But it's not good enough. When I go back to Kansas, I still find a lot of people, we got oil prices, the worst they've been in 25 years.
A lot of independent oil bins are going broke in our state. So I think it's better, but we're not there yet, and we need to do a lot of things.
Look at entitlement programs. The thing we have to do, not because we're on this program, is to provide some incentives for capital formation.
And make it stick. Either you're going to eliminate the capital gains tax, or you're going to index it, or reduce it at least.
Are you going to make a push on that, or are you just going to make a push on it?
After his performance in the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, do you think Ross Perot has peaked as a force in American politics?
Well, I think he's disappeared, but probably not for long. He hasn't done much since NAFTA.
From my understanding, I've talked with him since the NAFTA debate. He intends to take a hard look at health care.
I don't know what his plan is, but I think he has some real problems with the big role of government in the Clinton plan.
Turning over one-seventh the economy in health care to the federal government is something that a lot of people aren't going to like.
Going back to Tim's question from before, do Republicans know enough about General Powell's views, particularly on domestic issues,
to feel comfortable with him on the ticket in either position in 96?
No, I don't think so yet. I think we like to think we do, but I don't know if anybody who's had a visit with General...
I don't think he'd sit down and talk to anybody right now on anything. He's busy writing his book.
He doesn't want to do much else for six months or a year, but certainly he could be a very powerful force in politics if he chose to do that.
What do you expect from this commission on entitlements that the President has set up with Senator Danforth and Senator Kerry?
Well, so far we haven't named our members because the White House hasn't named their members, and if they're going to stack the deck, it's going to be totally a waste of time.
Just a quick question on that. Secretary of Treasury Benson on this program two weeks ago said that he would be in favor of raising the retirement age for Social Security to 68 as a way of saving money. Would you look at that?
Well, that's one way. There are dozens of ways to save money, but I think the important thing is to take a look at entitlement.
You can't put two-thirds of them. I remember that program very well. You can't take that much off the budget. I think Secretary Benson is being responsible.
And you'd look at that idea.
We'd look at all the ideas. We did it in 1983 in a bipartisan way.
Vice President Gore suggested that means testing in effect those who were more affluent Americans would receive fewer benefits, entitlement benefits. Would you look at means testing?
Particularly in Part B Medicare, we're about a $38 billion subsidy. We pay 75 percent of everybody's premium, whether they're billionaires, billionaires, or flat broke.
How about means testing across the board for all entitlements?
Well, certainly it's something we're going to have to do. Let's look at it. Let's get the commission established. Let's get the White House on board. We're prepared to name our members on the Senate side and the House side.
How about cost of living adjustments, COAs, across the board? Look at those.
Well, we went through that in 1985. I thought it was a pretty good idea at the time.
I think you have to be very careful, though, that you, if you're going to do anything like that, you target only upper income. You don't go after moderate or low income Social Security recipients.
It is the new year and you're now Mr. Nice Guy. Doesn't President Clinton deserve some credit for the improvement in the economy?
I was a Wall Street Journalist. Somebody said Bugs Bunny would have done it, but, you know, I don't know who that was. The old Doll's back. I knew it wouldn't last long.
I give the President some credit, I think, but all we really had is a big, big tax increase in NAFTA with the help of Republicans.
So I think he gets some credit, but so do Republicans, so does President Bush. Don't forget about the Bush recovery, in my view, is well on its way.
Senator Doll, thanks for joining us. Have a good 1994. And coming next, we'll find out what Mary McGrory thinks might be in store for Bill Clinton and the United States in 1994.
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Mary McGry, welcome. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. Senator Dole mentioned in our earlier segment that once you get into politics and on the national arena, everything's fair game.
We have been debating amongst ourselves as journalists the whole issue of covering the private lives of candidates. You've covered politics brilliantly for a long time. What's your sense of it?
I go up one side and down the other like a lot of people. I think I'm totally ambivalent on it. On the one hand, I think it's none of my business. On the other hand, I think everything about a president is of concern and an occasion of legitimate inquiry by the public.
The public said last 1992 that they really didn't care about Bill Clinton's private life. They were not interested. He told them it wasn't very good and they said, well, okay, maybe you'll be very good on programs.
Mary McGry used the word ambivalent, Ron. A good word.
I think everyone is fundamentally ambivalent. I mean, I think we have one problem is that we've clearly crossed the threshold. I mean, between 1988 and 1992, we are in a situation where these kinds of charges are going to be looked into and going to be aired.
But I think that we have to be very careful and we have to have very high standards of proof. David Brock, who wrote the article in the American Spectator that aired many of the latest charges, had a rather whiny column in the Washington Post this morning saying that he was being kicked around unfairly.
But the fact is that he seemed to throw in anything that these troopers would tell him without any additional evidence. I think we have to have better standards than that when we're dealing with a sitting president of the United States or, for that matter, anybody else.
Anybody can say anything. Anybody can say they saw anything. And simply saying so does not make it so. And I think we have to be very careful about how we proceed in this rather uncharted terrain that we're now in.
But there has been no specific White House denial to the specific allegations in Mr. Brock's article, Bob Novak.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, there has been no denials. And I have to come to Mr. Brock's defense because there's an awful lot of people in this town who are attacking Mr. Brock for doing much of what the Los Angeles Times did.
