It's Not Polite to Point

By Rick Horowitz

Congressman Cipher likes punctuation as much as the next guy. Commas and periods are his favorites -- he uses them all the time. And parentheses. He uses parentheses whenever he has to say something big about something complicated and he hopes nobody will notice. This happens quite a lot.

He's not exactly radical on the subject -- Wally T. ("Flip") Cipher is not exactly radical on any subject. When it comes to punctuation, the heir to the styling-gel millions and dangling thread in the Great Republican Tapestry figures he's pretty much normal. But there are limits. The way he sees it, President Clinton has stepped over the line.

An exclamation point?

It was painful enough for Cipher, watching the president grinning and waving at that White House budget ceremony of his, taking that big fat felt-tip pen and drawing a big fat zero where the deficit used to be. But an exclamation point?

Rubbing it in. That's all he was doing -- rubbing it in.

Congressman Cipher is not a happy man these days. He didn't like having to bite his tongue for so long about That Other Thing, that thing that everyone knew was going to finish Clinton once and for all.

"He's going down like a rock," their strategists told them, their strategists with their fancy surveys and their secret memos. "Don't say a word." So he didn't say a word. None of them did. But the president didn't go down like a rock -- he went down like a rubber ball.

And now the strategists are telling them it's OK to let him have it with both barrels, but it may be too late; they may have missed the moment. The president is right back up there in the polls, higher than ever in the polls, and he's standing there grinning and waving and drawing big fat zeros where the deficit used to be.

Rats.

Not that Congressman Cipher has anything against wiping out the deficit. After all, that's how he first got elected to Congress. ("Unbalanced? Vote for Cipher.") That's how he got re-elected. ("Cipher Means Zero.") And he's perfectly ready to do it again, to put himself forward as the man who single-handedly restored fiscal sanity to the entire budget process. (That might be a bit of a stretch, but he kind of likes the way it sounds. "Cipher: Fighting for Sanity.")

But not if Clinton is hogging all the credit.

Not if Clinton is going to keep reminding people how he didn't get a single Republican vote when he first started cutting the deficit back in '93 or whenever it was. Why doesn't he talk about last year? Last year there was a bipartisan budget deal; last year he had plenty of help from Republicans. So what's he doing going off on his own again, with all these new programs?

"Big government."

Cipher tries the words on for size. They're comfortable, the way a favorite old shirt is comfortable. A good thing -- that's the latest advice from the strategists: Attack the president's new budget as a return to "big government." It's always worked before. But...

People don't like "big government." Cipher understands that. But they seem to like child care. More teachers in the schools. More medical research. And Medicare and Social Security -- they really, really like Medicare and Social Security. When you break it down that way, it doesn't look so much like "big government." It looks more like "nice things."

"Big government."

Cipher isn't sure it's going to work again. He has the nagging feeling that something's missing.

"Big government!"

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

2/3/98