What Nov. 4 May Bring Is Loss of Senate Brokerage

What’s troubling about this year’s midterm elections is not so much their negative campaigning--that’s par for the course--but their negative institutional implications for the next two years. Ad hominem rhetoric is a familiar staple of American politics; overt failure to confront the country’s major issues is less common.

The danger is twofold: To begin with, autumn’s shallow campaigning isn’t laying groundwork for an upcoming national policy debate, either in the 100th Congress convening in January or in the intensifying maneuvering for the 1988 presidential election. There’s also cause to worry that the Nov. 4 races may yield a closely divided, even more politicized U.S. Senate that will complicate, not improve, national governance during Ronald Reagan’s last two years.

Neither party is exactly elevating the national dialogue. Republicans, for their part, are no more interested in staging a great debate in 1986 than they were back in 1984 when Reagan preferred to voice feel-good themes in pursuit of a 50-state personal landslide. Preserving power is the name of this November’s game, and to keep control of the Senate, now Republican by 53 to 47, the GOP has to reelect a number of second-echelon freshman legislators, 1980’s surprise riders on Reagan’s unexpectedly long coattails.

In strategic terms, enormous amounts of money have been marshaled to finance campaigns placing heavy emphasis on finely spun cocoons of protective advertising. Senators whom 21st-Century history books will pass over without a thought are being packaged for home-state viewing audiences as reincarnations of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Or, for that matter, as devoted protectors of groups and interests they’ve sometimes been voting against. In politics, money talks, often most effectively through the lips of advertising agencies.

Of course, it takes two sides to trivialize. If the Republicans seem more interested in parading behind their money and technology than in joining a real dialogue on the national future, the Democrats have their own shallowness. One has to wonder why they’re pumping out so many personal attacks, given the national issues where they ought to be scoring points. The farm belt, after all, is in a depression. So are the energy states. American manufacturing is also at least in a recession, what with our record trade deficit transferring fulfillment of American consumer demand overseas. Then there’s the Reagan Administration’s top congressional priority of the last two years, revenue-neutral tax reform, which was greeted by the public with a yawn.

And all the while, the U.S. economy remains in the grip of $200-billion budget deficits. You’d think the Democrats would be getting ready for a turkey-shoot.

Not so. In fact, it’s still not clear whether this political hunting season is going to see the Democrats as shotgun-bearing stalkers or as continuing targets. Since the 1984 election, when they finally came to grips with a decade and a half of well-deserved national-level voter rejection, the Democrats have been going through an identity crisis. Moderation now often goes hand-in-hand with equivocation. Congressional Democrats, in particular, have been a befuddled and inhibited opposition. Is the current federal farm program a disaster? Well, Democrats helped Republicans put it together. Was tax reform a misplaced priority in light of the trade and budget deficit crises? Democrats helped on that, too. None of it could have happened, after all, without House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois. Did the Gramm-Rudman budget deficit reduction mechanism turn out to be a joke? Senate Democrats helped write the comic book.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either. Reagan-era Democratic fecklessness has precedents. Just as we’ve seen recent eras when uncertain Republicans tried to “me-too” the Democrats, Democrats conspicuously me-tooed Republicans in several pivotal pro-business and unabashedly capitalist periods in U.S. history.

During the late 19th Century, and then again during the 1920s, Republicans dominated U.S. politics, presiding over economies that brought boom times to many big metropolitan areas but produced hard times in the agricultural and extractive hinterland, a pattern apparent today. But then as now, the Democratic Party was unable to develop anything resembling a united policy. On the national level, they pretty much echoed the Republicans and failed to provide a rallying point for disgruntled regions or voters. The siren song of Horatio Alger entrepreneurialism and big contributors was too great.

This was true in Congress, and even truer with respect to the presidency. Most Democratic national conventions shrank from ideological combat. Their White House nominees during most of these years--Grover Cleveland in 1884, 1888 and 1892, then James Cox in 1920, John W. Davis in 1924 and even Alfred E. Smith in 1928--were criticized for being closer to Wall Street than to Wheatville, Neb. Not until the two-tier economics of the 1890s and the 1920s deteriorated into the depressions of 1893-96 and 1929-33 did the Democratic Party focus its appeal on America’s depressed electorates. One can suggest they display a similar weakness in the mid-1980s, and it’s limiting their election appeal--even in regions suffering from local economic agonies.

In the meantime, Senate Republicans, at least, have something unusual going for them--the unique role that the Senate GOP has played over the last six years. GOP senators aren’t on the defensive as much as members of the President’s party could be after six years of an Administration producing serious economic problems, and with good reason. Not only have many Republican senators running for reelection personally opposed locally unpopular Reagan policies, but the Senate itself has frequently played an unusual role hammering out centrist compromise between the Reagan White House on the right and the Democratic House of Representatives on the left.

History underscores the uniqueness of the circumstances and function. Setting aside the 1931-32 period, when partisan control of both houses teetered, only once before during this century has control of Congress been divided--in 1911-1912. By contrast, the division of party control since 1980 has gone on for an unprecedented six years, during which time the GOP Senate has all but institutionalized a philosophic brokerage rule. Should the GOP’s Senate control end in November, the President’s own ideological lame-duckery may matter less than the disruption of effective 1987-88 national governance from the end of the Senate’s effective arbitration function.

Alas, a good case can be made that the Senate’s 1981-86 role won’t survive the November elections. Should the GOP hold or increase its 53-seat strength, which few observers expect, renewed White House hubris and overambition could jeopardize the Senate’s brokerage ability.

On the other hand, either a narrowly Democratic Senate or even a body where the GOP has only 51 seats or control hangs on a 50-50 tie could lend itself more to anarchy than to constructive centrism. Finally, if the November elections don’t produce a clear message--and that’s a fair bet--then the 100th Congress is likely to go into the 1987-88 pre-presidential campaign period without much real direction, doing little more than politicking by the time next summer rolls around.

It’s happened before, of course. The last two years of a departing President’s term are always transitional. In 1988, though, the country faces the first “double open” presidential election--one in which both parties have already known for two years they’ll be nominating non-incumbents--since John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon faced each other. Over the last three decades, moreover, presidential politicking has virtually become a “permanent campaign,” and a dozen people in both parties, including major policy-makers, are already running or maneuvering.

What we need from the 1986 congressional elections, but seem unlikely to get, is an issues debate and a result that will promote effective governance instead of further confounding it. But with only three weeks to go, neither is in sight.