Alone in the Middle

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Voting in the midterm elections was still a few days away, but Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island was already feeling lonesome for the old gang. Surveying the voluntary departures of such Senate moderates as Minnesota's David Durenberger and Missouri's John Danforth as well as worrying about the loss of several others on Tuesday, a mournful Chafee said, "I'd like to say we're going to have some unforeseen support, but I must say, the middle is shrinking."

If any prediction about the elections this week could be considered safe, it was that Congress, paralyzed by bitter partisan warfare, was about to become even more divided along ideological lines. The Republicans, their ranks moving increasingly to the right, were poised to control more seats than at any time in the past 40 years. In the Senate, where G.O.P. control was only seven seats away, conservative candidates were faring better than more pragmatic hopefuls. In both parties, moderates were in retreat. The trend, said Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat and committed middle-of-the-road er, is "not conducive to bipartisanship and building coalitions."

Nor were the harsh, bridge-burning proclamations that rang across the country as the midterm campaigns went down to the wire. In fact the 11th-hour tactics -- as well as their implication for the next Congress -- seemed destined only to make voters angrier. On Halloween, Bill Clinton launched an eight-day, scare-out-the-vote tour, arguing that the Republicans would do everything from closing Yellowstone National Park to slowing racial progress. His favorite gambit was to claim at nearly every stop that Republicans wanted to cut the benefits of Social Security recipients by $2,000 each. However improbable -- and hypocritical, since Clinton's own budget director suggested a similar package of entitlement cuts recently -- the ploy helped the Democrats win 26 seats in the mid-term elections during Ronald Reagan's first term. And Democrats have been faithfully trotting it out ever since.

Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the Social Security tactic "the big lie." Conservative strategist William Kristol snapped that the fear mongering proved that Clinton was "brain dead" and "exactly what he once accused George Bush of being: an out-of-touch, visionless President with only a few questionable foreign policy accomplishments." At a minimum, Clinton's maneuvers will make it harder for either party to propose or accept cuts in spending and entitlements, which they both know is necessary in order to keep the deficit from ballooning again. At worst, the President's tactics were a harbinger of broader gridlock to come. Said a veteran Democratic Party official: "I don't know how Clinton is going to govern, given the tenor of what he is doing."

The G.O.P., meanwhile, was having problems of its own as a result of its move toward the right. Some of the few prominent moderates left in the party engaged in a mutinous round of endorsements. Only six days after New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani endorsed New York Governor Mario Cuomo over Republican George Pataki, Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan threw his support to Senator Dianne Feinstein rather than Republican Michael Huffington. Ross Perot extended his vendetta against the Bush family across the generations by backing Texas Governor Ann Richards over First Son George W. Bush. In Pennsylvania, Teresa Heinz, widow of Republican Senator John Heinz, dismissed G.O.P. upstart Rick Santorum in favor of the more patrician Democrat Harris Wofford, calling Santorum "short on public service and even shorter on accomplishments." In the G.O.P., at least, the center would not hold.

The string of crossover endorsements gave the White House some badly needed cheer. Clinton aides made hopeful claims that they might reduce Democratic losses in the Senate by taking over seats in Minnesota and Vermont. Clinton stopped twice in Minnesota last week while crisscrossing the country in an effort to lift Democrat Ann Wynia above Republican Representative Rod Grams.

Behind the scenes at the White House, aides were doing advance work on a damage-control campaign to explain the Tuesday results. Officials said Clinton would appear at an East Room press conference Wednesday afternoon and argue that the real lesson of the election is pretty much what it was in 1992: that voters want change in the way business is done in Washington. Clinton has told his top advisers that he will seek Republican votes on welfare reform, a bill designed to overhaul telecommunications regulations, a reauthorization of the Superfund toxic-waste-treatment program, as well as a clean-water measure. The agenda represents a move to the middle, which aides say is deliberate and unavoidable. Said a White House official: "No matter what the results are, it is absolutely essential for us to work with Congress in a bipartisan way."

But with whom? In the House, an unusual number of Democratic Southerners are either retiring, vacating their seats to run for higher office or expected to lose. They will be replaced, most likely, by G.O.P. lawmakers of much more conservative bents. White House aides have begun to target 30 or so veteran Republicans who they hope will be swing voters to create the alliances the President needs. Last year they voted with Clinton on gun control and the North American Free Trade Agreement. But Clinton aides admit that these G.O.P. Representatives will be under intense pressure from their leaders to toe the line. In the Senate, Republican moderates are stepping down or struggling to win, while much more conservative Republicans such as Ohio's Michael DeWine and Missouri's John Ashcroft are expected to cruise to victory. The result may be that just as Clinton moves to the middle, he will have a much narrower pond in which to fish for votes.

Moreover, reaching compromise on water quality is one thing; getting there on spending, taxes and values is something else. On welfare reform, for example, there are enough votes in both parties to pass legislation next year. But the Republicans will be able to up the ante at every turn. They could conspire to toughen Clinton's plan to force welfare recipients back to work, cutting the time limit from two years to one year; his plan to provide public- sector jobs after that interval could disappear entirely. Clinton may be forced to abandon or veto welfare reform if it is amended to conservative taste.

If the Republicans were to take the Senate, they would be aided in this game by the fact that nearly all the key committee chairmanships would be in the hands of conservatives such as South Carolina's Strom Thurmond or Utah's Orrin Hatch (Judiciary), North Carolina's Jesse Helms (Foreign Relations) and New York's Alfonse D'Amato (Banking). As they lure Clinton to the center in the hope of compromise, Republicans know that they will be sparking a rebellion on Clinton's left, particularly among labor and minorities. Said a liberal Democrat, "The more he wants to govern, the more he is going to alienate his base."

Several Republicans said the G.O.P. will cooperate with Clinton for a while, if just to demonstrate that they are not party to gridlock. But after that comes what veteran Republican consultant Tom Korologos calls "the mother of all gridlock." As he envisions it: "For six months, there will be this fandango between the President and Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. Everyone will marvel at how collegially they are working together. And then, along about the Fourth of July, everything goes kaput. Because the Republicans aren't going to let anything pass, and the Democrats aren't going to be able to pass anything."

Which is why White House officials admit that sooner or later, the Administration will turn to measures that aren't so much designed to pass as simply to "define" which party is on the side of the angels. Clinton will propose a health-care-reform program, perhaps aimed at children only. He may, depending on the scope of the election results, offer a tax credit for middle- class families, financed by increased taxes on the wealthy. Says Democratic adviser Tony Coehlo: "Let's make sure we propose things that we can either prevail on or we can educate the American people on."

Of course, this is exactly the kind of behavior that got the voters so angry in the first place. But it is deeply rooted in both parties' collective thinking. A Democratic official went so far as to venture that it was in Clinton's interest for the moderates to languish and disappear so that Americans will know that the Republican Party is, as he put it, controlled "by the crazies." More level-headed Democrats know the loss of the middle is a made-to-order blueprint for a strong third-party candidacy in 1996 -- or worse. "Two years of polarization," said Senator Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat who might succeed retiring majority leader George Mitchell, "is going to kill us all."

Clinton, according to a Democratic Party operative who spoke with him last week, is anxious and confused about his looming migration to the middle. One reason is that Clinton still deeply resents the Democratic moderates for abandoning him on elements of his economic program and health-care reform. Now he must turn to them to revive his presidency -- only to find their ranks depleted. For Clinton, the scenario is almost sad: elected as a New Democrat, he stumbled during his first two years in office largely because he proposed Big Government solutions, like his health-care plan, to a populace that thought it had already rejected them. Now, as he finally tries to occupy the middle, he may find that nobody's home.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington