DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711120098

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: By Bill Thompson

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

WARNING TO REPUBLICANS

Republicans, beware. Your leaders might be on the verge of self-destruction.

We know big trouble could be on the horizon for the Grand Old Party because Republicans scored a clean sweep of key races in the Nov. 4 elections. For Republicans, success is often the first step on the road to disaster.

Republicans racked up significant gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia, retained an important congressional seat in New York and held onto the mayor's office in New York City. These victories are cause for concern because they could easily spark a self-defeating surge of Republican arrogance.

Remember 1994? That was the year Republicans won control of Congress for the first time since the Ice Age, riding the Contract With America to a nationwide sweep that was supposed to set the stage for President Clinton's eviction from the White House in 1996.

The Republican Revolution of 1994 not only didn't set the stage for the GOP to recapture the presidency - it severely distorted the party leadership's view of what Americans were thinking. The '94 sweep set up the GOP not for a total takeover of the voters' hearts and minds but for total humiliation in the great budget battle of 1995.

Clinton's public-relations victory over congressional Republicans in the budget fight turned his re-election the following November into a mere formality.

And all because the Republicans read too much into a great day at the polls.

Now the Republicans sweep a few ``off-year'' elections, and Newt Gingrich is planning future victory parties.

A newspaper headline captured the mood: ``GOP revels in a sweep of key races in nation.''

One of the pro-Republican pundits analyzed the Virginia governor's race and Rudy Giuliani's re-election as New York mayor and deduced from them a sure-fire formula for continued Republican dominance.

If there's one thing the pundits should have figured out by now, it's that the outcome of last year's or last month's or last week's election offers no clue about the outcome of any future election.

Republican Jim Gilmore was elected governor of Virginia largely on the strength of his pledge to get rid of a much-despised car tax. He succeeds a successful Republican governor who was prohibited by law from seeking re-election. There is nothing to be learned from Gilmore's victory.

As for Giuliani, well, there aren't enough Republicans in New York City to elect a dog catcher. Giuliani won despite his party affiliation, not because of it. New York is safer and cleaner than it's been in decades, and Giuliani got the credit.

Actually, the best lesson for Republicans can be found in an election they almost lost: the New Jersey governor's race.

Christine Todd Whitman got the scare of her life in the Garden State, winning re-election by a razor-thin margin after a hard-fought campaign that looked like it might go the other way. Whitman prevailed in the end, apparently by stealing her Democratic opponent's two biggest issues late in the campaign.

Whitman might have learned that lesson from Clinton, who stole the Republicans' best issues in last year's presidential campaign. But the lesson for Republicans in Whitman's near-loss lies in the post-vote number crunching.

According to some of the folks who analyze voting patterns, Whitman would have breezed to victory if she hadn't been deserted by more than a third of New Jersey's hard-core conservatives. Those conservative Jerseyites went for a no-chance third-party candidate, a Libertarian who ended up with 5 percent of the vote.

This is a potentially serious problem for the Republican Party. Too many of the party's most conservative voters would rather see a liberal Democrat win an election than compromise their principles to vote for a Republican who doesn't meet their conservative standards.

That's stubborn and foolish. Add stubborn and foolish to self-defeating and arrogant, and you can see where this month's sweep might signal trouble for Republicans. MEMO: Bill Thompson is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

This column was distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information

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