Democrats See Pentagon Waste as Key to Overcoming Republican Gains

After months of post-election hand-wringing, Democrats are moving to exploit mounting disclosures of bungling and fraud in Defense Department spending as a key to helping them seize the political initiative from the Reagan Administration and the GOP.

Most immediately, Democratic strategists believe that the disclosures of wasteful Pentagon practices, possibly running into the billions of dollars, bolster the case for their own version of the federal budget, which was approved by the House last week.

The House budget, like the version approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, aims to shrink next year’s deficit by $56 billion but, unlike the Senate version, it would hold defense spending to this year’s level and retain next year’s scheduled increase in Social Security benefits.

“We’ll be damn well ready to run against the opposition when they try to protect spending increases on the defense side, which has been shown to be full of waste and fraud,” Democratic National Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. said. “In the meantime, some of those long-standing things that folks are depending on, like Social Security, are going to be protected in our budget.”

GOP Image Problem Cited

Less directly, but perhaps just as significantly in the long run, some Democrats see the Administration’s treatment of culpable defense contractors as underlying what even Republican National Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. has cited as a continuing Republican image problem: the view “that all Republicans care about are corporations and big business, that they don’t care about the common man.”

Kirk called the punishment meted out last week to General Dynamics Corp. “a joke.” Citing more than $200 million in over-billing, the Navy halted some contract negotiations but rejected a recommendation to bar the company’s three top executives from future defense business.

Republican Sen. Mark Andrews of North Dakota complained that the Administration’s resistance to efforts by himself and other lawmakers to tighten controls on Pentagon purchasing procedures “gives the public the impression that the Administration is content with what is happening. That may not be fair, but that impression lingers.”

California Rep. Tony Coelho of Merced, chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, said that the public believes that the Administration lacks a sincere desire to root out fraud in defense purchasing. “By in effect seeming to support and permit corporate abuse,” Coelho said, “Ronald Reagan shows the difference between the two parties much better than anything we could do.”

Many Under Investigation

With nearly half of the nation’s 100 biggest military contractors under criminal investigation, Democrats expect a continuing opportunity to stamp the issue deeply on the consciousness of the electorate before the 1986 congressional elections.

Moreover, in a broader sense, the embarrassment suffered by the Administration from the Pentagon spending revelations is feeding the growing sense of confidence among Democrats that they are at last emerging from the doldrums that followed President Reagan’s 49-state landslide last November.

Some party strategists caution that, as pollster William Hamilton put it: “So far it’s more a case of the Republicans going down than of the Democrats coming up.” Beyond defense purchasing, Democrats have benefited considerably from other Administration moves, such as the controversial decision involving Reagan’s visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg.

Democrats also have taken heart from an apparent decline in the President’s much-vaunted powers of persuasion, as exemplified by the failure of his televised plea last month on behalf of his budget to touch a sufficiently responsive chord among the public and Congress. The loss of some of Reagan’s personal magic may result from a factor that no second-term President can control--the awareness that he is a lame duck who cannot run for reelection.

Democrats Take Credit

Nevertheless, the Democrats credit themselves with assisting in the decline of the President’s political prestige through such maneuvers as their efforts to expand financial credit to hard-pressed farmers.

Although legislation pushed by the Democrats to expand farm credit was vetoed by the President, the Democrats count the issue as a political plus and expect it to yield dividends at the polls in 1986 in the Farm Belt. And as Iowa Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley, himself a frequent critic of Administration farm policy and Pentagon procurement practices, said recently of the President: “He is now perceived to be part of the problem.”

For GOP lawmakers such as Grassley and Andrews, among the earliest and most forceful critics of Pentagon waste, the prospect that the Democrats may benefit from the issue is tinged with more than a little irony. But Democrats believe that, as one Senate staff member argued: “The only way they (Republicans such as Grassley and Andrews) can avoid getting hurt is by putting distance between themselves and their party.”

Republicans in general may find it difficult to do that, particularly because the Administration has made such a point of presenting itself as a patron of the Pentagon and an advocate of increased defense spending. “It’s their President, and it’s their party,” said David Johnson, executive director of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. “We think of this as being potentially a very big issue in 1986.”

Other Democrats Share View

Outside Washington, other Democrats share that view. “This is probably the No. 1 chink in Reagan’s armor,” Iowa Democratic Chairman David Nagle said. “He’s been seen as a proponent of a strong defense, and now these revelations about waste cut into his overall credibility.”

The controversy has its origins in disclosures dating to 1983 of exorbitant prices paid by the Defense Department for prosaic items--$600 toilet seats, $426 hammers and $6,000 coffee pots.

During his 1984 reelection campaign, with public attention focused on the still-thriving economy, Reagan was able to deflect much of the criticism. Meanwhile, the evidence of vast wastefulness and even of criminal misconduct began to pile up, and the issue took on more serious political dimensions with the charges against such giant corporations as General Electric, which recently pleaded guilty to criminal charges of defrauding the Pentagon of $800,000 on Minuteman missile contracts.

With more than three years to go in Reagan’s second term, Democrats view the Pentagon procurement mess as an example of the sort of political liability that inevitably accrues to the party in power.

“This is the way we can show that those people who are running the government are running it wrong,” pollster Hamilton said. “We can use this and use any other issue that shows the Republicans are responsible for what’s wrong with the country.”