Don't Scratch the Off-Year Itch

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Senator John Chafee, running for his Republican life in Rhode Island, last week got up the nerve to indulge a growing political suspicion. To raise funds, he held a nonevent. For $25 a supporter could stay home. For $35 he or she received an autographed copy of the speech Chafee did not deliver. For $40 the contributor was excused from reading it. The hopeless political junkie with $75 to give was invited to a chicken dinner -- in his own home, the chicken sent in from Colonel Sanders'. For $150 the Senator and his wife dined with the donors, and a tape of the speech was played at a level that was mercifully inaudible. Chafee raked in an astonishing $6,000 through the grateful dread.

Back in Washington, Horace Busby, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson and now author of one of the best political newsletters in the country, savored the Chafee story, considered the trench-coated armies of political broadcasters currently unleashed to inflate the significance of this mid-term contest and chuckled. "An off-year election does not have a message outside a Congressman's own district," he said. That is something that Richard Scammon, dean of all election analysts, has contended for years. With only one exception (1934), he noted, the party in the White House has lost seats in every off-year vote since 1842. And since World War II, neither party has seen its share of the mid-term House vote change more than 5% from the previous off-year election.

Busby has devised a kind of "political physics." He figures that the Democrats will have a lock on the House of Representatives for years because since the 1950s, Republicans have never been able to gain more than 192 seats, and that the Republicans cannot be dislodged from the White House in 1984 because of the historical pattern of the Electoral College system. Not much is going to change that arrangement, he feels, short of economic catastrophe or Armageddon. Busby is

more than mildly amused to note the expenditure of time, wind and money in this campaign when the results are, by his calculations, so fixed.

Democratic presidential contenders view the political events of this fall as pregnant with meaning for their candidacies. Says Busby: "On that glorious morning after the convention of 1984, when the new Democratic presidential nominee comes down for his first meeting with this strategy planners, and he asks that inevitable first question, 'How many states are we sure of?'-- if his people are honest they will tell him, 'Sorry, boss, only the District of Columbia is for sure.' " (D.C. has voted more than 75% Democratic in every presidential election since it got the right to that vote in 1964.)

And what is Ronald Reagan doing wandering through the unemployed ranks in Peoria? wonders Busby. If there was ever an old and tested rule of the mid-term election, it goes this way: Keep the President at home. Since his party always loses in the off year, the more he campaigns, the more of an issue he becomes.

Richard Nixon likes to recall how for six weeks in 1958 he bounced around the country in a propeller-driven plane, a Vice President exhorting the faithful in Nebraska, tramping through Alaska's Matanuska Valley (even though Alaska was not yet a state) and thundering his hopes in Michigan, labor's stronghold. Ike, wisely, had decided to stay in the White House. "The roof fell in," Nixon remembers with a melancholy laugh. "We lost 47 seats in the House."

Whatever happens in the coming elections, they will mean less nationally than the massed punditry of the press attempts to impose meaning on them. What is increasingly clear to almost everyone is that changes in Congress and the statehouses will barely affect in the next half-year the central problem before us: the rejuvenation of the wealth-making capacity of the nation. Even within the White House, when the men and women who counsel Reagan are being frank with themselves, they admit that if there is no better economic news soon, then that delicate bond of trust between the people and the President may break.

When the campaigning is mercifully over and the votes are in and people turn from promises to reality, Ronald Reagan will still face the greatest challenge of economic adjustment and inspiration that any President has faced since the Great Depression. And face it he must.

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