Off to the Races

By Richard Lacayo

If you were to spend a few hours sitting through a reel of this season's congressional campaign commercials -- a numbing project, to be sure -- you would be likely to come away with a peculiar picture of the political landscape. For one thing, you might easily get the impression that all the candidates, especially the incumbents, are passionate enemies of the Washington Establishment. You might also suppose no one is a Democrat -- especially the Democrats. If there's a characteristic sound bite this year, it's the muffled tread of politicians on tiptoe.

So here's Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, boasting about how he saved a small town from the Environmental Protection Agency when it moved against a local polluter. Federal bureaucracy, Kerrey warns, "is the most formidable enemy of all sometimes." (Is this the same Bob Kerrey who not long ago proposed a federal takeover of health insurance?) And here's Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, bragging that he was "leader in the fight that stopped the BTU tax." That's shorthand for the energy tax. Readers will recall that the leader in the effort to advance it was Bill Clinton.

Such are the trials of being the party in power in 1994. Even while recognizing that in midterm elections the President's party almost always loses seats in Congress, the Democrats are bracing this time for a potential disaster. The G.O.P. may well win four additional seats in the Senate -- or in a true rout, the seven they need to regain a majority there -- while picking up 25 more seats in the House. Given what the President has already endured in the present Congress, losses of that size would give the opposition make-or- break power in the next one, where battles on welfare reform and the global trade pact await, plus the uncertain second act of health care. The impact of the more powerful G.O.P. presence, declares Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour, will be to "cut Clinton's term in half."

The omens for Democrats are not good. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, the President's job-approval rating is 40%, the lowest for any President at this point in his term in four decades. His disapproval rating is 52%, the highest of his presidency, attributable to the wear and tear of congressional fights over crime and health care, the wiggles of his foreign policy and the lingering suspicions about Whitewater. The upshot may be this: more of those questioned say they would vote for a Republican (40%) over a Democrat (38%) in their congressional district.

Though every congressional contest has its own issues, the problems of the Democrat in Chief help explain why candidates lower down find themselves breathing hard to keep ahead in races that should be easy wins, including Kerrey's in Nebraska and Senator Ted Kennedy's in Massachusetts. Moreover, departing Democrats far outnumber Republicans among the unusually large number of lawmakers who are retiring this year. Given the advantages in campaign money that incumbents enjoy, each retirement creates an opportunity for the other side to romp through a more level playing field. With victory a real possibility in more districts, Republicans are also finding it easier to recruit serious candidates, while more Democrats are shying away. This year there are 31 House races in which the Republican faces no opponent from the other party, something true for the Democrats in only nine races.

Then there's the Clinton problem, especially for candidates in Western and Southern states where his popularity is lowest. Even so, Democrats are not running away from him everywhere. Later this month, the President will be campaigning intensively in several states where the party believes he can help, including Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri. His job will be to remind voters that the economy is in the best shape in years, the deficit is declining, and his Administration has ushered through a significant run of legislative successes on such things as the North American Free Trade Agreement, crime and family leave.

"We must ask people whether they're better off than they were two years ago," says Tony Coelho, the new senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee. "The answer clearly is yes." Even if that works, Coelho reckons, Democrats will lose between 18 and 22 House seats and three in the Senate. Given the risks of association with Washington, Democrats are also moving to emphasize their stands on purely local issues. Describing the House campaigns, Genie Norris, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says that "we approach this as if they're 435 mayoral elections."

Meanwhile, Republicans are happily doing just the opposite by playing up the Washington angle and national themes. "Democrats are running from Clinton like scalded dogs," chuckles G.O.P. chairman Barbour. So the Republicans' constant theme for November, he promises, will be that Democrat incumbents have consistently "voted for Clinton's bad ideas."

Republicans can't be too sanguine. Polls show that their losing fight to stop the crime bill left them with the image of obstructionists on an issue many Americans say is the one most important to them. To fend off the impression that his party knows only how to oppose, House minority whip Newt Gingrich will unveil a national platform later this month to which all G.O.P. congressional candidates will be expected to pledge themselves. It will include a list of bills they would promise to produce within 100 days, including a balanced-budget amendment, welfare reform and George Bush's old standby, a cut in the capital-gains tax.

