the chairman of President Clinton's National Economic Council.

Asked over breakfast with reporters last week why people don't believe the budget numbers, Sperling was ready with an answer. Clinton has been president for more than four years, but Sperling still blames Clinton's Republican predecessors.

"People are locked into what happened in the 1980s," he said.

"Whenever the administration spoke, the result was the deficit ended up being higher than they said, and growth ended up being lower.

"So you had administrations projecting lower deficits and the deficit getting higher. And that's a mindset that a lot of people still have."

Sperling, 38, is one of a handful of key players in the delicate budget negotiations on Capitol Hill, where bipartisanship has been the word of the month. He knows as much as anyone about Clinton's plans for economic policy.

Spinning Clinton's record

But Sperling also was one of Clinton's top economic advisers in the 1992 campaign, and the campaign mentality dies hard. He can't resist spinning Clinton's record.

The facts - "the undeniable facts" - are that under Clinton "every single year for five years in a row, the deficit has been lower than projected by $40 billion a year. Every year, growth has been higher than we projected."

So, "the only conclusion you can draw" is that Clinton has been conservative in his budget assumption numbers. "Overly conservative," Sperling says.

The irony for Clinton, the first Democrat to be re-elected president since Franklin Roosevelt, is that his legacy may be the balanced budget his Republican predecessors only talked about. Clinton says he's proud of the prospect, but other Democrats aren't so sure.

Clinton may have run his last race, but some Democrats worry, as do some Republicans, that they're giving away issues they could use in 1998 and 2000.

Concern for poor

From the Democrats' liberal wing, left for dead after the debacle of '94, comes criticism that the budget plan abandons the poor and the disadvantaged.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., sharply criticizes the party of Roosevelt for losing its way.

"If this balanced-budget agreement is to be the great accomplishment of eight years of a Democratic presidency, then history will judge us harshly," Wellstone declared last week.

Wellstone apparently sees a president when he looks in the mirror. Former and potential Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson says a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party is inevitable.

Sperling, one of the original liberals in the Clinton White House, argues there's a strong appetite in the country for both parties to find six or seven months to work together "to do something right for the country." And the balanced-budget agreement is "the right thing for the country."

Clinton has so few programs to brag about that Sperling is reduced to arguing that many administration policies, while not targeted to the poor, would actually benefit the poor the most.

"Our efforts to have every school wired to the Internet, to have every child technologically literate, to have every child reading by the end of third grade, those are proposals for everyone - but there's no question that if those proposals are successful they will have disproportionately positive benefit in bringing disadvantaged and minority children into the mainstream."

Literacy program

Clinton wants $2.75 billion for the America Reads program, which would hire thousands to train a million volunteers to teach children to read, and $2 billion for technology literacy.

And, while Republicans flatly rejected Clinton's proposal for a new federal program to repair crumbling schools, Sperling insisted the president will fight for it later.

As for the next campaign, Sperling said, "Democrats will have the opportunity to make the case that they have shown with a Democratic president that they can manage progressive government in a fiscally responsible way."

He seemed dissatisfied and tried again. "I think this will be good for the country, and I think that Democrats who take ownership of their support for balancing the budget will be in a very strong position."

It was not yet 9 a.m., and Gene Sperling looked exhausted.

Scripps Howard News Service