The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, a Bosnia update with a report and an excerpt from Defense Sec. Perry's press conference today, three ways to look at the economy, as told to Paul Solman, Jeffrey Kaye, and Elizabeth Farnsworth, our weekly political analysis with Paul Gigot and Elizabeth Drew, substituting for Mark Shields, and a David Gergen dialogue with Barbara Kingsolver, author of High Tide in Tucson. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Defense Sec. Perry said today NATO forces are not going to Bosnia to fight a war; they are going to keep a peace. He spoke at the headquarters of the 1st U.S. Armored Division in Germany. Soldiers from that division would be sent to Bosnia as part of the NATO force.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense: We do expect that there will be some opposition, some resistance to this peace agreement. We do not expect organized opposition. We do not expect to face any armies. Our force is quite capable of taking care of itself no matter what they confront, but we're not going in there to fight a war, and we will not go in if we believe that's what we have to do. We have to be prepared for this disorganized--we have to be prepared for harassment from individual groups, and we will be prepared for that.

MR. LEHRER: The leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia have promised U.S. and other troops will be safe in Bosnia. A White House spokesman said today those promises are in letters from the three to President Clinton. They were written in Dayton on the final day of the Bosnian peace talks. The leader of the rebel Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, met in Pale today with local Serbian leaders who are unhappy with the peace agreement. Yesterday, Karadzic was reportedly persuaded by Serbian President Milosevic to accept the peace deal. We'll have more on Bosnia right after this News Summary. Most of the five million public service employees of France went on strike today. Many also marched to protest the government's plan to change retirement and health benefits and to privatize key public utilities. The one-day walkout brought public transportation to a halt. Banks, government offices, and most schools closed throughout the country. Another strike is planned for next week. The people of Ireland voted today on whether divorce should be legal. The proposed constitutional amendment would allow divorce for couples who have been separated during four out of five years. The predominantly Roman Catholic country rejected a similar measure in 1986 by a two to one margin. Today's results will be announced tomorrow. Westinghouse has completed its purchase of CBS. Westinghouse is now the nation's largest broadcasting company. The deal passed a final hurdle Wednesday when the Federal Communications Commission approved it. A spokesman said today Westinghouse paid $5.4 billion for CBS. Louis Malle died last night of cancer in California. The French- born film director was best known for such movies as "Pretty Baby," "My Dinner with Andre," and most particularly "Au Revoir, Les Infants," which was about Malle's childhood loss of a friend during the German occupation of France. Louis Malle was 63 years old. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a Bosnia update, economy concerns, our weekly political analysis, and a David Gergen dialogue. UPDATE - MAKING PEACE

MR. LEHRER: First tonight, making the peace in Bosnia work. Diane Tong of Independent Television News reports on how the Bosnians are adjusting to the new reality.

DIANE TONG, ITN: Convoys of aid rolling into Serbia. There's a renewed sense of determination among the international community to ensure that the long-awaited peace plan for the Balkans is at last underway, and despite recent reports of violations of the cease-fire, the peace juggernaut is now well on track. There are growing indications too that the peace deal struck in Dayton, Ohio, is finally being taken on board by the Bosnian Serb leadership. The leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, and other Serb rebels are understood to have grudgingly accepted the deal. Today Karadzic met senior Bosnian Serb officials in Pale to talk about the fate of Serb-held suburbs in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. In Sarajevo, the Bosnian prime minister, Haris Siladjzic, appealed to the Bosnian Serbs to take an active part in post-war political, economic, and cultural life. He said the days of destructive Serb nationalism were now over.

HARIS SILADJZIC, Prime Minister, Bosnia: Serbian nationalism will never be dead. But the negative Serbian nationalism has now been, well to a great extent, defeated, because the project of Greater Serbia has failed.

MS. TONG: The new optimism in the Balkans is not just being displayed by the politicians. Among the people too, there's a sea change like here in the town of Bosanski Samac. The contentious issue of the northern Bosnia corridor here has been put aside for international arbitration at some later date under the peace agreement. One soldier leaving from the front line said he hoped that it was the last time he was going out into the trenches.

