Divided They Fall

owever the slugfest between George W. Bush and Al Gore comes out, let's just hope that the victor has coattails. If the past few years of divided government have taught us anything, it's that the next President's chances of resolving big problems like the solvency of Social Security and Medicare or charting a post-Cold War foreign policy will be far better if his own party commands majorities on Capitol Hill.

The congressional oversight process, which of late has been devoted more to scandal-mongering than constructive efforts to enhance programs and management, would also profit greatly if the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were to come into political alignment.

This is especially true this year, given that experts are predicting a tight and nasty general election campaign. The likely outcome will leave no shortage of bruised feelings and a narrowly divided Congress. If Bush wins the presidency but Democrats regain control of the House, we may be in for at least two more years of backbiting and stalemate. Ditto if Gore gains the Oval Office but Republicans continue to rule the legislative roost.

There has been much talk recently about growing political polarization in Washington and the collapse of the bipartisan center where important compromises once were hashed out. For the first time in the 19 years that it has analyzed congressional voting patterns, National Journal found a clear liberal-conservative divide between Senate Democrats and Republicans in 1999. In previous years, there always had been an overlapping cluster of a dozen or so conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who formed a centrist bloc. But last year, the most liberal Republican was rated to the right of the most conservative Democrat.

The "middle cluster" in the House was similarly found to have all but disappeared. Congressional Quarterly summed up the situation as "a perfect recipe for legislative gridlock: intense party-line voting and personal invective at a time of divided government and narrow majorities."

Such pessimism has not always pervaded the nation's capital. Twenty years ago, when Republican Ronald Reagan won the presidency but his party failed to wrest control of the House from the Democrats, it hardly was a formula for impasse. Indeed, in his first year in office, Reagan won approval of massive tax and spending cuts, altering government priorities that had stood since the New Deal.

But Reagan had something-aside from his considerable personal popularity-going for him in 1981 that does not exist today. It was a bloc of southern Democrats in the House, known as the "boll weevils," who could usually be counted upon to support Republican causes. In fact, one of the Reagan administration's key legislative advisers was a Louisana Democrat, Joe D. Waggoner Jr., who had been known during his service in the House from 1961 to 1978 as a master at engineering alliances between Dixie Democrats and the GOP.

For nearly half a century, such alliances served as a check on the Democratic Party's congressional dominance and paved the way for bipartisan compromises. The so-called "southern coalition" emerged as a force in Franklin Roosevelt's second term, thwarting his attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court, and subsequently shaped the outcome of major civil rights, labor and economic legislation, congressional historians note.

By the mid-1980s, however, the South had ceased to be a region of "one-party" politics, in which conservative candidates won election under the Democratic banner. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., for example, began his political career as an aide to conservative Democratic Rep. William Colmer but ran as a Republican to succeed his boss upon Colmer's retirement. Today, the region's conservatives mostly run as Republicans for seats made electorally safe by redistricting decisions that lump Democratic votes mostly into areas that maximize the electoral chances of black candidates.

The new "two-party" South has subsequently become the heart of the GOP's congressional base. And the senior southern "barons" who once were powerful Democratic committee chairmen have departed the scene. In essence, it isn't so much the center that has collapsed as it is that the bipartisan conservative coalition has died a natural death. As a result, what once appeared to be cooperation between Republicans and conservative-leaning Democrats now translates into highly polarized party-line votes.

To be sure, there are moderates on both sides of the aisle who still seek to forge centrist solutions to critical problems of the day, from improving education to fostering free trade. And it's equally true that both Bush and Gore will seek to steer their campaigns toward the political center between now and November. Bush, most certainly, will keep well clear of South Carolina's Bob Jones University, and Gore will hold no more private meetings in New York City with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But whoever winds up in the White House had better not count too heavily on support from a centrist Congress.

Dick Kirschten is a contributing editor for National Journal.