Divided Government Poses Stubborn Problems : Parties: The split-up of power produces a politics of co-incumbency. Some observers say this leads to compromises that fail to resolve key difficulties.

At a luncheon speech in Akron, Ohio, last month, George Bush came out breathing fire, blaming congressional Democrats for blocking a budget agreement and threatening to campaign against them “in every state in the union.”

But by dinnertime, at a stop in Chicago, the President was sounding a different tune: Warned that some of his charges had angered key Democrats and jeopardized prospects for reaching a budget compromise, the President sought to soothe the opposition leaders’ feelings. If he had caused any confusion, Bush said: “I apologize for misspeaking.”

That’s the way it goes these days as both parties--and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue--struggle to cope with the problem of divided government. Whatever budget agreement is finally hammered out by the two sides, that fundamental dilemma--which has contributed significantly to the current fiscal crisis--will remain.

This split-up of power between the presidency and the Congress--which has become the rule rather than the exception since World War II--has produced what some analysts call the politics of co-incumbency, leaving both parties facing what University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham terms “a choice between collision and collusion.”

For most of the last decade, the Republican White House and leaders of the Democratic Congress--leery of rocking the ship of state--have chosen the latter course, hammering out a series of compromises that they have touted as a demonstration of statesmanship.

But critics in and out of government complain that while such bipartisan bargains may protect the negotiators’ immediate self-interest, they paper over the nation’s serious problems and obscure substantive differences between the parties and among their constituencies.

“We have created a political system built around the idea of risk avoidance,” says Richard Moe, who was a White House aide during the Jimmy Carter Administration and now is an adviser to House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). “Politicians are paralyzed by the fear of the consequences of their actions,” Moe says.

To a growing number of scholars, the repudiation by the House last week of the budget agreement reached between Bush and top Democratic lawmakers at the 4 1/2-month-long budget summit underscored the weaknesses of co-incumbency politics.

“Co-incumbency and backdoor deals worked fine as long as you didn’t have to make hard choices of any kind and when you were not threatening pain and strain,” Burnham says. “But this budget package did just that. People in the Northeast were screaming like hell about the tax on heating oil, and people all over were screaming like hell at the notion of cutting Medicare.”

Cornell University’s Benjamin Ginsberg, co-author of “Politics by Other Means,” on the declining importance of American political parties and elections, views the budget blowup as a warning about the dangers of co-incumbency that party leaders should take seriously.

“This was a fire bell in the night,” Ginsberg says, “an alarm going off to show the desperate straits we’re in.”

Some analysts believe that the stunning rebuff given the President and top congressional leaders may backfire on the leadership Establishment in both parties by giving new confidence to already vocal minorities, such as conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, and thereby fueling more partisan behavior.

“I think that the fact that the House Republican Party by a very substantial margin has now declared that it favors actually fighting for its own values means that for the foreseeable future, collusion becomes a less viable option,” says House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who led a rebellion of GOP House conservatives against the budget accord.

“The American system works best when people have a feeling that somebody up there represents them and their votes make a difference,” Gingrich asserts.

Even so, many politicians still argue in favor of such bipartisan bargains. Gephardt, who helped draft the rejected accord as a member of the budget summit--and supported it even though, he says, he “detested” it--contends that compromise is a necessary element in politics.

“I came to the conclusion that the failure to do something would cause economic and political chaos--and that would be the worst of two bad alternatives,” he explains. “When you can’t do what you want to do because you can’t control the government, you have to decide whether you are going to do something you don’t like or are you going to do nothing.”

Whatever the economic consequences of the budget crisis, its political impact is already evident. Here are the implications for some of the major players on the national political scene:

Gingrich. Denouncing the accord as likely to “lose jobs, raise taxes and deepen the recession,” Gingrich established the ordinarily outnumbered House GOP conservatives as a political force-to-be-reckoned-with--and may have signaled his own political ambitions as well. “There’s not much standing between him and the 1996 nomination, except Dan Quayle,” Cornell’s Ginsberg says.

New York Democratic Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. For Cuomo, who is the early favorite of Democratic professionals for their party’s 1992 nomination, attacking the agreement put together by all those Washington in siders gave him an opportunity to play the out sider--one of his favorite roles.