MR. LEHRER: Defense Sec. Perry laid out some of the details of how U.S. and other NATO troops will be deployed in Bosnia. He did so at a press conference in Germany, where most of the American troops will be coming from.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense: We have a real opportunity for peace, and we should seize it. It is time to stop the killing. I have just finished meeting with 700 of the military leadership of the 1st Armored Division. I have answered for them the following questions: Why are we asking them to go to Bosnia? Who will go with them, what other nations? What is their mission? When will they go? And when will they come back? Let me summarize briefly the why. I gave them what I call an iron logic, which connects U.S. vital national interest with the President's decision to make a commitment to Bosnia. And the first part of that logic is that the United States has vital political, economic, and security interests in Europe, and that the second part of it is the war in Bosnia threatens these interests, not just because of the war as it has been conducted, but because the danger that that war would expand either to the South or to the North and become a wider Balkan war. The third part of that is that we now have, for the first time in four years, a real opportunity to achieve a peace, and that to seize this opportunity not only must NATO go in for peace implementation force but the U.S. must commit to be part of that force. The peace agreement will simply be nullified if the United States is not a part of this force. The peace enforcement mission is providing the security environment which allows many other things to happen, but things for which the peace enforcement team is not responsible for making happen. The IFOR, the enforcement team, will not be resettling refugees; they will be providing an environment which allows that function to be going on. They will not be involved in economic restructuring or in rebuilding the infrastructure. All of these are very important civil functions which will be going along in parallel with the IFOR mission. The principal task of IFOR is to provide a security environment which allows all these other very critical tasks to take place. The--in order for this mission to be successful, in order for us to even agree to go into Bosnia, we require agreement from all of the parties to accept the NATO peace implementation force. We are not going in there to fight a war. We're not planning to fight our way in, and we do not expect organized opposition. We do expect, recognizing that there has been years of war and hatreds having built up, we do expect that there may be some individuals or some gangs who will not accept the decision of their leaders, will not accept the signatures that were made at Dayton, and therefore, we are going in very well armed and with very firm rules of engagement. Our forces will be quite capable of taking care of themselves, but, again, we're not going in to fight a war, we're not going in to deal with organized resistance from an army, and we will not go in if that is what we have to face. We have casualties every week just through accidents that occur. Being-- running an army, even in peacetime, even conducting training missions has risks associated. We--even our training missions we run at the edge of performance so that our soldiers will be at peak efficiency. And so we do have accidents, and we do have casualties. If we go into an operation like this where there are going to be some disaffected individuals and gangs, we may expect some of them to try to harass, try to attack our troops. We are well trained to deal with that. We know there are millions of mines in the country, and so even though somebody's not deliberately planting a mine for our troops, we could have accidentally run over a mine, therefore, our training is intensive in mine awareness and how to deal with mines in the country. Now we know that the weather is very bad, particularly in the winter there, and there may be automobile accidents. There are many ways which casualties could occur.

MR. LEHRER: Perry said he hopes to begin withdrawing U.S. troops six or seven months after they are deployed. The peace plan calls for a complete withdrawal after one year. FOCUS - BOOM OR BUST?

MR. LEHRER: Today, the Friday after Thanksgiving, is the traditional first day of the Christmas shopping season. It has also become the traditional day for looking at consumer confidence and other public attitudes and concerns about the economy. We follow that tradition tonight from several perspectives, beginning with two reports, one by our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, of WGBH-Boston, the second by Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles.

MR. SOLMAN: For quite a few years now, the American economy has been growing at a healthy 4.2 percent annual growth in the most recent quarter, yet conventional wisdom has it that Americans are very nervous about their economic present and even more so about their future. Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles has talked to conservative writer George Gilder who takes an unconventional upbeat view of the economy, but first, the more sobering perspective from economist Frank Levy at MIT. MIT's Frank Levy says we're uneasy with the economy because of the changing nature of economic growth in recent years.

FRANK LEVY, Economist: What's happening now that we're getting what we wanted, we wanted--for a long time we wanted the economy to become more efficient, and that's happening. And in the last several years we've wanted all this to take place with less government spending, which means a smaller safety net, and when you put those two things together, the economy becoming more efficient and a smaller safety net, you get more inequality, and you get a very wild ride.

MR. SOLMAN: Levy often speaks on this subject to folks of all ages. Less government spending only means that government's growing less quickly than the economy as a whole, but to Levy, it also means that the victims of economic efficiency are less protected by government programs more nearly on their own. Now, the efficiency Levy's talking about, and its mixed blessings, are probably familiar to the NewsHour audience. Regularly, over the years, you've seen factories like this one. A skeleton crew spends most of its time waiting for some problem to arise. Here, engine blocks are being turned out by computers instead of union scale workers. When a line goes down, a technician or two speeds to fix it, and running at all, good new jobs done by highly educated professionals, who form the backbone of modern manufacturing. This is frankly the story. Going, going, gone are the blue collar jobs created by the technology of the 40's, 50's, and 60's, which paid good money to the people with a modest education who used to man factories like this one, replaced, behind the scenes, by the white and gold collar jobs of the new technology. Levy's worry is that the new technological growth is creating a widening income gap between those with education and those without it. And it's been the beneficiaries of the new growth who tend to really understand what's been happening. Frank Levy's home is Newton, Massachusetts, and this is a ninth-grade classroom in Newton North High School, where even the freshmen know the score.

FEMALE STUDENT: Well, if you don't go to college, you won't get a really good job when you grow up, and then basically you won't have a life. You really need to go to college 'cause it's like a required essential of living in the 90's.

MR. SOLMAN: No life at all, you say?

FEMALE STUDENT: Well, I mean, you might get a job that's going to pay $5 an hour, if you're lucky, and that's not going to help you survive if you have kids and a family.

MR. SOLMAN: To kids here, college is a prerequisite, and to many not just any college.

MALE STUDENT: I haven't even decided what I want to do for a living yet, but whatever it is, I mean, it obviously helps to have- -to go to a good college and get a good degree there, because it's- -people would rather see someone with a degree from John Hopkins than a degree from like Massachusetts State Community College.

