Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411100099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The question is for how long.
With the Republicans in control of the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since 1954, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and a postage stamp cost 3cents, with the Republicans in control of the statehouses in seven of the eight largest states, it is evident that a power shift of major proportions has taken place. But is the transformation permanent?
Not necessarily.
The Republicans could blow their opportunity by seeming too obstructive, their own internal ideological divisions could weaken them, and President Clinton could claw his way back, a la Harry Truman.
In the South, the change is historic in dimension. The shift that began in the Eisenhower administration and gathered momentum under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is complete now, and that will hurt the Democrats nationally for uncounted years to come.
The Republicans gained 16 House seats in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, giving them near-parity with the Democrats in a region where for decades they were largely irrelevant.
They now hold 62 House seats, the Democrats 63. Of 22 Senate seats, they hold 14, including that of Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who switched parties Wednesday. And they have six of the region's 11 governorships.
Bill Kristol, the conservative theoretician who heads the pressure group Project for the Republican Future, offered a typically expansive interpretation. Tuesday's returns, he asserted, mean that ``60 years of Democratic dominance of American politics, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt, have been effectively ended by two years of Bill Clinton.''
That remains to be seen.
``Tuesday was potentially one of the most important days in 20th-century political history,'' said historian Michael Beschloss.
``It could mean that the Republicans definitively become the majority party in this country. It could mean that we are headed back into a period of congressional dominance and presidential weakness such as we had in the late 19th century.''
But whether or not that occurs, he and others emphasized, depends on what happens next. The voting created the possibility of a major realignment, but by no means assured one.
What happened in the 1940s constitutes a cautionary tale for the Republicans. Just as Clinton's unpopularity sorely hurt the Democrats this week, costing them more than 50 House seats, so that of Truman penalized them in 1946, when they lost 56 seats.
But the Republicans did little with their new-found power; Truman stigmatized them as ``the do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress'' and only two years later, the Democrats gained 75 seats, the largest turnaround in modern congressional history.
Not since 1930, said Merle Black, an Atlanta political scientist, have the Republicans held onto their gains in the House for more than two years.
Clearly, this year's crop of new Republican leaders sees the dangers. Rep. Newt Gingrich, the Georgia firebrand who is expected to become speaker of the House, sounded uncharacteristically subdued on Tuesday night as he spoke of the responsibilities of governing. And well he might; the last Republican to hold that post, Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts, stepped down 38 years ago.
Gingrich's Senate counterpart, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who will become the majority leader in January, told the president on the telephone Wednesday, ``I want to let you know right up front that we want to work together where we can.'' But he also told a reporter that the election constituted ``a vote of no confidence in the Clinton agenda, which means we need to develop a whole new one.''
Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff, argued that some items could possibly be agreed upon by the two sides, such as the line-item veto and campaign-finance reform.
But the incoming Republicans are more conservative than the outgoing ones, on average, and the remaining Democrats are more liberal.
The two groups have starkly different views on what might constitute effective health-care legislation and welfare reform; and as Panetta said, the president and his remaining band of supporters will oppose any middle-class tax cuts without matching spending reductions.
Relations will not be improved by the prospect of tougher, wider-ranging probes of the Whitewater affair, overseen by such Republican critics of Clinton as Sen. Alfonse D'Amato of New York and Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa.
Much of the honeyed talk is just talk. Gingrich, said a fellow Republican who knows him well, ``will act just as obstreperous as ever in his new role, just as determined to bring things like the balanced-budget amendment to a vote, but he will do it behind a screen of sweet reason.''
In fact, the 1996 presidential campaign already is under way, and it promises to be wild and woolly. A challenge to Clinton from the right is possible, given the number of people in his party who blame its losses on what they see as his failure to stick to the centrist, New Democratic manifesto he backed during the campaign.
But difficult as Clinton's task is, at least he has a well-defined enemy for the wars ahead. He might have been in an even tougher situation if control of Congress had been divided or if the Democrats had barely hung on.
The president will have to show a defter hand if he is to succeed, balancing vetoes with negotiations. Ronald Reagan governed with considerable success with a Congress controlled by the other party, but he was a good deal more popular than Clinton.
by CNB