Politics: It's all about 2013

National Review editor Rich Lowry is considered one of America's top contemporary political writers and analysts. At 42, he offers a voice for the younger conservative generation.

The author of The New York Times best-seller "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years," Lowry speaks his mind with no apologies.

We spoke by phone Tuesday as a group of Democrats, Republicans and other, independent political leaders announced formation of a new group that hopes to find nonpartisan solutions to some of the nation's problems and to impact the next congressional session.

Q: What can we expect from the 112th Congress?

A: I think one of the first bills will be to repeal ObamaCare in the House, and that will pass and go to the Senate and presumably not make it through the Senate. Obviously, President Obama wouldn't sign it and I think that sets up the big fight over spending and over the budget. Republicans will honor their pledge, at least in the House, to cut domestic discretionary spending back to '08 levels and they'll get $100 billion or more in discretionary spending, which is small in the context of the whole federal budget and of the deficit, but is a step in the right direction. I think that's going to have trouble in the Senate as well and I'm not sure Obama would go along with that.

So there's going to be a lot of stalemate unless Obama -- and I don't discount this possibility -- continues on his current course, which involves some triangulation. So does he offer a big bargain on Social Security• Does he advance his own tax-reform idea, which there are rumblings of• ... Does he do something big to try to efface his image as a liberal partisan and really get back to the center?

Q: What can't we expect from the next Congress?

A: I wouldn't expect major changes in federal policy. I would expect more gridlock than anything else. And it all depends on Obama, ultimately.

He's obviously not going to give, I think, on any major aspect of the health-care law. But on the fiscal stuff, given his rhetoric over the last two years about how this massive increase in the deficit is just temporary and it has to be dealt with because it represents a threat to our future, ... I really think it will be hard for him to be a total rejectionist.

So he has the whip hand on all that because Republicans aren't going to make a move on entitlements unless he goes first and Republicans won't be able to get through spending cuts likely unless he's willing to accommodate them on some level.

Q: So we can expect a lot of noise out of the House and then it will run up against the Senate ...

A: Yeah, well, it's still a Democratic Senate and you'll have some nervous Democrats in red states who are up in 2012 and may be willing to play ball. I think there's clearly kind of an operational ... conservative majority in the Senate but in the Senate majorities don't matter unless you're at 60 and I'm not sure whether they're at 60 on a lot of this stuff.

I really think the whole thing is a play for 2013. I think Mitch McConnell is absolutely right. Their political goal has to be defeating Obama the same way his political goal has to be getting re-elected. In 2013, if you have a Republican president, well, then you get a big burst of conservative reform ... for a year. Or Obama wins again, consolidates what he's already done and takes it a step further.

But it's really all about 2013. There's limits on what you can do without a president. One thing that I think could be very interesting is this debt ceiling. And I have no idea where that's going to go. Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme" and I do think you're going to see some sort of government-type shutdown scenario because that's the main ... instrument of leverage for Republicans.

Q: Who are some of the players to watch?

A: Number one, I think, in the House is Paul Ryan because he's at the center of this debate over the budget. He has the most creditability of all the Republican leaders among the tea party types. So it will be incumbent on him to make the case that "Look, guys, this is as far as we can go and no further" is realistic.

He's really going to have to draw that line and again there's going to be a big appetite to push the line as far as possible among a lot of people.

He is also going to be at the center of, I think, a potentially big dispute with the rest of the Republican leadership about whether to begin to deal with entitlements or not. It's obviously delicate. Republicans didn't in the midterms ... campaign on reforming entitlements. Most of them, the bravest, kind of mentioned it. For them to make any significant steps toward dealing with entitlements now would be a big political risk.

I think Ryan is very brave on this stuff and is going to be inclined to try to include some of that stuff in his budget. I'm not sure some of the other leaders are going to look so favorably on that. So I wouldn't be surprised to see a very interesting inter-Republican battle on that.

Q: Speaking of inter-Republican battles, Michael Steele wants another term as party chairman. What kind of impact will that have?

A: I really like Mike, but he hasn't been a very good chairman. And I think if he wins, it really makes the RNC irrelevant.

We have these outsider groups that stepped up and filled a lot of the gaps, especially fundraising in the midterms, but that's really not the ideal way to operate. Someone was pointing out the other day if you're a Republican presidential candidate, you'd really rather have a functioning, well-oiled RNC rather than trying to rely on this grab bag of outside groups.

And I think outside of Steele staying and what it means to the RNC, I just think it's a shame what we've done to the political parties. We have campaign finance laws that make it much easier for these outside groups to spring up and raise gobs of money and eclipse the political parties.