MR. SOLMAN: Frank Levy thinks the kids are right on the money.

FRANK LEVY: The biggest change in the labor market in the last 15 years has been what's happened to the earnings of high school graduates. If you go back to the late 70's, the average 30-year- old guy with a high school diploma was making about twenty-seven or twenty-eight thousand dollars in today's dollars. If you look today, the average 30-year-old guy with a high school diploma is making about $21,000. That's a tremendous decline, and those kids obviously have the message. The issue is those kids are in really one of the better school systems in the country, and who are in a position to do something about increasing educational skills.

MR. SOLMAN: Meanwhile, kids in less lustrous school systems, says Levy, are in an increasingly worse position. TV viewers have seen footage like this so often it's become almost a stereotype. At most schools, kids focusing on football instead of physics, for the majority school is a social scene, not a training ground for the post-industrial job market. But it's not just kids who are feeling the pressure, nor even just blue collar adults. The center of Newton, Massachusetts, is high rent by almost any standard. Suits at Mr. Sid's can run $2,000 or more. But out on the street literally everyone we stopped voiced the same anxiety about their economic future.

MAN ON STREET: I think that the general climate is that everything is a lot less certain.

OLDER WOMAN ON STREET: I think the economy of our country is rather--can't predict a thing.

WOMAN ON STREET: I think a lot of people are feeling they're walking around with a target, a bull's-eye on their back.

MR. SOLMAN: A professor we've talked to, from Harvard, says the following. He says, look, most people now are on this kind of track, going forward; they don't have upward earnings to look forward to. And then are a few people, a slim stratum of the society, that are going like that, but the problem is even those people are worried now because they say, gee, if I lose the job I'm on, look how much further it is that I'll have to fall. Is that a fair description do you think of what's happening?

SECOND MAN ON STREET: I think it is. I think the minority of people are basically on a slow upscale, where the majority is the status quo, and people who are earning higher incomes have to be somewhat concerned because basically those that were in upper- paying jobs when they lose their jobs, they're going down a notch or two, okay.

MR. SOLMAN: And they're falling further than they would have in the past.

SECOND MAN ON STREET: Correct.

MR. SOLMAN: This prompted our final question for Frank Levy. Does fear of falling explain the anxiety that besets even those with good jobs?

FRANK LEVY: There are a lot of things going on right now. In the labor market, employees are being judged more on performance day to day, and that creates a lot more uncertainty. For people with really exceptional talents like Michael Eisner or Michael Jordan there are huge salaries, there are a lot more two-income families because you need two incomes to hedge against this labor market, you have female-headed families at the bottom of the distribution that are out of the economy, and throughout all of this, you have this growing split between workers of different educational levels. All of this is coming out of the kind of economic growth that's making the economy more competitive, but because we're doing this, we're going through this period with a small safety net, it's just a very, very uncertain time.

MR. SOLMAN: Thus, the sobering view of the U.S. economy in which growth favors the few and the rest are left to fend for themselves.

JEFFREY KAYE: Uncertainty and pessimism about the U.S. economy are far from universal. The Haglund family of Denver, Colorado, grew by one about six weeks ago when Tyler was born. Meagan and Bill Haglund couldn't be more optimistic about the financial prospects for them and for their only child.

BILL HAGLUND: Boy, I'm high on life right now. I'll tell you, everything is going the way I would like it to. I mean, I got a beautiful family and a healthy little baby boy, and a decent job with a good career ahead of me.

MR. KAYE: The future looks good?

BILL HAGLUND: The future's looking bright. The future's looking real bright.

MR. KAYE: Do you agree, Meagan?

MEAGAN HAGLUND: Oh, yeah. This is his first white collar job. He doesn't come home dirty anymore.

MR. KAYE: Haglund's cleanliness is virtually guaranteed since he just started work in the clean room of a high-tech company. He had been delivering desks to that firm and to others when he was offered a job as a lab technician. As a result, Haglund, who is a high school graduate studying electronics in night school, saw his salary increase from $14,000 to $21,000 a year.

BILL HAGLUND: In three months, I'll get the degree, and hopefully, we'll re-negotiate my salary, so it'll be even more. So it's a very positive thing.

MR. KAYE: Haglund's new job is with a company with the unwieldy name of Superconducting Core Technologies, or SCT. SCT President Robert Yandrofski says the company is undergoing a growth spurt.

ROBERT YANDROFSKI, President, SCT: We've grown from 10 people less than a year ago to 60 people now, and our growth curve is pretty staggering. And that's driven largely by the demand for any type of technology that lowers the infrastructure cost for these wireless networks.

MR. KAYE: SCT is about to start production of a device that will improve the efficiency of wireless communication equipment such as cell phones. The company recently had a visit from author George Gilder. Gilder writes about technology and entrepreneurship and has become a leading advocate for the notion that telecommunications companies like SCT represent a startling turnaround in the U.S. economy.

GEORGE GILDER, Author: This kind of company epitomizes the entrepreneurial efflorescence that really drives economic growth in America. It's part of this fabric of incredibly fertile new technology and research that's going on in small American companies all around the country and which is also extending huge possibilities around the world.

