WASHINGTON DC -- Quick, what year is it? The budget is in balance (with “surpluses as far as the eye can see”), unemployment is below 5 percent, inflation is non-existent, the economy is humming along in such fine shape that more than a few economists think (not for the first time) that the problem of the business cycle has been solved, and our southern-accented president is proposing new social spending programs.

Sure, it sounds like today, but today’s condition also perfectly describes 1964. And we all know what happened next: an explosion of government spending, inflation, regulation, war, and bell-bottomed blue jeans.

This creepy parallel came to mind when surveying the scene unfolding here in the week before President Clinton’s annual State of the Union speech. Did we mishear him two years ago when he said, “The era of big government is over”? In the Monty Python version perhaps he said “The era of big underwear is over.” Whatever, as Blob Dough might say. Right now, Big Government is open and Ready for Your Business. How else to understand Clinton’s various proposals for new spending that, as of this moment, total $42 billion, with more surely on the way by next week?

There is one other fearful symmetry with the bad old days of the 1960s. No, not the comeback of bell-bottoms, but the weak response from Republicans. Back in the 1960s, Republicans responded to every proposal for a new government program with their own smaller “alternative” program. You might call it sort-of Great Society, or maybe just the Good Society. But the “Conservative Republican Alternative Program” could always be dismissed by its handy acronym, CRAP. Why vote for low-budget liberalism when you can have the high-octane stuff?

The initial Republican response to Clinton’s new spending ideas has been muted, fragmentary, and equivocal. Above all, some Republicans have expressed the view that they are ready to “work with the President” to achieve a “compromise” on some of these new ideas. This is not how a majority party should act and speak. Where is a voice saying, “The voters did not send us here to spend more of their money”?

Clinton’s political purpose in these proposals is transparent. Republicans should see this as an opportunity to fight a defining election campaign in the Fall. The experience of the big elections of the past two decades is that when Republicans hang tough and sharpen the differences between themselves and the Democrats, they usually do well with voters. They should, in the words of General Grant, be prepared to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott is giving the Republican response to Clinton next week. What he says will provide a major clue to how much fight the Republicans have in them.

--By Steven Hayward