Clinton and Congress: It could get even nastier

It's tempting to see the recent election as a sign that Washington may be ready to stop squabbling and finally get something done. Chastened Republicans will be under huge pressure to dispatch an impeachment inquiry the voters have overwhelmingly rejected. President Clinton, boosted by his party's surprisingly strong showing on Election Day, is primed to cooperate with congressional Democrats-and he is driven by a personal imperative: to be judged a major figure flawed by minor scandal, rather than the reverse. And the issues on the table-Social Security, education, fiscal policy-are ones that both parties claim to champion.

But don't expect sweetness, light and substantive legislation in 1999. If anything, the 106th Congress may be nastier and (if such a thing is possible) less productive than the one that just ended. Republicans now barely control the House (and the Republican leadership barely controls its own infuriated members), which guarantees frequent clashes with the minority. Filibusters will continue to bog down the Senate, and President Clinton remains a lame duck. Even if Republicans wrap up the impeachment inquiry as early as January, other investigations will drag on. Unfinished campaign finance probes, for one, will continue to feed Congress's well-established addiction to scandal politics.

Former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta predicts that the election results will actually make Republicans more combative: "I suspect that rather than less trench warfare, trench warfare is probably going to continue, with both sides maybe using different grenades."

And then there looms the 2000 election, with its inevitable attendant pressure toward polarized politics. Most in Washington agree that Congress will have, at best, until next August to get any work done before presidential politics take over completely. "This is a Congress that has to squeeze two years into eight months," noted Ed Gillespie, president of the Washington public affairs firm Policy Impact Communications and a former House GOP and Republican National Committee aide.

And this Congress will be behind before it begins. Normally, congressional leaders spend the weeks following an election hammering out their agendas and laying the ground work for coming policy battles. This year, that crucial window will be closed by 1) Republican internecine warfare and 2)the impeachment inquiry.

Centrism or Civil War?

To be sure, some observers predict significant achievements from the 106th Congress. The great GOP hope-a substantial tax cut-is now more critical to embattled Republican leaders than ever. A slow-growth economy could give ambitious GOP tax relief the popular boost it clearly needs. Other bills that came within an inch of passing this year, including patient protection legislation and a banking system overhaul, could go over the top in 1999. There may also be room for middle-ground achievement on education.

"With close majorities in the Congress, that might be an incentive for Congress to be more like the country and have the center be stronger," said Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, who touted the strong Election Day showing by centrist Democrats. "That might make for bipartisan compromises on issues like Social Security reform."

But the 1998 election hinged on each side's turnout of core voters, and this both underscores and heightens the degree to which the two parties are defined by the need to appeal to their ideological activists. That does not bode well for bipartisan legislative achievement. Moreover, practical and political obstacles will make it hard for either party to achieve its policy goals.

For one thing, the dominant issues are, in themselves, polarizing. The Republicans' desire for a tax cut runs smack up against Clinton's call to "save" the budget surplus for Social Security. The two parties remain far apart on how to rescue the retirement system from going broke, and political risks on both sides could paralyze the process. Republicans reasonably fear that if they push for privatization, Clinton will accuse them of robbing old people's pensions; Democrats reasonably fear that blocking tax cuts in the name of saving Social Security will stick them with the "big-spender" label.

Nor does either party enjoy unanimity. Republicans, in particular, enter the postelection era a divided party-even on the defining issue of tax cuts. Will it be an across-the-board income tax rate reduction, as House Budget Committee Chairman (and presidential hopeful) John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, urges? Or will social conservatives get their wish for an end to the marriage penalty tax? It's anybody's guess.

"The continuous battle cry for tax cuts remains little more than a rhetorical flourish, completely unbacked by any specific hammering out of policy details," complained Lawrence Kudlow, chief economist for Shelton (Conn.)-based American Skandia Life Assurance Co., and a former Office of Management and Budget official under President Reagan. "And that rhetorical flourish masks the fact that within the caucus, the Republicans are divided."

At bottom, Republicans are still adjusting to life in the majority. Their disastrous face-off with President Clinton in the previous Congress, which led to government shutdowns, for which Republicans were blamed, has left GOP leaders gun-shy and tentative in their dealings with the White House.

"Forty years out of power can have an enormous amount of impact on the ability of a party to take up the governing reins," said Richard F. Fenno Jr., a political science professor at the University of Rochester. "They're just incredibly inexperienced."

Clinton's Last Chance

Continued GOP flailing, in fact, seems likely to put the ball back in Clinton's court. The Republicans may be the majority party, but Clinton is right when he says that Democrats are driving the issues agenda-because now that Clinton has co-opted the more popular aspects of Republicanism and moved his party to the right, the Democratic agenda is the agenda of the middle, where moderates of both parties say they're comfortable. The election results this week reconfirmed what sells in America when times are good. "In a way, the momentum is back in the White House after four years of essentially being in Congress; the Republicans are now on the defensive," said University of Pittsburgh political scientist Bert A. Rockman.