MR. KAYE: And those possibilities, according to Gilder, are reflected in the good fortune of workers such as Bill Haglund, employees who, says Gilder, make the case that despite talk of an economy on the doldrums, the U.S. economy is actually vibrant and dynamic.

GEORGE GILDER: What Bill Haglund represented a few months ago probably was somebody in poverty or near poverty. And what he represents now is probably a member of the middle class on his way, because he's a part of a fast-rising new company in the wireless industry toward wealth. The idea that you have to have a college education or whatever to participate in this era is just nonsense. It's not true, and it's a figment of statisticians who miss the kind of phenomenon that Haglund represents.

MR. KAYE: The phenomenon, according to Gilder, is an explosion in job creation caused by computers. Evidence of the economic boom, as Gilder sees it, was on display last week in Las Vegas, where some 200,000 people attended the world's largest computer show, COMDEX. Gilder suggests computers are creating a tidal change in the economy.

GEORGE GILDER: Today in 1995, for the first time, there will be more personal computers sold in units than television sets. There will be more e-mail messages sent in the United States in 1995 than postal messages. These are just a tip of a vast transformation underway in our economy, where the Internet and the computers connected to it become the central nervous system of a whole new economic environment.

MR. KAYE: According to Gilder, prosperity created by U.S. domination of the growing telecommunications industry has actually narrowed the gap between rich and poor.

MR. KAYE: Are you suggesting that people's widespread despair about the economy is not related to their own personal experience?

GEORGE GILDER: Yeah. I think--I don't think there's widespread despair about the economy. I just--I don't know what these polls are particularly. I don't--I doubt their validity. What there is widespread despair about is the moral decay in the country. That's a different phenomenon that expresses itself in economic problems, and there's 70 percent more single parent families in the numbers these days, which means that if you measure by households, rather than by per capita people, you'll find that you can show that incomes aren't rising. And this is what people frequently do. They measure by households, when there's a huge increase in the number of households. Each household commands less income.

MR. KAYE: In fact, according to Gilder, companies like SCTare causing a powerful economic ripple effect by creating employment and patronizing suppliers. Some of the furniture Bill Haglund delivered is stacked up at SCT ready for the company's planned expansion, yet another example, as Gilder sees it, of the explosive power of U.S. entrepreneurial growth.

MR. SOLMAN: A few last words about these two seemingly irreconcilable points of view. Economists like Frank Levy may sound glum, but few of them are anti-growth or anti-entrepreneurship. Some even think George Gilder could eventually be proved right and that the post-industrial revolution might finally provide jobs at all levels of the economy. Others doubt it, but what all these economists tend to worry about is a wrenching transition to a rosy or not so rosy future, a transition they think we're going through now. Conservatives like Gilder, for their part, don't deny that the economy has problems, nor that America needs an educated work force; their emphasis, however, is on the need for initiative, responsibility and entrepreneurship, all qualities they believe Americans have in abundance.

MR. LEHRER: Now, how the economy impacts public opinion. Elizabeth Farnsworth has that part of the story.

MS. FARNSWORTH: With me is Andy Kohut, the director of the non- partisan Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. The Center's newest survey found a significant increase in economic anxiety among Americans. Thank you for being with us, Mr. Kohut.

ANDREW KOHUT, Times Mirror Center: Happy to be here.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So we've just seen these two different visions of the economy, one that sees the changes as producing more inequality and less security, one that sees the changes as producing more opportunity, even for those who are less educated. What are you finding in your polling?

MR. KOHUT: Well, what we're finding is just a lot more worry. Before every national election, a year before, we not only ask political questions, we ask people about their own lives. We ask them how satisfied they are with various elements of their lives and how worried they are about various financial concerns. And, across-the-board, the biggest change in this poll is a higher percentage of people saying that they're worried about things like paying for health care costs, affording, meeting the responsibilities to their children, whether it's making sure that they have enough money to put them through college, or that their kids are going to have good jobs waiting for them. And people are worried about retirement, and they're very worried, even despite the fact that we're in an economic boom era, a boom era here, and not a recession time; people are worried about their wages being cut, and they're even beginning to worry about unemployment again.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And comparing this to polls that you've done over the past say ten years, this is really a significant increase in worry?

MR. KOHUT: A significant increase over the long-term, but much higher levels of worry than a year ago, and a year ago people weren't--

MS. FARNSWORTH: How do you explain this?

MR. KOHUT: Well, I think it's a combination of things. But, first of all, the economic recovery hasn't come home to people. This has been a pink slip recovery, i.e., good economic news about IBM's profits or the macroeconomic reports are all juxtaposed with reports about layoffs and, and things that don't--that make people feel insecure about their own futures and think that big companies and affluent people are doing well, and they're not. And the second impact here is clearly the budget debate has scared many Americans. People are worried about the things that are being talked about in Washington, paying for health care costs, having enough money to retire, and putting their kids through college.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What about the argument, George Gilder made this argument in the story there, the piece, that pollsters are not quite getting the point, that the economy is improving, that the changes in the economy are providing all kinds of new jobs, but that it's not showing up in the polls for some reason?

