In the House of Representatives, I had a different problem. Every Democrat knew he or she had maximum leverage, and many were bargaining with me over details of the plan or for help on specific issues. Many of the Democrats who came from anti-tax districts were especially afraid of voting for another increase in the gas tax only three years after Congress had last raised it. Besides the Speaker and his leadership team, my strongest supporter was the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski. Rostenkowski was a superb legislator who combined a fine mind with Chicago street skills, but he was being investigated for converting public funds to political uses, and the assumption was that the investigation would reduce his influence over other members. Every time I met with members of Congress, the press would ask me about Rostenkowski. To his everlasting credit, Rosty bulled right ahead, rounding up votes and telling his colleagues they had to do the right thing. He was still effective, and he had to be. The slightest misstep could lose a vote or two, plunging us off the razor’s edge into defeat. In early August, as the budget drama moved to its climax, Warren Christopher finally secured the agreement of the British and the French to conduct NATO air strikes in Bosnia, but the strikes could occur only if both NATO and the UN approved them, the so-called dual key approach. I was afraid we could never turn both keys, because Russia had a veto on the Security Council and was closely tied to the Serbs. The dual key would prove to be a frustrating impediment to protecting the Bosnians, but it marked another step in the long, tortuous process of moving Europe and the UN to a more aggressive posture.
By August 3, we had settled on a final budget plan, with $255 billion in budget cuts and $241 billion in tax increases. Some Democrats were still worried that any gas-tax increase would kill us with those middle-class voters who were angry anyway about not getting a tax cut. Conservative Democrats said it didn’t do enough to reduce the deficit through cutting spending on the entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. More than 20 percent of our savings already came from reducing future payments to doctors and hospitals under Medicare, plus another big chunk from subjecting more of the Social Security income of better-off retirees to taxation. That’s all I could do without losing more votes in the House than we could gain.
That night, in a televised address from the Oval Office, I made one last pitch for public support for the plan, saying it would create eight million jobs in the next four years, and announcing that I would sign an executive order the following day to establish a deficit-reduction trust fund, assuring that all the new taxes and spending cuts would be used for that purpose only. The trust fund was especially important to Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, and I credited him for the idea in the TV address. Of the six senators who had voted against the plan the first time, DeConcini was my only hope. I had had the others to dinner, met with and called them, and had their closest friends in the administration lobby them, to no avail. If DeConcini didn’t change, we were beat.
The next day, he did, saying he would vote yes because of the trust fund. Now, if Bob Kerrey stayed with us we would get fifty votes in the Senate, and Al Gore could break the tie again. But before we got there, the budget first had to pass the House. We had one more day to find a majority of 218 votes, and we still weren’t there. More than thirty Democrats were wavering. They were afraid of the taxes, though we had done printouts for each of the members showing how many people in their districts would get a tax cut under the EITC, as compared with those who would get an income tax increase. In many cases, the ratio was ten to one or better, and in barely more than a dozen were their constituents so well off that the district would see more tax increases than decreases. Still, they were all worried about the gas tax. I could have passed the plan easily had I dropped the gas tax and offset the loss by abandoning the EITC
tax cut. It would have been far less politically damaging. Poor working people had no lobbyists in Washington; they would never have known. But I would have. Besides, if we were going to soak the rich, the bond market wanted us to spray the middle class with a little bit of pain. That afternoon, Leon Panetta and House majority leader, Dick Gephardt, who was working tirelessly for the budget, had struck a deal with Congressman Tim Penny of Minnesota, the leader of a group of conservative Democrats who wanted more spending cuts, promising the budget cutters another vote during the fall appropriations process to cut spending even more. Penny was satisfied, and his approval brought us seven or eight more votes.