Dismissing the budget accord as something that “Washington” had “slapped together,” Cuomo charged that it would have added to the tax burden “of those already most burdened--the workers of the middle class and their dependents.” As for the art of compromise, so valued by the budget negotiators, Cuomo quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said that compromise sometimes amounted to “surrender and invited new demands.” He called the budget proposal “a surrender to the failed policies of the last 10 years.”

Bush. For the first time during his presidency, Bush asked the country to sacrifice by supporting the tax hikes and the spending cuts in the budget proposal--and the country turned him down.

“This is going to make it much harder for him to proceed on the pragmatic basis he favors,” says Richard Williamson, who was an aide to former President Ronald Reagan and is now an informal adviser in the Bush White House. “He is going to have to come up with a better definition of the driving force behind his presidency.”

For his part, Bush scarcely helped his standing with the public by acknowledging that the dilemma of having a divided government made him prefer global wheeling and dealing--as he has done in managing the Iraqi crisis--to the nitty-gritty of domestic politics.

“People really basically want to support the President on foreign affairs,” the President told a press conference last week. “Whereas on domestic policy, here I am with Democratic majorities in the Senate and Democratic majorities in the House having to try to persuade them to do what I think is best. And it’s complicated.”

If divided government seems complicated to Bush, it’s even harder for the average citizen to understand. “When people vote, I’m sure they don’t think they are voting for divided government,” Gephardt asserts. “It’s our system that creates divided government.”

Indeed, the causes are deeply embedded in the system--a function of the constitutional separation of powers designed by James Madison, who gave Congress and the President separate functions as a matter of checks and balances. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote. “The interests of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

But the governmental deadlock that has been so marked in recent years also seems to reflect the political trends of the last two decades.

After voters’ disillusionment with Democrats because of the agony of Vietnam and the disappointments of the Great Society, they generally have approved the Republican approach to economic and foreign policy, which are mainly presidential responsibilities. At the same time, they have often favored Democrats to oversee the provision of everyday government services.

As a result, the situation almost literally fits the epigram offered by American Enterprise Institute analyst William Schneider: “The Democrats can’t win the presidency, and the Republicans can’t win anything else.”

But critics assert that this trend is reinforced by the tendency of leaders in both parties to strive to protect the status quo rather than risk confronting the opposition on controversial issues that might jeopardize their political turf.

Take Bush’s decision to abandon his “read my lips” opposition to tax increases--a stand that congressional Republicans had counted on to be their best defense against Democrats. It is widely assumed that Bush shifted his ground on taxes in the belief that accepting a tax increase would be the best way to reduce the deficit and thus stave off a recession, which would threaten his reelection hopes in 1992.

“The White House is convinced that if this budget package, more or less as they agreed to it, isn’t passed, interest rates will remain high,” said conservative activist Paul M. Weyrich after talking to White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu last week. “If interest rates remain high,” Weyrich said Sununu told him, “growth will slow and we’re into a recession, and if we’re into a recession they’re in very deep trouble politically.”

But many conservative Republicans warn that the bipartisan accord is both bad policy and bad politics. They believe that tax increases by themselves will bring on a recession.

“What Bush should have done was to veto any tax increases and dare the Democrats to let (the) Gramm-Rudman (deficit-reduction law) go into effect, which would have cut the spending programs they want to protect,” says David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Democrats, on the other hand, are under fire for being too timid to challenge Bush. One example cited by critics is the failure of Democratic congressional leaders to push hard for the proposal by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) to cut Social Security payroll taxes. Moynihan argues that the surplus in the Social Security trust fund is being mischanneled to make the federal deficit look smaller.

Another factor that inhibits Democrats is their heavy indebtedness to corporate political action committees (PACs), whose contributions swell the campaign war chests of their congressional incumbents. “Democrats get as much or more PAC money as Republicans,” says Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), chairman of the newly formed Coalition for Democratic Values, which is dedicated to reviving the party’s liberal activist tradition. “The PACs play the game, and they understand who is in control of Congress.”

George Shipley, a Texas-based consultant and onetime adviser to 1988 presidential candidate Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), agrees. “Our party has not been able to take advantage of new issues that emerge, like the environment, because we don’t want to risk losing all that PAC money,” Shipley says. “We’ve grown comfortable with our control of Congress.”