MR. KOHUT: That's because it's not showing up in people's pocket books. Tell that to someone who earns $40,000 a year and has four- -a couple of children, trying to balance, trying to balance their own personal budget. Gilder is a technological champion of technology, if not a cheerleader for the technology, and in the long run, he may be right, but it hasn't, hasn't gotten through to many people.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And what about the argument that these may be not economic questions that are upsetting people but more social questions, or what he calls moral, I think he used the word "moral concerns" or something like that, moral problems, in other words, you feel more vulnerable because you know, you don't feel safe in your city, your income may be the same, but you don't feel safe, or you don't like the public schools, or something like that.

MR. KOHUT: Well, there's some of that too. There's some--that's true-the moral crisis--concerns about moral questions run right across the gamut of, of the political spectrum in this poll. But, nonetheless, there is real economic anxiety out there, and it's very hard to--very hard to ignore and say, well, that doesn't really exist, because there's so much consistency in what these polls show about people's anxiety.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. Give us some examples. You break your polling up into different kinds of groups. Let's start with some of the worries that seem to go right across all the groups. What would those be?

MR. KOHUT: Well, people are much more concerned about health care costs. One in five worrying, saying what's wrong with this country is that health care costs are out of control, and a percentage of people saying that they worry about meeting their health care obligations or the costs of health care has risen from 50 percent a year ago to 64 percent. That's a big, big jump.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. Let's stop right there just for a minute with health care.

MR. KOHUT: Okay.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Do you think that that's because all of the discussion about health care over the past year, the Clinton plan and now the new debates in Congress, have made people much more wary of health care issues?

MR. KOHUT: I think the Medicare debate and the Medicaid, Medicaid less than Medicare, scared people, and also I think that companies are increasingly over the year, over the past few years, cutting back on how much insurance they're paying for, but the cumulative effect is, is intensified by what's the debate here in Washington. People have heard what's going on in Washington and it scares them. And what's interesting about this poll is it's not only poor people and lower income people, lower middle income people, who are worried. The great increases in worries have come among college- educated people, upper middle income people, people who typically vote Republican or at minimum are independents, not, not the traditional Democratic groups.

MS. FARNSWORTH: That are worried about health care.

MR. KOHUT: Health care and a whole range of costs.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What do youthink the political consequences or how do you translate the concern over certain aspects of these, of people's life, their economic life? How does that affect politics, do you think?

MR. KOHUT: Well, I think what's happened is that the worries about the budget debate and the blame being placed on the Republicans have turned off independent voters, and only 20 percent of independents approve of GOP policies, back at--right after the November election a year ago, 55/60 percent said they approved of what the GOP planned to do. Obviously, Democrats disapprove. The Democratic coalition has come together. Democrats are energized. They feel that a lot of the issues that they worry about, are concerned about, education, the environment, are at stake, and they're more interested in this election than they were four years ago when the--in the '92--when they looked ahead to the '92 election. On the Republican side, what's really interesting is we see less Republican unity than Democratic unity, and that's unusual, because generally, Republicans have their act together to a far greater extent than the Democrats. But now the Republican Party, it's a bigger, more heterogeneous party, and the social conservatives, who are less affluent than the economic conservatives, and don't have that economic ideology to sustain them through this debate are approving of GOP policies at much lower rates than the economic conservatives. And that's the problem with Republicans. And, by the way, Bill Clinton's approval ratings never went up with the economic recovery, and this was the first time in, in--since I've been doing polling, which is a long time, where there hasn't been a political recovery accompanying an economic recovery, and that's because of this anxiety factor. And it's worse today than it's been.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Well, thank you very much for being with us.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, political analysis and a Gergen dialogue. FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

MR. LEHRER: Now, our Friday night political analysis by "Wall Street Journal" columnist Paul Gigot and Washington columnist Elizabeth Drew, substituting for Mark Shields tonight. Paul, how do you read Kohut's reading of the politics of this anxiety question?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: He's got a snapshot of the current state of the battle. His polls are relatively recent, and there's no question that the Democrats have succeeded in raising an awful lot of anxiety about some of the changes going through Congress. The question is: What will happen at the end when there's a deal and both sides agree? And I think something he misses that I think is also part of this whole anxiety, indeed, it's one of the impetuses for what the Republicans have been trying to do, is the anxiety about government not having its own house in order. If you look at what the--the way Republicans in the 60's and 70's used to argue about the budget, it was always a fiscal issue. It was we have to balance the budget because this is going to lead to some kind of an economic problem. You look at their arguments now, particularly John Kasich and Newt Gingrich, they're making a moral point. They're saying we'd better get our house in order now, otherwise, there's going to be chaos down the road, and we're going to hurt our children and our grandchildren. That's a very powerful argument to make, and it's been driving an awful lot of what the Republicans have been trying to do.

MR. LEHRER: Do you agree, Elizabeth, that it's the debate that has caused the anxiety, and once a real deal is made, that will recede?