So the fact is, Mr. Brock is a conservative and he wrote, I think, a brilliant treatise on the Anita Hill affair. And so he is very politically incorrect.
The problem is, I believe, there's two essential problems. It's not really whether the American people have decided they're not interested because they voted for President Clinton.
The question is, did President Clinton lie when he went on 60 Minutes and indicate that he had turned over a new leaf on his personal relations? I don't know if that's relevant, but I think if the American people thought he had lied and campaigned under false pretenses, I think that they would resent it.
The other question is, did he use the power of the office to get the highway patrolman to either give them information or to do something else? So those are questions that are extremely difficult.
I say one thing, Tim, that if we continue this, and this is where I'm ambivalent, I don't think you can say, well, we're going to stop right here.
I think we have to look at every single candidate that runs for president and then we go on a sex patrol. So it's a very troubling question.
Senator Dole said that marital infidelity is an issue that you can look at to determine one's character.
But to your point, Bob, if we begin to look at the 96 race and give everyone truth serum on this issue, what else will be on the radar screen?
What other issues will be discussed if all the time and all the emphasis is spent discussing sex?
Well, look, certainly in 1992, there were very few people by election day, I think, out there in America who did not understand what Bill Clinton meant when he said that he caused pain in his marriage.
I mean, we certainly have crossed a certain kind of point where people have accepted the idea that they could have a president who has failed to perhaps keep all the vows of his marriage.
And I don't think that spending a lot of time trying to isolate specific instances where that has been the case necessarily gets you very far.
And yet, Mary McGrory, if one wants to be the leader of the free world and be the moral leader of the United States and talk about illegitimacy and about absence with young people, shouldn't he or she be a role model?
Yes, definitely. No question about it.
But how do we enforce that? We don't.
Or it is, in fact, difficult where we are at least ambivalent in approaching it.
Well, one of the most difficult things, Jim, is that we as members of the news media are put in the position of being a filter for what the people should know.
Because there's a lot more in this whole case that reporters have dug up and they haven't printed.
So that is an extremely difficult entertainment to say this is fit for public consumption and this is not.
It's not just merely a standard of high proof. It's a standard of acceptability by the public.
We have to take a break right here. We'll be back after this message to talk about what happened in 93 that we liked and some expectations for 1994.
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We're back, Mary McGrory. We criticize the administration an awful lot on this program. It's part of our job.
But in 1993, was there any member of the administration who deserves a gold star?
Yes. In my view, yes.
Hazel O'Leary, the secretary of energy, undertook a very bold enterprise.
She wanted to tell the secrets of our atomic history to the world.
Her premise was that if the rest of the world is going to disarm themselves of their nuclear weapons,
we have to tell the truth about what we've been doing to encourage them to tell the truth about what they've been doing.
So she just put the whole government through a kind of a car wash and said, here is what we did.
We did not report all of our atomic nuclear tests.
We experimented on some, I think it's 600 people without, most of them, majority without their knowledge,
including feeding radioactive cereal to retarded teenagers at a Massachusetts school.
That's pretty tough. Anyway, she has done all that.
And the hope is that the government will respond and give up all its secrets now and that other nations will follow suit.
Ron, any gold stars?
I think that one of the best things that happened in 1993 was that some of the old debates finally got broken, crime being one.
We're now on the brink of finally moving past a crime bill that has been deadlocking in Congress for years and years.
And we can start to move forward on some of the other issues that we haven't really addressed yet,
like how to train people for the 21st century, welfare reform, and other issues like that.
We're cleaning out the old so maybe we can start with the new.
Bob Miller?
And up on the table is Mickey Canada, the trade representative.
He barely got in the administration and everybody had kind of low marks for him in the campaign.
And he was quite a substantial role in getting NAFTA passed and the negotiation of the Gap Treaty.
So I think he was an upper achiever.
I think Secretary of Treasury Benson was very instrumental in NAFTA, Bob Novak.
He never got the credit he deserved for pushing that inside or encouraging the President to be passionate about it,
and I think deserves a little bit of credit for it.
Mary Magrory, looking forward to 1994, we're here.
Yes.
What is your best wish, your best expectation for the United States in this year?
Well, I hope we, like Ron, I hope we do welfare reform.
I think that is the most pressing domestic problem.
I hope we behave in the way we like to think of ourselves in foreign affairs,
but I guess that's out of the question.
I mean, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, we're just not being the kind of country we think we are, we hope we are.
And I hope we, it seems to me we're in the middle of a very intricate deal.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I noticed in the paper today that our ambassador to China says China's human rights record is getting better.
I haven't seen that.
I saw in the same paper that we're going to maybe recognize Vietnam and lift the embargo.
So maybe they're going to do one thing for the left, Vietnam, and one thing for the right, China.
That has to be the final thought, Mary Magrory.
Oh my goodness.
We're out of time.
Just started.
Mary Magrory, Ron Bronstein, Bob Novak, thank you.
My wish is that we continue to talk about and take care of the kids of this country.
Start your 94 with the very best in news and information tomorrow and today,
and then the NBC Nightly News with Mr. Tom Brokaw tomorrow night.
That's all for today.
We'll be back next week.
If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press.
See you then.
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