THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410080027
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Republican pollsters and candidates are pinching themselves over the poll numbers they are seeing as this year's off-year elections head toward the wire. Visions of not only taking control of the Senate, which the GOP had for six years during the Reagan administration, but even the seemingly invincibly Democratic House of Representatives, dance in Republican heads.
Republicans would be strongly advised not to start counting chickens, however. Polls have been wrong before. One need only recall last year here in Virginia, when polling failed to detect the magnitude of George Allen's victory in the gubernatorial race.
The party holding the White House traditionally loses seats in off-year elections, so it is scarcely surprising that the Democrats look set to take some losses. The giveaway that the beating might be worse than usual, however, is to be found in Democratic behavior rather than Republican.
On ``Meet the Press'' recently, host Tim Russert said a White House source had told him that losing control of Congress might not be that bad for President Clinton, since it would allow him to run against Congress in 1996, a la Harry Truman. As political analyst Charles Cook has pointed out, however, that scenario overlooks the possibility of long, drawn-out Congressional investigations of Whitewater, Cattlegate and many other Clinton-era scandals.
Some Democratic campaigns are actually releasing to the press polls that show their candidates are not as far behind as is generally believed. That kind of behavior is the harbinger of disaster.
Why? If it is true, as the 1992 Clinton campaign insisted, that ``it's the economy, stupid,'' then Democrats should not be so desperate. While hardly robust, the economy is not in dire straits either.
Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., who is retiring this year, might well have put his finger on the problem in the New York Times last week. ``When Bill Clinton ran for president, people here hoped he was one of them,'' Boren said. ``Our guy next door, they thought, New Democrat, a lot less liberal than Dukakis or Mondale or Carter. So he carried the state. Now they've decided he ran under false colors, and that has infuriated them.''
Indeed, economics aren't everything. Character counts too, and unfortunately for the country, President Clinton has given Americans a good deal to question about his character.
He did indeed run as a ``New Democrat,'' one who was going to ``end welfare as we know it'' and was supposed to have learned from the failures of government. He had run denouncing a ``decade of greed'' and said he would elevate the ethical standards of Washington.
The two years since the campaign, however, have revealed the hollowness of most of these pledges. The promised middle-class tax cut was jettisoned almost immediately in favor of a pork-laden ``stimulus package'' that went down to defeat in Congress. Almost Mr. Clinton's first act in office was to propose lifting the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces. Welfare reform received a low priority.
All of that, however, paled in comparison with the president's effort to nationalize the health-care industry. There was nothing ``New Democrat'' about this effort, which was pure British Labor Party-style nationalization. Drafted in secret, it shriveled like a vampire when exposed to sunlight. The tangled machinations of Whitewater and the first lady's miraculous cattle futures trades also took the sheen off the first couple's claims to moral probity.
George Bush's U-turn on taxes provoked the American people to take a chance on a revamped Democratic Party, whose claims to be more in tune with middle-class America were taken at face value. Two years of harsh scrutiny have stripped away many of those claims, however, and the president has gone from being his party's savior to its albatross. by CNB