ELIZABETH DREW, Author/Journalist: No. I think it's sort of circular, what has gone on. The so-called disaffected right probably gave Clinton his margin of victory in 1992, because he said he would do something about the stagnating incomes. He didn't, and in 1994, for that among other reasons, he got his comeuppance. This is the group that both parties are fighting over, as they fight the budget, it's the Perot voters, it's the great swing vote in America. But I think the budget fight is, is about that, and each one is saying, this is the way to improve your life, the Gingrich way, less government. When Newt Gingrich says he's trying to destroy the welfare state, he should be taken at his word, he really believes that, and that fits into the politics. The Democrats are saying no, there are things in government that we must protect, it must be kept there, and will help people get security. And Paul mentioned when they get a deal the argument made, be over--there are Democrats now in the White House and on Capitol Hill who think it's the better politics to not get a deal because they are winning this argument. Keep it going to November. I think there are problems with that, but it's being seriously talked about.

MR. LEHRER: You're nodding.

MR. GIGOT: Well, she's right about some of those Democrats. James Carville, for example, who says, let's take it right to November.

MR. LEHRER: He's one of President Clinton's advisers, '92. Probably will be again or is again.

MR. GIGOT: A very hard thing for an incumbent President to do, though, is to carry an argument that's essentially based on disagreement for a year, because if you're an incumbent, you want to be able to suggest to the voters that you fulfilled some of your promises, including lowering the tax burden, which is one of the things that could come out of this deal. So I think that's a high risk strategy.

MR. LEHRER: Moving beyond the immediate budget problem, if there is this kind of anxiety, the kind of general anxiety there was reflected in the pieces and in the Kohut discussion that we just heard, does that help Clinton, or does that--President Clinton--or does that help the Republicans, or is it a wash?

MS. DREW: It helps whichever one gets the message through the clearest, because each is saying, I have a way to help you. And I agree with Paul, this is a long time for a President to be making the case, and just for a second, yes, I agree with him also it's very dangerous to not get the deal, because I think the public would say, fie on both of you, we elected you to get something done and to bring about change, so it'll be a hard thing to do.

MR. LEHRER: If they're still arguing about all of this, then nobody wins.

MR. GIGOT: Well, yeah--

MR. LEHRER: Politically.

MR. GIGOT: I agree with that. I would say there's one caution to the Republicans. You cannot, I don't think, when you have this economic concern, just make your case on the size of government. You also have to make your case that you're lowering the cost to government and the size of government to get somewhere.

MR. LEHRER: For a reason?

MR. GIGOT: For a reason.

MR. LEHRER: Right.

MR. GIGOT: In particular, I think this has a lot to do with the question of tax burdens, and Andy Kohut talked about the social conservatives and some of their anxieties. They're not all libertarians, economists who think that the flat tax is the greatest thing in the world. But if they--the case can be made to them that the flat tax helps--will increase their incomes and will get some money back into their pockets, that's a very powerful argument to make them part of the coalition.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. On to another issue, Elizabeth, what's your reading of what Congress will do on the, on the issue of sending troops to Bosnia?

MS. DREW: Normally, I mean, I think that normally Congress does not block a President on a question of this sort and of this importance. A lot of people have suggested this time it's different because there is no popularity for sending troops to Bosnia because Clinton, himself, does not project a great military leader and so on. I still think in the end they won't want to have taken the responsibility, they don't like responsibility in this area in general, so they don't want the responsibility for having blocked it, as well as for having sent. So right now, they're saying, oh, the President hasn't made his case. Well, that's [a], a truism and [b], a holding action. Let's see if he makes his case. I think they will pass something with a lot of "whereases" and "to wits" in it, or not vote at all.

MR. LEHRER: What do you think?

MR. GIGOT: I tend to agree with Elizabeth about the outcome. I think that the President said something very clever here as a political matter. He said, I've already made the solemn commitment, I'm going to do it; if you disagree, you'll have, you'll be sending a message. If you overrule me, Congress, you'll be sending a message to all of our allies, to everybody in the world, that an American President's word can't be trusted, which Americans' word can't be trusted, and you have to pay for the consequences. The Congress is not going to want to, to do something like that. Now, there's one complication here on the Republican side, I think, and that is that the Presidential race is on. And if you looked at the press releases this week, Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan were all out of the block saying this is a horrible idea, and oppose it categorically. Bob Dole, in particular, but also Dick Lugar were also much more cautious. There's going to be a lot of pressure on Bob Dole as the Majority Leader to come to some kind of opposition to this, despite the fact that his instincts as somebody who's played in this town are going to be to help the President, since he wants to be President.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Coming from the political side, I mean, the outside Congress side in his party, right?

MS. DREW: Right. But there are ways you can express opposition to it without stopping it. There have been a couple of votes on the Hill already overruling the President on his Bosnia--

MR. LEHRER: The House, just flat.

MS. DREW: Very strong. A couple in the House and Dole led the fight to the arms embargo, but now the President has a peace treaty in his hand, as Paul says, and he says, are you going to be responsible for having this peace collapse, and that's a real tough one to answer.

MR. LEHRER: Speaking of Senators from Kansas, Paul, Nancy Kassebaum announced that she will not run for reelection, she's one of many who have now said no thank you, I don't want to do this anymore, this being the United States Senate. What's going on, anything special in her case?

