In Era of New Party Roles, Survival Instincts Obscure Ideology

WASHINGTON — The Republican Party’s official 1996 Christmas card depicted a joyful elephant opening a gift-wrapped replica of the U.S. Capitol. “Oh boy!” the pachyderm exclaims, “Congress again!”

Indeed, on this inaugural weekend, divided government is back with us--but with a dramatic difference from the 1980s version.

For a dozen years, starting in 1980, the conventional political wisdom was that Democrats couldn’t elect a president while Republicans couldn’t elect anything else. Then came the elections of 1992 and 1994--confirmed by the 1996 vote--which turned the political world upside down by reversing the institutional order of battle in Washington.

It is a situation expected to last out the century, at the least. And now that the parties have exchanged power bases, they also are modifying their behavior, to some extent even mimicking what their opposition has done in the past.

President Clinton has provided the most striking example of this on his way to winning reelection, a victory that will be formalized Monday when he takes the oath of office. On the campaign trail, Clinton unblushingly embraced such issues as balancing the federal budget and battling crime, both concerns Republicans previously regarded as their exclusive domain.

But GOP leaders also have taken note of the changed environment and the need to respond accordingly. “We are no longer the party of the White House,” said John Herrington, California party chairman. “Things have changed. We are the party of Congress. We are the party that’s going to have to make government run better and more efficiently and serve the needs of people.”

The explanation commonly offered for the previous way government was divided was that voters wanted Democrats in Congress, where they could do what they did best--hand out the benefits of government. On the other hand, the theory went, only a Republican president could be trusted to preside over the Cold War, keep the economy on track and stand up for the values of the middle class.

“Voters felt that Congress would take care of people at home and the president would take care of the country abroad,” said Fred Steeper, a GOP pollster who worked for the Ronald Reagan and George Bush campaigns.

Major changes in the political environment--notably the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Reagan-era economic boom and the emergence of the federal budget deficit as the dominating reality of national politics--shattered that belief. And there emerged the era in which ideological cross-dressing often seems in fashion.

As Clinton borrowed liberally from what had been the GOP agenda, frustrated Republicans denounced him as both a plagiarist and a hypocrite. “What Republicans are angry about is if they had been able to make Clinton behave the way Democrats are supposed to behave, he would have been on the wrong side of most of the issues,” said John Petrocik, a UCLA political scientist who sometimes works for the GOP.

Overshadowed by Clinton’s ability to benefit from the lessons taught by his Republican predecessors, but of equal significance, has been the tendency of GOP legislators to emulate their Democratic counterparts--at least to the extent of being willing to occasionally compromise ideological principle for political self-interest.

As they headed down the homestretch to November’s judgment day, enough Republicans on Capitol Hill went along with Democrats to make possible enactment of laws raising the minimum wage and making health care more accessible, thus cloaking traditional liberal objectives with bipartisanship.

Moreover, on the hottest issue of the year--welfare reform--Republicans agreed to compromises that got a bill signed into law. That helped their own reelection campaigns, but also allowed Clinton to reap political benefit. This came at the expense of GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole, who had anticipated being able to accuse Clinton of breaking his 1992 promise to end welfare “as we know it.”

“We wanted them to stick it to Clinton and put the failure of welfare reform on his ticket,” said Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager. But GOP incumbents, fearful that a Democratic tide would sweep them out of office if they could not point to legislative accomplishments, “put their selfish interests ahead of the nominee,” Reed said.

“You had a president that most Republicans on Capitol Hill detested,” said Charles Jones, University of Wisconsin political scientist. “And yet as they looked forward to the election, they wanted a record, even if it meant starving their presidential candidate of issues.”

The practical mood evident among Republicans as the new Congress gets down to business could portend more such pragmatic decision-making by GOP lawmakers.

Even some conservative analysts concede that the GOP needs to back up its attacks on government with alternatives that meet middle-class needs.

“Some Republicans want to abolish [the Department of Housing and Urban Development],” points out congressional affairs specialist John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College. “But what are they going to put in its place? Are they going to provide housing vouchers to poor people, or just turn public housing programs over to the states?”

Other analysts agree that for either party, forging a new majority will demand a more flexible mold.

“Politics and governing is going to require new formulations and mixes of approaches that purists on either pole find very unsatisfactory,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “But that’s the world we live in.”

It is a world of severe limits that robs politics of much of its possibilities and makes divided government a security blanket for the notoriously risk-averse political leaders of both parties.

“In this era of debt politics, neither party wants full responsibility,” Jones said. “You are in a period where you are talking about taking things away from people rather than giving things to people. This is really an incentive to preserve split-party government, where you can avoid the blame and share credit.”

In the meantime, divided government offers both parties the chance to function as partners, or co-incumbents, and to serve each other’s political needs.

“Clinton needs to go out of his way to empower the Republican Party so he’s not controlled by the congressional Democrats,” said Dick Morris, Clinton’s former political advisor, who views the Democrats on Capitol Hill as too liberal to suit middle-class tastes.

As for the Republicans, Morris said, “They need bipartisan government to get back in the mainstream and show the American people they are not crazy.”

As for non-politicians, judgments on divided government likely will depend on a simpler equation: what they expect from government.

“A lot of people feel that divided government is good because it prevents much of anything from being done, and they are happy with the status quo,” said Ben Ginsburg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “But for those who think government is potentially capable of doing some good, for people who are not happy with the economy, society and the political system, [divided government] is not so good.”