There is also a strain of Republican thinking that says courting the charge of obstructionism is a risk worth taking. Gingrich is satisfied that the crime-bill fight left an impression the President had triumphed with a bill that smelled of pork. And via his much faxed newsletter, party strategist William Kristol has been urging that obstructionism in the name of image- building is no vice. A party that opposes the President unyieldingly, he reasons, gets a nice, sharp profile.

It could work, for instance, on health-care reform, one battle most Americans tell pollsters they are are no longer sure they want the President to win. That the issue, once a sure plus for Democrats, is now a more complicated blessing is evident in Pennsylania, where Democratic Senator Harris Wofford is in a tricky race against Rick Santorum, a Republican Congressman who promises to protect voters from government interference in their health-care decisions. It was Wofford's surprise victory three years ago over Dick Thornburgh, after a campaign that made health-care reform an issue, that first alerted politicians to its potential. But while Wofford is far ahead of Santorum in fund raising this year, their contest is a toss-up. "Health care is a significant factor that has energized a lot of people who are nonpolitical," says Santorum, with the clear implication that this time the newcomers are his.

While the health-care issue cuts both ways for Wofford, the Clinton factor is a distinct disadvantage. Wofford's campaign committee has gone so far as to prepare a long list of issues on which he and the President differ. "This ((race)) is not a referendum on Bill Clinton," he insists -- though he knows his 1991 victory was widely seen as partly a referendum on George Bush.

The Republicans have their own mixed blessing in the religious right. For candidates who move their way on abortion, school prayer and gay rights, conservative Christian activists can provide candidates with a base of enthusiastic supporters. In Virginia's fractious Senate race, a four-way contest in which the winner will not need 50% of the vote, they have helped give Oliver North a real shot at the seat held by Democrat Charles Robb. "North is constructing a coalition of the pious and the poff," says political scientist Robert Holsworth of Virginia Commonwealth University. "He's much more effective at it than anyone thought he would be."

But Republicans who get too close to the Christian right risk scaring off centrist voters. In Texas the state Democratic committee is carefully targeting House races in which it thinks it would be advantageous for its candidates to stress their support for abortion rights. One of them is for the seat held by Jack Brooks, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, whose opponent, Steve Stockman, is heavily supported by the religious right.

A lot of Democratic candidates already find themselves moving cautiously rightward this year. Two years ago, when Clinton handily took California from George Bush, Dianne Feinstein won her Senate race in a landslide. This year she holds just a 6-point lead over Michael Huffington, a one-term Republican Congressman. The ultrawealthy heir to a family fortune made in natural gas, Huffington has spent $10 million of his own money on the campaign and expects to spend that much again by Election Day, most of it on TV commercials. To combat those, Feinstein's ads concentrate strongly on her anticrime measures -- she was author of the assault-weapons ban that was part of the crime bill -- her support for the death penalty, the balanced budget amendment and limits on illegal immigrants.

To help take back the anti-crime issue from the Democrats, the G.O.P. has been recruiting more law-enforcement officials as candidates. In Ohio's 19th Congressional District, which runs through Cleveland's suburbs, freshman Representative Eric Fingerhut faces Republican challenger Steven LaTourette, a onetime local prosecutor. "Certainly someone who makes his living putting people behind bars has instant credibility with voters," observes Benjamin / Sheffner, who follows House races for the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan Washington newsletter.

When all the fiddling with issues is over, the final factor in November will be turnout. Given that Clinton's enemies are generally more passionate than his friends, conservative Republicans are more likely to get to the polls. Democrats hope that in the final weeks of the campaign, particularly after Congress adjourns in early October, Clinton can galvanize the party base by reminding them, as he did two years ago, why they vote Democratic. "For months the other side has had a corner on intensity," says one party strategist. "That's what we have to turn around before November. No one knows better than they do that November is not long from now.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 800 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Aug. 31 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.5% Not Sures omitted

CAPTION: If the election for Congress were being held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate in your district or the Republican candidate?

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Clinton is handling his job?

How well do you think things are going in the country these days?

What do you think the government should do next regarding health-care-reform?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Cook Political Report}]CAPTION: TIPPING THE BALANCE

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Tresa Chambers/New York !