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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Voters Get Another Chance To Send Marching Orders ‘96 Election Seen As Referendum On Republicans

Mike Feinsilber Associated Press

The voters surprised everyone - the Republicans, the president, maybe even themselves - two years ago when they put Republicans fully in charge of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Now they’ll say if they meant it.

This election will tell whether the people were bent on one of those sharp reversals in direction that have occurred only rarely in American politics.

Its significance will depend just as much on who controls Congress as on who sits in the White House.

If the Republicans succeed in keeping control of Congress, it will be the first time since Calvin Coolidge presided in the 1920s that the GOP controlled both chambers for more than a single two-year term.

Republican congressional victories would establish that 1994 was no fluke, no mere outburst of anti-Washington sentiment or frustration over government.

If the voters keep both Bill Clinton and the Republicans in power, the message will be in favor of checking an activist president with a conservative Congress (and vice versa). That produces a lot of friction, but it also produced a lot of legislation in the last two years.

Whether the Republicans like it or not, 1996 has become a referendum on them. Newt Gingrich is on the ballot in his Georgia district - and an unnamed presence on ballots everywhere else. In one poll, nearly six voters in 10 said Gingrich would be a factor in their vote. Far more said he would be a negative factor than a positive one.

“The Republicans overread their mandate in 1994,” says pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press. “The public was voting for some conservative ideas, but mostly it was voting to break gridlock in Washington and to express discontent with what the Democrats were doing. This was a very ideological turnout. More conservatives voted in 1994 than in 1990. The Democrats were despondent. They were upset about Clinton and his failure in health care. He hadn’t achieved what he said he would.”

On Nov. 5 the people will send new marching orders to Washington.

Consider the possibilities:

Bill Clinton re-elected, with Republicans still in control of Congress.

That assures two more years, at least, of tugging and pulling, but not necessarily gridlock. The 1995-96 Congress was unusually productive, from welfare overhaul to V-chip, from lobbying restrictions to increasing the minimum wage and penciling out farm subsidies.

Still, in general, retaining the status quo would point toward less ambitious government. And toward a balanced budget, a Republican goal that the Democrats - and the public at large, perhaps with prodding from Ross Perot - seem to have embraced since the 1994 election. “How are you going to pay for it?” is now the question that confronts every new proposal in Washington.

Clinton re-elected, with a Democratic Congress, or at least a Democratic House.

Clinton’s strong lead in the polls now makes that a possibility. If it happens, Clinton is pushed by the activist left of his party. Most of the Democrats who claim key committee chairmanships come from the party’s liberal wing and are believers in government’s ability to rectify society’s pains. On the stump, Dole characterizes them as “activists meddling in expansive government,” and says Clinton, deep down, is one of them.

The Republican-written and Clinton-blessed welfare revision program, breaking a 60-year Democratic promise to the poor, would surely come up for re-examination in a Democratic Congress. Clinton has already promised modifications if he’s re-elected.

Bob Dole elected, and with a Republican Congress kept in power, perhaps strengthened.

In that event, the election becomes what academics call a “realigning election,” confirming a sharp turn in the country’s mood and direction.

That would be true no matter how close the divisions in Congress, but especially the case if the Republicans pick up the seven Senate seats needed to block Democratic filibusters.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” landslide in 1932, confirmed in 1934, was the last realigning election; Ronald Reagan’s revolution was undercut by his failure to ever win Republican control of the House.

If installed at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue this time, the Republicans would have cause to claim to be the voice of the country; the Democrats, once the party of workers, Southerners and immigrants, would wonder if they had a future in a white-collar, mortgage-holding, mall-shopping, increasingly conservative America.

In Congress, Dole would be pressed to make good on his promised 15 percent tax cut and a balanced budget, a tough combination which could only mean that government spending would be throttled down even beyond the limits Republicans proposed in their showdown with Clinton that shut the government down for a time in 1996.

Dole elected, with a Democratic Congress.

This scenario is just not in the cards.

In some ways, this year’s election resembles 1948. In 1946, the country was tired of war and tired of Democrats running things; they’d controlled the White House and Congress for 14 years.

So in 1946 Republicans picked up 55 House seats and 12 in the Senate, ending a Democratic stranglehold on Congress. The New York Sun published a cartoon showing a gravestone labeled, “New Deal. Born 1933, Died 1946.”

But two years later, the realignment never came. The Democrats rebounded. Harry Truman campaigned against the new Republican Congress, which he pictured as both extreme and ineffective. He was elected in his own right and Democrats picked up an astonishing 75 House seats and nine in the Senate to take back Congress. Truman proposed a “Fair Deal” to pick up where the New Deal left off.

Even if the Democrats bounce back this time, says political scientist David Mayhew of Yale, author of a book on divided government, the 1997 Democrats will have a problem. They have no “Fair Deal.”

They haven’t proposed “a large new idea, which it could be claimed the public had ratified” if they win, Mayhew says. “They’re not campaigning for much of a mandate on anything.”

By contrast, the GOP has Dole’s cut-taxes-and-balance-the-budget-too idea, so ambitious a notion that it would overwhelm everything else.

One dominating issue - the entitlements - has not been put forward in this campaign because neither party likes to talk too specifically about cutting back enormously popular programs. No one has laid out plans for preserving the two huge middle-class benefit programs, Social Security and Medicare, both threatened with bankruptcy.

The new order that takes office in January will have to grapple with those - and with balancing the budget, which remains an iffy proposition. But since the parties have not offered competing ideas, the public can’t choose.

Maybe that’s what the off-year election of 1998 will be all about.