Common Cents: A Retiring Six-Term Congressman Reveals How Congress Really Works - and What We Must Do To Fix It.

• Author: Miller, Matthew

In December 1993, I was among the staff that went with President Clinton to Representative Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky's district outside Philadelphia for her conference on the future of entitlements. A few months earlier, Margolies-Mezvinsky had bravely cast the deciding vote for the President's budget in the House, a vote she paid for with her seat in 1994 in a heavily Republican district. Most pols seek pork payoffs for votes like this, but Margolies-Mezvinsky was different. She asked the president to participate in this conference instead, with the refreshing attitude that if she educated her constituents on our long-term budget problems, they'd come to respect why she voted for the President's package as an important (though with its continued $200 billion deficits, inadequate) first step toward solving them.

The prospect of Clinton talking Social Security, Medicare, or federal pensions had thrown the White House into convulsions of anxiety. The day was carefully scripted, to say the least. And by the usual standards, the conference was a success. That is, no administration official gave any indication that we'd consider doing anything that might be unpopular with anyone.

But the postmortem among staff members at the train station made clear just how thoroughly we had deceived ourselves on the subject of entitlements. As Laura Tyson (now head of the White House's National Economic Council) and Treasury official Alicia Munnell complained that the Administration had taken unfair shots for having ducked the big entitlement choices, I thought, "Wait a minute. I know it's no fun to be on the receiving end of an all-day chorus of 'You didn't do enough.' But it's one thing to stick to our storyline publicly; we didn't really believe it, here among ourselves, did we?"

We had ducked the hardest choices. The criticisms were fair. I was overcome with a sinking feeling--that maybe I didn't belong on this team--when Minnesota Congressman Tim Penny, also a panelist that day, turned up on the platform for the ride back to Washington. At last, I thought, a kindred soul.

I sat with a pensive Penny on the Amtrak that night, and found myself admiring a politician with decency and commitment. An ardent deficit "hawk," he was still smarting from the defeat of a big spending-cut package he'd crafted with Republican John Kasich. (The White House had led the campaign against it.) Penny seemed almost naive when he asked me: Was the administration as cynical...