MR. GIGOT: I don't think so. I mean, she's had yeoman service, 18 years, I think, three terms. That's a long time. She said--and I take her at her word--she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren. She'd been in the majority, a member back when the Republicans held the Senate from 1980/86. So unlike a lot of House members, she's been there before, done that. This new experience isn't something that she wants necessarily to go on and on. I think what you're looking at is a generational shift within the Republican Party, in particular. More Democrats are retiring because I think their prospects of taking majority are dimmer in the near-term, but in her case, I think it had much more to do with individual choice.

MR. LEHRER: What do you think about Nancy Kassebaum?

MS. DREW: I think that there is no reason to expect people, and they shouldn't have lifetime service, and--but I also think it is- -I know, I see it, that it's getting harder and harder to serve in both chambers, the harassments and the demands, and the fund- raising and the increased partisanship. But I think she takes with her when she leaves a certain amount of class that'll be very much missed. There's nothing self-important or pompous about Nancy Kassebaum. She's very straight. She works hard. She does her job. She kept her sense of humor. So I think she's yet another factor in the dropping of the class quotient of the Senate.

MR. LEHRER: And then the word "moderate," she's considered a moderate politically, but she was just a moderate person too, was she not?

MS. DREW: Right.

MR. LEHRER: Which means something in this current climate.

MR. GIGOT: She was. If you look at her voting record, she's actually pretty conservative economically, in particular. She was arguing that welfare ought to be sent back to the states before the election of 1994.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah.

MR. GIGOT: So you're right. She's a temperate soul. She would go along with Democrats and be able to deal.

MR. LEHRER: And she made a big name in being one of the first Republicans to go against Reagan on the sanctions against South Africa and actually pushed that and is largely credited for getting that through. She and Dick Lugar, another Republican moderate, end quote. Arlen Specter, speaking of Republicans, Elizabeth, suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination. What does that mean?

MS. DREW: I don't think it means a great deal. Some people are interpreting it as saying oh, a moderate or a pro-choice candidate, which he was, is--can't get through, but he was a flawed messenger of the pro-choice message in that a lot of people can't forget or forgive him for the way he dealt with Anita Hill in the famous Clarence Thomas nomination hearings. I think it prompts two thoughts in my mind. One is, if Colin Powell did run either as an independent or as a Republican, we would know more about whether the so-called center is as large and predominant as a lot of people think it is. And the other is you mentioned Lugar. Both Specter and Lugar were serious people and Lugar is out there making serious speeches. And every four years we say we want the issues, we don't want the horse race, but what are the stories--you know, what did Gramm do to Dole today, what did Dole do to Gramm today, the front- runners, whereas, somebody who may be the pick of the litter actually is making serious speeches and he's not covered. Who would know?

MR. GIGOT: I agree with that point. It's really a critique about the media I think as much as anything. We love to cover the horse race. I'm as guilty as anybody else. So we don't cover the issues. I think regarding Arlen Specter, he advertised himself as a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian. I don't think the Republican primary voters were buying that first part. I mean, he has a relatively liberal voting record for a Republican who wants the nomination on economics. And he hailed back there Barry Goldwater, but he's not--

MR. LEHRER:He wasn't part of the revolution in other words.

MR. GIGOT: I think that's--but Colin Powell, on the other hand, his popularity shows that I think a pro-choice candidate might be able to win the nomination.

MR. LEHRER: So don't read too much into this.

MR. GIGOT: I wouldn't.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Thank you both very much. DIALOGUE - HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON

MR. LEHRER: Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," talks with Barbara Kingsolver, author of High Tide in Tucson, a new collection of essays exploring themes of family, community, and the natural world.

DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: Many people say your novels have a moral vision and that's what attracts many of your readers. What I found very interesting about your new book is that in telling stories about your own life, much the same experience happened. I wanted to read just a piece back to you for our viewers that was in a chapter called "Jabberwocky" about your own life. "Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile. I was downtown in front of the Federal Building with a small crowd assembled to protest war in the Persian Gulf. He was in a black Ford pickup. As the truck roared by, he leaned most of his upper body out of the window to give me a better view of his finger. And he screamed, 'Hey, Bitch, love it or leave it,' so I left." Tell us about that.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Author, High Tide in Tucson: I think it was time. I think that was probably the blue million and first time someone had told me to love it or leave it and suddenly it seemed like a very good idea. The Persian Gulf period before, during, and after was a very difficult time for me because I'm a person who uses language to try to get at truth and honesty and morality, and during that war what I found was that language, there was no possibility of using language that way. Language was perverted. We heard about a surgical war. I mean, surgery is something you get to--you know, that you use to get better, delivering the ordinance- -that meant drop the bomb. If one felt that reducing a civilization to rubble through bombs was not a reasonable way to settle our differences, you weren't allowed to talk about that.

