Molly Ivins October 28

AUSTIN, Texas — This is the perfect political story and also true, but the names have been changed to protect the players.

Many years ago in the Texas Lege lurked two senators who loathed one another with a livid passion. One was conservative, the other liberal; one from a rural area, the other urban; one a mean old bull, and the other a witty cosmopolite. We'll call them Bubba and Cary.

One afternoon, Bubba is drinking with a friend in a local dive when in walks Cary. Bubba looks at him and snarls, "You're a sorry (expletive)!"

Cary continues to the bar without comment. But after he gets a drink, he passes Bubba's table again, stops and says: "You think I'm a sorry (expletive), right?"

"Right," says Bubba.

"Well, I think you're a sorry (expletive)."

Bubba rears, back ready to rise and fight. Cary continues: "But we both KNOW Senator Doakes is a sorry (expletive)."

Bubba laughs and says, "I'll drink to that."

They were both smart politicians. And that's what smart politicians do: concentrate on the areas where they can agree, even if there's only one. That's how deals get done, the ball is moved forward, the system works and the people's interest is more or less served.

The trouble with Tom DeLay is that he's not a smart politician.

Here we are, cut off at the Budget Impasse again. The Republicans are vowing not to touch the Social Security surplus, and their alternative is to cut everything else across the board. They think this is smart politics because the Democrats used this ploy for years, charging the R's with "raiding Social Security" to give tax breaks to the rich and other heinous schemes. Now the R's think they can beat the D's at their own game, ha-ha-ha.

The D's, meanwhile, are busy pointing out that if the R's hadn't given the Pentagon ships it hasn't asked for and planes it doesn't want (not to mention all the other pork in the spending bills and the expensive tax breaks to special interests that give big campaign contributions), we could afford more cops and teachers and Meals on Wheels. Cutting cops and teachers and veterans' benefits and Meals on Wheels is not smart politics — especially since it won't hurt Social Security.

DeLay said to President Clinton, "You find the billions in savings if you want to keep the government open." Then, of course, he claimed that a government shutdown would be blamed on Clinton.

Threatening to shut down the government and then blaming the shutdown on the other side is, you may recall, precisely what happened during the late unpleasantness masterminded by that political genius Newt Gingrich.

The Republican leadership — House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip DeLay — can't even hold their own troops in line for an across-the-board spending cut, which proves that most Republicans are not stupid.

Of course there's a better way to do this — three ways, in fact. Spend some of the Social Security surplus, cut billions or compromise with a mix of the two.

Let me suggest even a fourth way, which is to admit that the Balanced Budget Act of 1996, crown jewel of the Republican Revolution, is a bunch of phony baloney. If you admit that the famous spending caps in the balanced budget act are nonsense, then you have to look at some of the more idiotic tax cuts for special interests in order to get the budget on a truly sound fiscal basis.

Smart politicians compromise, and even smarter politicians actually tell the truth.

Meanwhile, Richard Stevenson of The New York Times noticed a wonderful side effect from the budget stalemate. Quite by accident, our pols have done something almost brilliant, which proves again that in politics it's better to be lucky than smart. Clinton won't let the R's cut taxes, and the R's won't let Clinton spend money on domestic programs. So the surplus, for lack of anything better to do, is now cutting the national debt.

Because of the way government finances work, running a surplus means the excess automatically goes into paying down the debt. According to Stevenson's recent article, if the government keeps doing this, it could eliminate the biggest chunk of the debt in 10 to 15 years, with happy long-term results for the economy. The theory is that reducing publicly held debt puts pressure on interest rates to go down, thus freeing up more capital for private enterprise, thus creating more jobs, thus yielding more taxes, and so on in a happy daisy chain.

In January, Clinton proposed setting aside two-thirds of the total surplus for precisely this purpose. He wanted to use the other third for a little tax cut and some social spending. He didn't count on having the whole surplus spent in this way, but there it is.

It would be nice to think the R's knew what they were doing, but their main motivation seems to be preventing Clinton from getting anything he wants. So far, after years of this behavior, the only damage has been to either the R's or the public interest. Maybe they should consider compromising with him instead.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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