Democrats, Ahead in Senate Fight, Opening Door to Rich Opportunity

As returns from balloting across the nation piled up evidence that their party will command a majority in the U.S. Senate for the first time in six years, the Democrats appear to have opened the door to a rich political opportunity. But they also have come face to face with a myriad of problems.

The opportunity stems from the power a Senate majority gives them to command public attention for their party and to dramatize the kinds of ideas Democrats could offer the nation--especially in the 1988 presidential campaign.

On issues such as President Reagan’s future judicial appointments, arms control--including the Strategic Defense Initiative--Nicaragua, the defense budget and trade, Democrats should now be in a position to lay their own alternatives before the country and insist that they receive a careful hearing.

Yet they face two problems:

First, even controlling both houses of Congress, the Democrats still must reckon with a President whose personal influence is probably little diminished by the failure of his effort to save the Senate for his party.

Attitude Cited

“I think a lot is going to depend on the attitude of the Democratic leadership and how confrontational or cooperative it is with the President,” Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, said as the votes were still being counted Tuesday night. He noted that Reagan had “won legislative battles” even in the heavily Democratic House.

The second problem, even more serious and deeply rooted, is that the Democrats--like the Republicans--this year failed to develop the compelling national message they need to help win the White House and govern the country afterward.

As party leaders themselves conceded, the kinds of overall themes that distinguish parties and candidates in voters’ minds and thus enlist their loyalties were absent from the battle for congressional seats and state and local office just concluded.

And as the Democrats seek to use their Senate majority as a stage on which to fill that void, they face a host of lingering internal divisions, schisms which could as easily be widened as narrowed by their increased visibility in Congress.

Illustrating the kind of problem Democrats may face, the present Democratic Senate Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia declared even before the votes were counted: “We will pull the Administration extremes back toward the center and act where there has been inaction. For example, we are going to put a trade bill on the President’s desk.”

But, in fact, the Democrats, along with some Republican legislators, put a trade bill on Reagan’s desk in the 99th Congress only to have him veto it. And, no one doubted that on trade, fiscal policy or any other area where the Democrats will oppose the President’s convictions, Reagan would quickly use his veto power. That could leave the Democrats embarrassingly short of the two-thirds’ majority needed to override the veto.

Given those odds and the President’s strong beliefs on such issues as trade, it seems likely that the impact of the new Democratic majority in the Senate will have less to do with policies enacted into law and more to do with politics--particularly the early maneuvering for the 1988 presidential campaign.

In political terms the most significant and welcome change for the Democrats will be their increased visibility. “This will give them a far greater chance to influence political debate,” said University of Virginia political scientist James W. Ceaser.

‘First Crack at Cameras’

“The committee chairmanships are now in the hands of the Democrats,” he pointed out. “That means they get first crack at the television cameras.”

Nonetheless, given the uncertainty and lack of focus that still grips the party in the wake of two landslide defeats in presidential elections, the critical question to be answered anew every day of the 100th Congress is what the leaders of the new Senate majority will say to the cameras and to the electorate.

“It isn’t as if there were some big Democratic agenda they wanted to proceed on,” said Austin Ranney, political science professor at University of California at Berkeley, and himself a longtime Democratic activist. “There are a whole lot of problems that they don’t know what to do about.”

Ranney suggested the Senate Democrats might use their new power to block a Reagan Supreme Court appointment if the nominee were as hard-line a conservative and as questionably qualified as Daniel Manion, whose nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago stirred a bitter controversy in the Senate last summer before he was confirmed.

But Ranney doubted that the Democrats would find the will to oppose someone as conservative as William H. Rehnquist, provided the nominee was as well-qualified as the newly installed Chief Justice.

In his vain campaign to prevent Democratic control of the Senate, Reagan warned that a Democratic return to power would mean a return to the big spending liberalism of the Democratic past. But with the notable exception of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, few of the new Democratic committee chairmen seem likely to come close to that stereotype. And even Kennedy, who could take over as chairman either at Judiciary or Labor and Human Resources, has moderated his views since the 1984 election.

Other Chairmen-to-Be

The other new chairmen-to-be include such Southern conservatives as Sam Nunn of Georgia at Armed Services, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina at Commerce, John C. Stennis of Mississippi at Appropriations, J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana at Energy, Wendell H. Ford of Kentucky at Rules, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas at Finance and Lawton Chiles of Florida on Budget, along with such Northern moderates as John Glenn of Ohio at Governmental Affairs and Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota at Environment and Public Works.

And the moderate-to-conservative cast of these new chairmen is likely to be reinforced by the fact that neither party used the 1986 campaign to test voter reaction to any major national themes.

By adopting the featureless, often negative, tactics that characterized the 1986 campaign, political leaders of both parties defaulted on a potentially valuable opportunity. They failed to use this year’s races to develop the ideas they will need to woo voters in the post-Reagan era--the kinds of themes that Reagan himself, and before him his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, expounded so successfully.

“You can run a midterm election as a collection of localisms and a series of mudslingings,” said Brookings Institution senior fellow Stephen Hess in referring to the character of the 1986 campaign. “But you cannot run a presidential campaign as a disparate collection of disjointed issues.”

Leaders of both parties acknowledged the shortcomings of the 1986 canvass. “I think this campaign has not been ennobling and enlightening. There’s been more smoke probably than hope,” Democratic National Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. admitted.

“The American people deserve better,” Republican National Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. said.

Differs From Past Races

Midterm elections tend naturally to stress local issues and personalities. Yet the 1986 campaign appeared to have even less connection with national problems than other recent midterm elections.

In 1978, for example, with the Democrats controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, the Republican Party called for sharp cuts in federal income tax rates. That effort, echoed and re-echoed two years later by Ronald Reagan and Republican candidates across the land, helped pave the way for the GOP takeover of the White House and the Senate in 1980--and for the tax cuts that were the early centerpiece of the so-called Reagan revolution in federal fiscal policy.

By 1986, many Republican candidates seemed worried about the consequences of the tax cuts they had supported, but they seemed to have no new political metaphor to replace the image of the meat ax that Reagan had applied to the budget.

“I think the Republicans are as nervous and as uncertain as the Democrats,” said Thomas Mann, executive director of the American Political Science Assn. “They believe that various economic problems are going to come back to haunt them.”