MR. GERGEN: Your argument and your trouble you felt about our society must have preceded the war. You must have felt--

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Of course, of course. I've always felt frustrated with the mistakes that, that we've made time and again in terms of using military might to negotiate, but this was a time when no discussion was allowed. I felt this far from a specialized kind of nervous breakdown where you stalk around a Walgreen's parking lot, ripping yellow ribbons off of car antennas, because you know, it looks very folk-loric, these pretty yellow ribbons. They're supposed to mean we support our boys, but they also mean a prayer of Godspeed to the killers. And no one was saying that, and I felt such despair that I was ready to leave. And it just seemed like a good time for our family to take a sabbatical.

MR. GERGEN: So you took your small daughter to Spain.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: To the Canary Islands. Yeah. We lived there for a while, and--

MR. GERGEN: What did you find? You wrote movingly about children and how children were treated in the Spanish culture.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: It was wonderful. I think one of the best things about leaving home and leaving the United States is that you can see it better; you can look back and really examine all of these things that we're taught to believe about this being the best country in every way. It's a wonderful country in many ways, and in many ways, it's a mess. And I, I loved the personal freedom of being able to walk around at night. I loved the fact that--I loved living in a place where there wasn't an immense disparity between rich and poor, where you don't have a lot of poverty, you don't have a lot of violent crime. So that was wonderful. And the thing I liked best, I think, was how people loved children. People in Spain look at children as the meringues and eclairs of their culture. And it made me realize that in many ways we look at children as toxic waste or something. I mean, that sounds over- stated, I'm sure. You love kids. I love kids. But as a society, institutionally, we don't love kids; 20 percent of our kids in this country live in poverty. That's a vile message that we're sending both to the kids who are poor and also to the ones who aren't. We're saying, communally, we don't care about you, umm--taking care of kids is one of those things like taking care of the environment that's best done by the group. You can't leave it to individuals, because not every individual parent is, is able to take care of a child perfectly well all the time, and yet, all kids are your future and my future.

MR. GERGEN: How do you think we came to see ourselves this way? You think we've lost our sense of community, of communal feeling. That runs through a lot of your work, both your non-fiction and your fiction work.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: It's true. I think everything I write is about the idea of community and about the special challenge in the United States of balancing our idealization of the individual, our glorification of, of personal freedom and the individual with the importance of community, how to balance those two offices.

MR. GERGEN: And you think we've lost that sense of community through the mythology that we have, the stories that we have in our heads?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: I do. I think that the unifying themes of America--our myths, our religion, our sort of national religion, is about the glory and the power of the individual and our great unifying myths tell us things like anybody can make it in this country if he's smart enough and ambitious enough. Well, that's, umm, it's a very motivating myth, and it probably got people, you know, out West, and, you know, got the soil tilled and so forth. But it works only to an extent, because the other side of that story is that if you're not making it, you must be either stupid or lazy. So a lot of self-blame goes along with poverty. It's very isolating. What about bad luck, you know? I mean, what about the fact that some people who are not particularly ambitious nor particularly smart happen to be born rich? You know, what about all these exceptions?

MR. GERGEN: So are you then trying to take your, your own--or excuse me for interrupting--

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: That's okay.

MR. GERGEN: --but through your own novels to invent a new set of stories for us, is that what you're about?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: It is in my own little corner. That's what I'm trying to do. I love what Joseph Campbell said about mythology. He said that our stories are what holds us together as a culture, and as long as they're true for us, and as long as they work for us, they--we thrive. And when they cease to become true, we fall apart, and we have to reconstruct them or revitalize them. We have to come up with new myths. I think the stories that got us westward ho have ceased to become true, if they ever were entirely true. I don't know, but I know for sure now that lots of people are suffering not through their own fault. They're working very hard, and they're not surviving. We need new stories. We need stories that can help us construct, reconstruct the value of, of solidarity, of not, not the lone solo flier, but the family, the community, the value of working together.

MR. GERGEN: Do you worry that you may debunk some of the stories about the United States, about our heritage, which, in fact, inspire people to believe in what--and that we have had a moral vision as a people, that we have had--this has been a relatively successful society, given it still has many blemishes?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: I think it's a terrific thing to value those parts of your history that--I mean, we have a terrific moral vision. Many parts of our story remain true. But until we're willing to, to look closer and find the flaws and pull them out, and sort of reconstruct the fabric, we're going to keep making the same mistakes again and again.

MR. GERGEN: Let me ask one last question. You did decide to come home.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: I did. It was hard to come home. It's harder to live here, you know, because of the pain of the disparity between rich and poor, because of the crime, because of the difficulties of raising children in a child-hostile culture. And yet, I could not imagine criticizing only from the distance. You know, if someone's standing across the street from you, yelling that you're doing something wrong, what do you think? You think they're a jerk. If they come across the street and help you, you think they're a worthy person. "Love it or leave it" is a coward's slogan. That's what I think. I think a more honorable slogan is "Love it and stay," "Love it and get it right," "Love it and never shut up."

MR. GERGEN: Thank you. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, Defense Sec. Perry told American troops in Germany NATO forces would not go to Bosnia to fight a war but to keep a peace. And 5 million public employees staged a protest strike in France that shut down all public transportation and most other services. We'll see you on Monday night. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.