12 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, November 14, 1995 House GOP is routed by public opinion polls AtOIW M -__-_ SPENDING Continued from Page 1 The Washington Post WASHINGTON-When the House Republican Conference gathered be- hind closed doors yesterday on Day One of the Shutdown, Speaker Newt Gingrich's remarks on the budget ne- gotiations were so perfunctory that few could remember precisely what he said. No Knute Rockne-style exhortations, not even the usual Gingrichian analo- gies to the Civil War or Greek history or the Duke of Wellington. Charlie Bass, a freshman Republican from New Hampshire, said, "Newt told us what we had been seeing on television." Couldthisbethe moment of truth 4 that House Major If this ity Leader Dick Armey foresaw not balaf back at the dawn of ihe Republican seven ye revolution - the moment when will h V e kesmight buckl ? internal r uner te pressue The answer ap- baefn pears to be not quite, not yet. seven. P4 On the battlefield of public-opinion - Rep. S polls, House Re- publicans are get- ting routed. There are whispers of tension at the top, of tactical disagreements among the speaker and his lieutenants. The freshman troops, at once the rearguard and vanguard of the self-proclaimed revolution, keep looking for turf on which they can take a glorious last stand. Press secretaries and publicists, message handlers for the rhetorical war with the Democrats, alternate between testiness and an all's-well joviality that betrays an inner uncertainty. But there are no indications of seri- ous panic or disarray within Team Gingrich, no indications that any on his side are about to break ranks. According to interviews with a di- verse array of Republican legislators, the House GOP remains unified on one non-negotiable item: a seven-year bal- anced-budget plan certified by the Con- gressional Budget Office. They expect Clinton will win some concessions along the way - first on Medicare, later on education and environmental programs - but that they will emerge from the give-and-take with the balanced budget. Sources close to the leadership said there were a few points of internal dis- agreement during the first day of nego- tiations with the Democrats, butGingrich and Armey were said to be fully aware ibudj aced 1 ars .. an revolt. Galarn eriod. Sam Brow that they could not compromiseonthe tt IS seven-year budget even if they were 11 inclined to, which You they insisted they . OU were not. Sam Brown- back of Kansas, a Y u leader of the HouserGOP fresh- men, said any such compromise Hy would provoke a revolt. wnback "If this budget R-Kan. is not balanced in seven years, the same thing will AP PHOTO U.S. Postal Service carrier Robin Pearson parks in Detroit yesterday. Postal Service employees are not part of the shutdown. Govenunent ht centers on budget forecasting diferecesoKi; unsuccessfully tried to broker a com- promise before Clinton vetoed the stop- gap funding bill Monday night, turned to thecameras and said, "Mr. President, you make things very difficult with the speech you just made." Federal buildings and national parks were forced to shutter across the na- tion as all but "essential" workers - such as air-traffic controllers, border guards and military personnel - were told to go home. Employees at the Agriculture and Energy departments kept working because the President and Congress have already agreed on their 1996 spending bills. At the Capi- tol, many cafeterias were closed, but the congressional franking operation carried on as usual. An overnight ABC News poll found that 46 percent of those surveyed blamed the Republicans for the stale- mate and 27 percent faulted Clinton. While lawmakers in the more ideo- logical House - personified by Gingrich - appeared thrilled with the dispute, Dole and many other senators looked like they had been invited to the wrong costume ball. "I'm sick and tired of this," one GOP senator said. "We look like babies, and the Presi- dent is scoring points." The argument between Clinton and the Republicans is rooted in an arcane debate about the "numbers," Washing- ton parlance for the estimates of future economic growth and government rev- enue. In order to theoretically eliminate the budget defcit in seven years, the Republicans have relied on Congres- sional Budget Office figures that are slightly more conservative than esti- mates by mainstream Wall Streetecono- mists. The White House uses estimates gen- erated by the Office of Management and Budget, which generally tracks the mainstream economists. Making these sorts of predictions is a highly inexact science - one year in the future is difficult to predict, while seven years in the future is pure guesswork - but even slight differences can mean hundreds of billions of dollars less - or more - in government revenue. In his address, the President empha- sized that using last-minute emergency measures to force him to choose be- tween a government shutdown and ac- ceptance of the Republican budget had been a Gingrich strategy since April. happen here to our leadership that hap- pened to George Bush when he broke his promise of no new taxes," said Brownback, who had spoken twice with Gingrich over the past 24 hours. "You will have an internal revolt. You have to balance in seven. Period." The freshmen, whom Gingrich once half-jokingly referred to as "a third party," have played an unusually strong role in the budget debate, twice draw- ing what they called lines in the sand on issues that they insisted had to be part of any deal: elimination of the Depart- ment of Commerce and defunding of non-profit groups that lobby on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post WASHINGTON-The federal gov- ernment ground to a halt yesterday as a result of a knock-down, drag-out fight over one-tenth of 1 percent. As the haggling continues between President Clinton and the Republican Congress over a stopgap funding bill, the biggest remaining sticking point seems to be which set of economic assumptions should govern the ongo- ing negotiations over the budget - the more pessimistic assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office