Washington -- "I've said all along this is not written in stone," said Newt Gingrich of the Contract with America. Actually, he has said that only since January. He used to say things like, "If we don't do what we say we'll do, then the people have a right to throw us out."
The retroactive disclaimer appeared this week in a newspaper article. It's proving hard to cut taxes, raise defense spending, protect Social Security and still move toward a balanced budget by 2002 without sustaining severe political damage.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich is known for proposing serious budget cuts, and doing so with an ingenuous, at times charming, optimism. He is like a golden retriever, endearing both in his enthusiasm and in his seeming indifference to how few people share it. Now, no longer a back-bencher, he finds his words being taken seriously. Suddenly he seems to be wearing one of those "invisible fence" collars that deliver a shock when dogs approach forbidden terrain. The list of tough budget cuts he was going to unveil by late January has been put off until -- oh, sometime this spring, he says.
Asked what sort of hits Medicare recipients are in for, the man known for urging painful sacrifice replied, "Well, frankly, what I hope we will be able to do is to convince people that we have a system that's going to allow them to have some choice, to be able to get the delivery of services they want at lesser prices."
Did he say, "Frankly"?
Mr. Kasich's "invisible fence" collar is an example of "hyperdemocracy" -- an electronic feedback link between politicians and constituents so intimate that it short-circuits deliberative, representative democracy.
Hyperdemocracy consists partly of the technological empowerment of special interests. Computerized mass mail, for example, has boosted the size of the American Association of Retired Persons and sharpened its reflexes. The push of a button sends rabble-rousing letters to millions of voters. A second variant of hyperdemocracy is the electronic plebiscite, in which phone polls, talk radio, etc., render an instant, sometimes uninformed national opinion that Washington slavishly obeys.
It has been suggested -- by Mickey Kaus in this space last week -- that hyperdemocracy is no real problem. He notes that the first, special-interest, variant favors political minorities, while the second, plebiscitary variant favors majorities. Thus hyperdemocracy is internally "contradictory;" majorities may electronically "cancel out" special interests.
Certainly one can imagine structural tinkering that would encourage this. But the tinkering Mr. Kaus champions -- the line-item veto -- implausibly asks the president to play martyr and alone incur the wrath of many special interests. A better idea would be to let the president send any line item back to Congress for a simple majority vote, innocently asking legislators if most of their constituents really favor this particular special interest. One by one, hunks of pork could be killed.
Deputizing the majority gets trickier once we come to the real budget-busters: middle-class tax cuts, Social Security, Medicare. Here a plebiscite may help "special interests," because they're huge. Most Americans are middle-class taxpayers. Most will someday get Social Security or Medicare, and many get them now.
This is one problem with the hallowed distinction in political rhetoric between "the people" and "special interests." Mr. Kasich, for example, denounces selfish special interests but insists that the "people" are prepared to sacrifice. Nonsense.
The Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, says that most Americans think the budget can be balanced by cutting "waste, fraud and abuse." With a straight face he says most people are willing to "make sacrifices" -- but only so long as they don't "pay higher taxes or see their services cut." He advises, "If we talk about pain, we lose."
His poll is the second variant of hyperdemocracy -- majority sentiment, electronically gathered and rapidly sent to policy makers. It's thus evidence that the two variants aren't benignly "contradictory."
Technology can help solve the problems it creates, but not easily. The electorate can grasp that it is the special interests, and might even abide by the implications of this fact, if some compelling leader used television to lay them out. But who? Not likely Mr. Gingrich.
The Democrats have also been dishonest; they, too, obey their "invisible fence" collars. But it's the Republicans who charged into town with such smugness, promising a "revolutionary" break with the past. And it's the Republicans who chose to etch their dishonesty in stone.
TRB is a column of The New Republic, written this week by Robert Wright.