ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Ray L. Garland
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
ONLY ONE president in modern times has had a comfortable second term. And you can make a case that even Franklin Roosevelt had a better third term, with U.S. forces marching to victory on all fronts, than a second, which saw a striking defeat of his plan to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices and a strong Republican revival in the midterm election of 1938.
Since that distant date, we have had four landslide victories by incumbent presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But fate was unkind. Johnson was driven from the race in 1968 by opposition to his policy in Vietnam, and Nixon was forced to resign. Though Eisenhower and Reagan came through fairly well, both were decidedly on the defensive during their last two years.
In winning the presidency, Democrats have had better luck than Republicans in carrying congressional majorities. Nixon won 49 states in 1972, but the GOP dropped two Senate seats and gained only 12 in the House. In 1984, Reagan also carried 49 states. While the GOP gained a respectable 16 seats in the House, it lost one in the Senate. Behind the near-landslide of George Bush in 1988, Republicans actually lost ground in both houses. In truth, neither Nixon, Reagan nor Bush wasted much effort trying to elect Republicans to Congress, and the party ended their era with 16 fewer seats in the House than it won in 1968.
If polls be gospel, the only issues in doubt are the size of President Clinton's margin and whether it will be sufficient to return Democrats to majority status in one or both houses of Congress. The conventional wisdom now holds it won't, and GOP congressional candidates will shortly adopt a strategy of "don't give Clinton a blank check."
Clinton has yet to make a sustained appeal to also give him a Democratic Congress. In view of the astounding catalog of legal problems swirling around his personal and official family, he may live to regret that. Had Republicans won Congress in 1972, it's hard to believe Nixon would have been forced out less than two years later. Though the times conspire against moral outrage, the parallels between Tricky Dick and Slick Willie are eerie.
The House is now divided between 235 Republicans and 198 Democrats. There is one independent who votes with the Democrats and a vacant seat that was held by a Republican. But 30 incumbent Democrats are retiring and 19 of those seats are in the South. They are expecting some losses in this group.
If Democratic losses among the open seats are held to no more than five, and assuming no defeats among incumbents, the party will have to win 24 seats now held by Republicans to take the House. There is nothing in current polling data to indicate this will happen. But a gain of 10 to 14 seats for the Democrats would be in line with the House outcome in recent, landslide presidential elections.
The Senate, now divided between 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats, is said to be even more doubtful for Democrats. But assuming the presence of Vice President Gore to break a tie in organizing the new Senate, the GOP can lose no more than two seats and still retain control.
If Republicans lose both houses, it will mean American politics abruptly turned a corner of some elemental significance.
The constant pulse-taking by pollsters has taken most of the fun out of politics and drained away much of its vitality as well. But not since the GOP took Congress and gave this gifted demagogue a target to score off have I believed Clinton's defeat was at all likely. Anyone who could add two and two knew that if Republicans took seriously the mandate they thought they won in 1994 to reduce spending, there was almost no way Clinton could fail to rise.
The case for Bob Dole comes down to two questions: Does character matter, and does your money do more good in the family budget or the federal budget?
While no politician can have perfect integrity, Dole's record at the center of American government for more than 25 years is still impressive. The esteem in which he was held by members of both parties in the Senate testifies to that. If you won't grant that Dole is an honest man, you must at least grant he isn't very comfortable being dishonest, which is more than can be said for the incumbent.
The reasons why voters seem to be rejecting Dole's call for an across-the-board cut of 15 percent in federal income-tax rates are complex. Democrats have done a good job convincing people that continued high rates of growth in federal spending for Medicare, etc. are more important to them than keeping more of their own money. But mainly, people don't think it's realistic. After all, weren't taxes cut in the '80s and didn't the deficit explode?
Republicans have done a poor job of telling people just how high those old rates were and how fast revenues rose despite tax cuts. They haven't made the case that the missing ingredient was spending restraint, which the GOP Congress is prepared to supply.
The record of modern government is that outlays will always rise to consume all that can be reasonably raised in taxes and more besides. While tax cuts are virtually proven to do a better job stimulating growth than more government spending, they also serve the great goal of restraining the use of public money to buy votes.
All Virginia incumbents, including Sen. John Warner, seem safe. There will be one change in the Southside 5th District that Democrat Rep. L.F. Payne is vacating to run for lieutenant governor. In that race, Democratic state Sen. Virgil Goode is almost running in disguise as a conservative independent and must be favored.
If the Senate race is close, John Warner might ponder the extent to which that was the result of his abandoning almost all defense of his own voting record and the positive achievements of the GOP Congress. If Mark Warner manages a miracle, Virginia will have two liberal senators instead of one.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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