This points to a more modest approach that, in fact, matches the one Washington pursued during both the Reagan and Bush years. The Medicare cost problem will not find one grand, all-encompassing solution. If the failure of the Clinton health plan pointed to a gradual approach to the problem of guaranteeing universal health coverage, the failure of the Republicans on Medicare points to gradualism in solving the Medicare cost problem. The Republicans were not wrong in thinking that the country might support more efficient approaches to ensuring a cleaner environment. If there is any ground for common action here, it lies in pursuing effective but less intrusive approaches to regulation that rely on incentives for good environmental behavior.
Conservatives ought to welcome more efficient and less intrusive government.
Liberals should welcome efforts to make the federal government, whose role they rightly defend, more effective. On education, a useful debate is possible only if some mistaken ideas that are held to as a matter of high principle are abandoned. Republicans are stuck on the notion that national education standards are a grave threat to local control of education. They have thus been wary of national action on an issue that is so clearly of national urgency. They would do better to admit that education is inescapably a national problem and then to argue over the best ways to structure the federal government's response.