Day of Reckoning

By LANCE MORROW

CHAOS THEORY LIKES TO THINK THAT THE BEATING OF A butterfly's wings, say, in central Mexico may, in the complex interactions of nature, eventually stir up a typhoon in the western Pacific. The Clinton presidency seemed determined in its first three weeks to validate chaos theory.

A wingbeat as gossamer and normally inconsequential as a Peruvian servant's lack of immigration papers stirred up storms over an Administration at the moment it was moving into the most powerful office in the world. Wild disproportions raged in from unexpected quarters. The famous double nanny disturbances and the fierce electrical displays over the issue of gays serving in the military had the effect of making Republicans, at least, cheerful for the first time since November.

But last week the distractions cleared away. Clinton locked his focus upon the real work of his Administration -- what he hopes to achieve and what it will cost to achieve it. Confusion seemed to give way to an impressive and possibly even dangerous clarity. In his address to Congress this week, the President would put on the line his entire agenda and all his hopes for the next four years. "This," a senior Democrat said of the speech, "is Clinton's blueprint for governing." Clinton is consciously calling down a day of reckoning -- for both the Administration and the American people.

That, at least, is the dramatic intent. Clinton's design will be elaborate, the policies intricately machined. The President aimed to ask Congress to adopt a package that would raise a variety of taxes (on energy, high salaries and corporations), cut a handful of others (on investments in new businesses and on the working poor), slash spending on some fronts while adding new money for job training and road building, for example.

Governor Bill Clinton campaigned on the promise of change -- in the politician's sunny sense of the word. Change has now taken on some of the harder, unpleasant urgency that drove Ross Perot, a feeling of emergency work to be done, or else . . .

Or else what? Clinton, speaking to a group of business leaders and lobbyists, peered into the abyss. He described open-ended decline, a most un- American falling off. Salesmanship: for an instant, Clinton touched the American fear that the nation might find itself transformed, for the worse, beyond recognition. But then he proffered the brighter scenario, if things are done the Administration's way: a growing economy, jobs, the "great American middle class" rewarded for its labors and sturdy virtues.

Clinton the campaigner backed away from the word sacrifice. Announcing his candidacy, he said, "For 12 years, the Republicans have raised taxes on the middle class. It's time to give the middle class tax relief." He rejected the idea of higher taxes for gasoline. At the Democratic Convention, he told delegates that his vision of the New Covenant meant "an America in which middle-class incomes -- not middle-class taxes -- are going up." Toward the end of the campaign he did introduce a new note of realism, if not austerity. At 3 a.m. on Election Day, he told a crowd in Albuquerque: "I'm here to tell you we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight."

That was then. The hobgoblin of little minds vanished after an election. Now sacrifice is at the core of Clinton's blueprint. He said last week, "Everyone will have to pay their fair share."

Except in wartime or Great Depression, sacrifice is an idea almost as un- American as decline. The national theology runs in the other direction -- toward the streets that are paved with gold, toward the freedom to prosper and make a good life. If a President asks the American people to sacrifice, he must show them a sharply focused danger, a monster at the gates of their self- interest. Otherwise, a call to sacrifice is liable to smack either of shivering self-abnegation (a perceived weakness, Jimmy Carter in a cardigan at dusk, turning down the thermostat) or of some redistributive shell game, with the real winnings going to government.

The historical landscape is littered with the bugles that American Presidents have used to call the people to sacrifice. The calls have often failed. A Jeffersonian gazette proclaimed, "We will flinch from no sacrifices" as the President imposed the embargo of 1807 and in answer to the predatory British and French navies, withdrew the U.S. from world commerce. American farmers, shippers and merchants were devastated by the cutoff. Jefferson's strategy did not work. Jefferson left the presidency disillusioned by the experience. Herbert Hoover tried to get Americans to sacrifice, regarding their economic struggles as the moral equivalent of war. He, too, failed. The call to sacrifice, by itself, is not enough.

Americans may enjoy a call to sacrifice as rhetoric ("Ask not what your country can do for you," John Kennedy said in his flashy reversible prose, "ask what you can do for your country"). But the key to Clinton's program will not be some mass popular talent for sacrifice. It will be an American trait more characteristic and useful and durable: a sense of fairness.

If the country is to accept the Clinton design, Americans must believe 1) the burdens are being shared fairly by all and 2) their sacrifices will pay off for them ultimately. If Americans believe their higher taxes and other sacrifices are going to pay for more bureaucracy, they will rise up with pitchforks.

Clinton began a campaign last week to convince Americans that the sacrifices will be fairly shared. "I believe government can both care about people and be careful with their money," he said. The Reagan-Bush era of expanding government privileges, he announced, "has come to an end." Clinton will try to shut down 700 government commissions and boards controlled by the Executive Branch, at a saving of $150 million. Gone will be the Cognition, Emotion and Personality Research Review Commission and the Technical Advisory Group for Cigarette Fire Safety. Clinton's aides took special delight in proposing to abolish the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Hasta la vista to its chairman and sometime Bush campaign cheerleader, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Philip Rosenbloom, a Minneapolis insurance executive, suggested Clinton might take a 5% or 8% cut in pay as a symbolic gesture.

The chastened attitude of Americans about their place in the global economic scheme of things makes them hospitable to the theme of sacrifice, fairly distributed. Carl Wangman, managing director of the Association for Corporate Growth, points out that a kind of national culture of sacrifice is already in place: "The majority of our corporate people are doing more with less." Yet the spectacle of corporate chief executives being magnificently paid even as their companies decline has reinforced a bruised sense of inequity, an outraged perception that reward had been detached from performance and merit.

The themes of sacrifice, fairness and a healthier national sense of community may merge in the most hopeful reading of Clinton's vision. During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt managed to draw Americans into some community of sacrifice. Much of the secret was his leadership and credibility. Says University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick: "Americans were willing to put up with hard times because they believed he was trying to work things out."

In 1993 Clinton's task is (fortunately) not framed in such a context of misery and economic breakdown. The deficit is a sort of dark hallucination in the minds of most Americans; they have little immediate sense of its danger. Layoffs have cut into millions of American families, yet the economy now shows some signs of revival. John Kennedy once said Americans are at the best when things are either very good for them or very bad. Americans today feel they are floating uneasily somewhere in between.

With reporting by Tom Curry/New York and Michael Duffy/Washington