Nothing significant will change about the issues platform Clinton and the Democrats laid out for 1998; it was crafted for unity and poll-tested for public appeal. Social Security solvency, education, health care and children's issues worked for the president before anyone heard of Monica Lewinsky, and the agenda buoyed him after the public said it had had enough of the intern scandal.

"We know what we want to do," said a White House official. "And obviously there will be a big push on for new ideas for next year."

The question in the White House after Election Tuesday was not how the president would proceed but where Republicans were heading.

If Clinton can help keep the economy humming, maintain an activist presidency and keep his job-approval numbers up, he has some inherent advantages over congressional Republicans. First, as he has done in the past, Clinton will be able to exploit the Republicans' mistakes. "The man is clearly a master of taking the lay of the land as given him, and making something positive out of it," said Democratic Leadership Council Policy Director Ed Kilgore.

Second, the president gets a head start. He has the bully pulpit and more than two months until Congress gets down to legislative business. That's a lot of time to occupy the policy mainstream and to shape public sentiment. Democrats and the White House will want to rack up a quick legislative win early in the new year, and the best candidate may be the managed care patients' bill of rights legislation that bogged down in 1998.

Third, Clinton and the Democrats are relatively united. He will have fewer problems, at least for the moment, with the fringes of his own party than the Republicans will have with theirs.

And fourth, Clinton wants to legislate in 1999 because he needs to. He must show more for his second term than white-knuckle survival and the permanent campaign. After tossing away his sixth year on scandal, the president desperately needs a few legislative achievements to give the historians something else to chew on.

"He wants to be at least a near-great President, and if, in the next couple years, he can get something done in the face of the pressures from the liberals, and the need for Republican support," Clinton might succeed, said University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles O. Jones.

But first, there's the little matter of impeachment. "That will be the first important skirmish in the battle for control of the Republican caucus," said Democratic pollster Mark S. Mellman.

The election results and exit polling would suggest that the GOP should search for the quickest conclusion of the impeachment debate. For the president, there is no better moment to tiptoe toward some compromise sanction, but even his friends worry that he'll read the Nov. 3 results as an excuse to stand and fight. White House aides say they've been talking quietly to lawmakers of both parties for six weeks about a plea bargain, and the last thing they want now is a Clinton newly emboldened to gamble on a winner-take-all victory.

Even if a deal is worked out, the bitter battle that would precede it would be a bad way to start the 106th Congress. Without Republican determination to cooperate, Clinton's last two years of governing will not be remembered for major legislative accomplishments. Yet that cooperation may be harder to achieve than ever.

The Election Begins

What is more, Democratic unity behind a New Democratic legislative agenda may be short-lived. Party liberals-from labor unions to African-American and women voters-who delivered key victories on Election Day, are likely to regard 1999 as payback time. And no matter how quickly Republicans move on impeachment, Clinton must continue to rely on his party's left flank for political cover in the near term.

In the run-up to 2000, the White House may also resist any but the most liberal-friendly policies, for fear of turning the Democratic base against Vice President Al Gore as he seeks the presidential nomination. This dynamic will intensify if House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo., throws his hat into the ring.

"Watching the House Democrats is going to be like watching a good soap opera: It's nasty, but interesting," said John J. Pitney Jr., associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. "Obviously the infighting is going to increase. Gore and Gephardt are going to try to pull one-upmanship on one another. And eventually, the criticism is going to break out into the open."

That is, unless Gephardt decides, as some already suggest he will, that he has a better chance at winning the speaker's seat in 2000's Democratic-majority House than at unhorsing heir-apparent Gore.

As the 106th Congress unfolds, skirmishing will intensify. On the one hand, both Republicans and Democrats will want to be able to point to concrete achievements as evidence of their worthiness to occupy the White House. On the other hand, with no fewer than eight potential presidential contenders in both chambers, petty squabbles and popularity contests are inevitable.

Ultimately though, the presidential contest will only emphasize the diminishing importance of what happens inside the Beltway. Republicans are already pointing to their governors as the party's next standard-bearers. As the presumed GOP presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who won re-election with 69 percent of the vote, epitomizes the pragmatic, centrist style that many Republicans think their party now needs.

Already there is sniping between Republican governors and their counterparts on Capitol Hill, and that sort of thing is bound to continue in the spree of blame-mongering that Republicans were deep into within hours of the polls closing on Tuesday. Gingrich, gamely, declared his joy at the opportunity to learn leadership from his brethren in the hinterlands. "We will be working very closely with the Republican governors," he said in a conference call on the day after the election. "And the model they show of reforming government and cutting taxes is the model for effective Republicanism."

Of course, in the end, a do-nothing 106th Congress may be exactly what voters want. More than anything, the recent election signaled public satisfaction with the status quo. "We live in a time that's marked by murky centrism; but given peace and prosperity, there's no great protest," observed Marshall Wittmann, director of congressional relations at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. "It's a formula that's worked for both Clinton and Republican governors."

The next two years will be, one way or another, eventful. Historic impeachment proceedings, GOP leadership struggles and a contest over the future of the Democratic Party will ensure, if nothing else, at least plenty of noise and heat. But for light, and for meaningful changes in public policy, wait until 2001.

Julie Kosterlitz contributed to this story.