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Clock ticks toward rude wakeup call

By Washington Post
Published January 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - "What do we do now?" Robert Redford, playing newly elected Sen. Bill McKay, famously asks at the end of the 1972 movie The Candidate. The first 100 hours agenda gave Democrats the framework to avoid that befuddlement at the start of the 110th Congress. But when the clock runs out, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., may start to wonder whether Newt Gingrich had a point in pacing his Contract With America agenda over days, not hours.

- The first 100 hours agenda will quickly collide with Senate and White House reality.

However gratifying it may feel to check items off the to-do list, House Democrats - and the folks to whom they made their promises - are about to discover the limits of their ability to deliver. On some proposals (Medicare prescription drug negotiations), the cooling saucer of the Senate could be a deep freeze. Others that pass the Senate (stem cell research) will still confront President Bush's veto.

- Having picked the low-hanging legislative fruit, Democrats have far more back-breaking work ahead.

Now come issues, from climate change to health care to immigration to farm subsidies, on which there is less agreement, inside and outside the party. Democrats may choose to punt on some, but unavoidably unpleasant budget choices begin next month. An already tight spending situation will be exacerbated by the pent-up demand resulting from the decision to freeze this year's spending at 2006 levels. But there are countervailing pressures from budget hawks within the Democratic caucus and from a president eager to veto appropriations bills and cast Democrats as the same old spendthrifts.

- The fissures, internal and external, in the Democratic Party, will start to emerge.

Internally, Pelosi presides over a motley caucus that agreed to agree on her Six for '06. Don't bet on similar unanimity over Seven for '07. She's got Blue Dogs vs. the Black Caucus, urban liberals vs. Western and Southern moderates, all with their own conflicting agendas and electoral pressures.

Externally, the party's natives - the liberal blogosphere, labor, gays, trial lawyers, environmentalists - will begin to get restless, like a carful of cranky children on a long trip.

- The consequences of promises will come home to roost.

First, the strictures of self-imposed pay-as-you-go budgeting, in which the Democrats have bound themselves not to increase entitlement spending without finding offsetting savings, have already started to pinch. The Democrats quietly but dramatically scaled back the scope of their promise to cut interest rates on student loans in half.

It's going to be a lot harder for them to comply with pay-as-you-go while shielding growing numbers of middle-class families from the alternative minimum tax - a $50-billion-a-year cost. You'll hear lots of talk about collecting unpaid taxes to finance the fix, but the Congressional Budget Office isn't likely to score savings from the tax gap any more than it will visits from the Tooth Fairy.

- Iraq is the elephant in the chamber.

Democrats don't agree among themselves about what should be done. Even if they did, they are trapped between their fear of looking like micromanaging undercutters of the troops and the clamor of their base for cutoff and withdrawal. It's not clear that tut-tutting their disapproval will prove to be a successful strategy for exiting from this bind.

For the second 100 hours, and the third, and beyond, Iraq is likely to eclipse everything else on the Democrats' agenda - whatever that turns out to be.

[Last modified January 17, 2007, 21:10:03]