Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411180032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES P. PINKERTON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The worst defeat for the White House party in a midterm election in half a century was also the clearest ideological contest in decades, even more so than the 1980 election that brought Ronald Reagan to the White House.
In that year, inflation at home and hostages abroad convinced even non-Reaganites that Jimmy Carter was an embarrassment and had to go. This year was different. Defeat for Democrats came like lightning on a clear day.
With the economy humming and no American flags burning, soon-to-be-retired Democrats have a right to ask: What did we do wrong? The answer is simple: They had the misfortune of being in office when all the chickens of the bureaucratic welfare state came to roost - on their heads. Today, more Americans agree with the Reagan thesis - ``Government is the problem'' - than when he said those words in his 1981 inaugural address.
Revulsion against Big Government was first apparent in 1978, when California voters passed the epochal property-tax-cutting Proposition 13. Two years later, the Republicans captured the White House and Senate and made hefty gains in the House. Yet during the '80s, congressional Democrats made a comeback. Paradoxically, the Democrats were better off without the White House.
Carter had been a millstone. With Reagan and George Bush in the Oval Office, the Loyal Opposition adopted a clever strategy of hugging the local ideological terrain. Democrats representing liberal states and districts felt free to confront the GOP, but scores of their colleagues, whose numbers made the Democrats the majority, played a cagier game. Outgoing Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash., was typical. He represented a conservative district that was reliably Republican in presidential contests. Yet he hung on to his job, year after year. His line was deceptively simple: He was with the Republican president when he was right, against him when he was wrong. What could be more reasonable than that?
Until this year, the voters never caught on to the con. Democratic legislators hid behind each other. Taking advantage of their institutional control, Democrats perfected tricky parliamentary maneuvers that enabled them to vote on all sides of every question, mollifying or mystifying every constituency. Democrats representing Republican areas declared themselves to be for spending cuts, tax cuts, balanced budgets, school prayer - anything they thought the folks back in Podunk wanted to hear. Foley-type Democrats could get away with such home-style posturing because they knew that the Permanent Government would drown such illiberal initiatives in the bucket of the Beltway.
Bill Clinton's election in 1992 upset that happy calculus. The end of divided government spelled the beginning of true blame-fixing. Enough problems had piled up during the Reagan-Bush years - from continued decay of the cities to further decline of workers' real incomes - to turn most voters against the White House.
Yet somebody should have explained to Clinton that his 43 percent of the vote was an indicator of just how thin his mandate was. In 1992, anxious as they were for a change, Americans hedged their bets by electing more Republicans to Congress for the first time since 1984.
Yet Clinton went chasing liberal rainbows, putting congressional Democrats in an impossible situation: Should they stand with their president or with their constituents? It was a no-win situation. Incumbents, having convinced people back home that they were centrist problem-solvers, had a president who forced them to take sides on divisive issues like taxes, gun control, and national health insurance. Trapped on an exposed roof, the Democrats in Congress became the involuntary national lightning rod. It was quite a shock.
James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday.
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB