With the balloons still dropping on a renominated President Clinton, questions began to arise about his second-term talk of building "a bridge to the 21st century."
But what precisely - or even generally - would he do during four more years in the Oval Office? Freed from the need for further voter approval, might he become the knee-jerk liberal his critics suspect him of being? Or would he use his independence from old-line Democratic interest groups to ramrod historic reform of federal entitlements, making Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid solvent well into the 21st century?Clues to Clinton's conduct of national policy starting in 1997 can be found in several forces. The most significant one is the budget squeeze.
The federal deficit is not going away anytime soon, certainly not in this century. Today's healthy economic outlook might be gone by this time next year, requiring anti-recessional spending that could drown out both Clinton's program initiatives and any further progress on deficit reduction under the same tidal wave of red ink.
This explains the limited breadth of the initiatives Clinton showcased Thursday in his acceptance speech: A $1,500 tax credit for the first two years of higher education. Putting the emphasis on low-tuition community colleges avoids the horrific costs of helping middle-class families avoid the huge student loans associated with attending a four-year college, where the cost of schooling can exceed $25,000 a year.
The proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes on profits from the sale of a home. Existing law lets those selling their homes avoid capital gains taxes through the purchase of a pricier house. Extending the advantage to all home-sellers will cost the Treasury just $1.4 billion, a far less grandiose commitment than Clinton's words suggest.
A re-elected Clinton might want to push for a big-ticket federal program if he had the chance - but he's not likely to get it. Just as he has throughout his first term, he would be constrained not merely by the deficit, but by the bipartisan consensus for the eventual elimination of all that red ink by early in the new century.
Another issue shaping a second term is which party controls Congress. If the Democrats take back both the House and Senate, it could permit Clinton to make good on his call for campaign reform. Generally speaking, Republicans oppose putting spending limits on campaigns. Democrats say they support them. In control of both Congress and the presidency, they would have to deliver on the Clinton promise or admit that they, the Democrats, are imprisoned by the current system of big-money campaigning.
Continued Republican control of Capitol Hill might present a rosier scenario for dealing with that other conundrum: the explosion in the costs of federal entitlement programs such as Medicare. It's quite possible, if the victorious president and congressional leadership get together quickly after the election, that the two parties might agree to bite the bullet together, sharing the political blame for the painful and unpopular cost-cutting that a real solution requires.
Moving on to the big picture, Clinton - like every president before him - also is concerned about his place in history.
Winning a second term will, of itself, move Clinton into a rare position for a Democrat. No member of his party since Franklin D. Roosevelt has attained that milestone. But where does he go from there?
One possibility is that he will make good on his familiar talk of reforging his party along New Democrat lines, putting the emphasis on tax cuts rather than big programs to achieve particular economic or social goals, and focusing on cultural issues, such as the V-chip, as well as the more New Dealish commitment to bread-and-butter programs.
A clear example of such New Democrat thinking in his acceptance speech was Clinton's proposal to shift welfare dependents onto the job rolls. He would give businesses federal tax credits equal to 50 percent on the first $10,000 of wages paid to former welfare recipients who take and hold onto jobs.
Bruce Reed, the centrist White House staffer, told the respected National Journal to expect more of this indirect, unobtrusive approach in a second Clinton term: "more vouchers, more tax credits, more efficient ways of delivering government services."
There's also the matter of Al Gore's agenda. President Clinton made it abundantly clear in Chicago that he wants his vice president to be the Democratic nominee in 2000. To prove himself a leader, Gore will want to continue his efforts to streamline or "re-invent" the federal government, to push for hooking up school computers to the Internet, and to pursue his fervent environmentalism.
Just as Clinton promises to play a major role in helping Gore win the presidency, Gore can be expected to play a major role in helping Clinton finish out his own presidency with gusto.
Finally, there's Hillary Rodham Clinton's agenda. The first lady gives powerful signals that she intends to be an activist member of the Clinton team. Her failure in championing the major health care reform initiative in 1994 may have deterred her from an all-out push for universal health coverage. But as she made clear in her remarks to the Democratic convention, she intends to push forward with a step-by-step approach, especially for providing health care to needy children.
All these forces at work - the budget, Congress, history, Gore and Hillary Clinton - suggest that a second Clinton administration will tilt toward the New Democrat approach of the past two years, avoiding the liberal cast of the 1994 health care debacle.
The chief reason for this is not Clinton's good faith - but the fact that his party needs to face congressional elections in 1998 and his vice president must stand on the Clinton record in 2000.