or the ever-so-slightly more optimistic fore- cast of the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget. These small differences in assump- tions about economic growth, inflation and interest rates, when compounded and projected over seven years, add up to one very big number-$475 billion. That's how much the projected federal deficit would be reduced by using the rosier OMB assumptions. Adopting these administration assumptions would mean that one-third less in spending cuts would be required to balance the budget over the next seven years than if the CBO assumptions were used. Whiletheir ramificationsmaybesig- nificant, the differences in economic assumptions themselves are rather nig- gling - well within the margin of error for economic forecasting. "In economic forecasting terms, these two forecasts are essentially the same is as likely to be true as the other," said David Berson, president ofthe National Association of Business Economists. "So I'm not sure what this fight is really about." What it's about is pride and politics, observed Robert Reischauer, who re- cently stepped down as CBO director. The Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees, Reischauer said, have been strongly critical of OMB's economic assump- tions for many months, making it very difficult now to back away from those statements without running the risk that voters will accuse them now of fiscal gimmickry. Clinton, however, has shown he can be flexible on such matters. In 1993, in his first State of the Union address, the new president declared that he would adopt the CBO's more pessimistic eco- nomic forecasts as the basis for his own first budget "so that no one could say I was estimating my way out of this dif- ficulty." But by this June, the president was unveiling his own plan to balance the federal budget within 10 years. It's never too late. join us. Al~e wama American diplomacy goes on the defensive around the globe + .,; . _ .. .M fr ' 1 ti i s ' ^ .ur Los Angeles Times CAIRO, Egypt-The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the largest American diplo- matic structure in the world, dominates this dusty city's horizon. Two stone towers cover a full block, dwarfing the surrounding villas, university campus and government offices. They seem to symbolize American might. But the embassy, secured far behind an 8-foot-high concrete wall on streets where parking is banned and heavily armed police patrol, also proclaims American vulnerability. Like a host of new embassies or re- cent additions from Bangladesh to Botswana, the mission here is a virtual fortress. Its perimeter is mob-resistant. Walls are bomb-safe. Windows are bulletproof. Roofs are designed to con- ceal sharpshooters. U.S. Marines stand guard behind bullet-resistant booths. The Cairo embassy reflects how vis- ibly America abroad is in retreat and how diplomacy, once a glamorous job that involved mostly political schmoozing, cajoling and convincing, is increasingly about the skills of survival. In Pakistan, two U.S. diplomats were killed and one wounded in March by gunfire while traveling to work at the U.S. Consulate General in Karachi in a van that had been dispatched to provide an added measure of safety. Round- the-clock Pakistani guards were subse- quently posted at the homes of all em- bassy employees in Islamabad. As recently as September, an armor- piercing, rocket-propelled grenade, nor- mally used against tanks, was fired from a busy street at the U.S. Embassy in central Moscow. And in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, security deteriorated so sharply that the State Department closed the U.S. Embassy there when U.S. troops ended their mission in a U.N. peacekeeping force this spring. Over the last 16 years, U.S. embassies and consulates have been attacked, bombed, mobbed or seized more than 360 times. And409 American diplomatic personnel have been killed, taken hostage or injured - more than during the previ- ous two centuries combined. The threats now range from Muslim suicide bombers in the Middle East to drug lords and Maoist insurgents in Latin American. The bombing Monday of the national guard training headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was not technically an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission, but the American trainers working there with their Saudi counterparts were Defense Department employees and constituted a major U.S. presence in the kingdom. Even those charged with protecting U.S. foreign missions have been tar- geted. In Cairo, the embassy's senior security officer was wounded when Muslim extremists opened fire on him en route to work eight years ago. Before and since then, the American mission in Egypt and its diplomatic staff have faced "almost continuous threats" on a par with the most danger- ous U.S. posts in Lima; Peru; Bogota, Colombia; and Beirut, Lebanon, ac- cording to State Department officials. Envoys at America's 163 embassies and 84 consulates now face greater peacetime restrictions on their move- ments and contacts than at any time since Benjamin Franklin opened the first American legation in Paris in the 1770s, U.S. officials say. The State Department's office of in- telligence and threat analysis has pre- pared a pamphlet called "Terrorist Tac- tics and Practices." It includes a"Bomb Threat Checklist," gives accounts of recent embassy evacuations and pro- vides a primer on surface-to-air mis- siles used against civilian planes. Yeltsin speaks to Russians on TV Los Angeles Times MOSCOW-President Boris Yeltsin looked remarkably healthier yesterday in his secondtelevision appearance since an Oct. 26 heart ailment sent him into the hospital and sent the diplomatic world into anew bout of Kremlin-watch- ing. Dressed in a dark suit and tie for the nearly 10-minute interview, Yeltsin sought to assure Russians that parlia- mentary elections will go ahead as planned next month and that he remains firmly in charge. "I am holding and controlling the wheel of this large boat that is Russia and I have my finger on the pulse," the I Y 4{ JI m