Democrats Groping for Image-Building Issues : Politics: House members, looking to 1992 elections, seek ways to counteract poll results showing a Republican surge in public esteem.

“I’m on the ropes, covering up and trying to clinch,” a Midwestern congressman said Friday at an aptly named retreat for House Democrats.

His comment--only partly in jest--illustrated the discouraged mood at the gathering of almost 100 lawmakers.

For President Bush’s stratospheric popularity and most Democrats’ opposition to his request for war-making authority in the Persian Gulf crisis gave many of the lawmakers here a clear case of political anxiety.

New polls showing a Republican surge in public esteem left the Democrats groping for issues to rebuild their standing with the voters before the 1992 elections.

They appeared united behind efforts to bolster their party’s image on national security and defense issues, but several who spoke during a panel discussion favored strong emphasis on traditional Democratic concerns such as education, health care and economic recovery.

The tone for the two-day conference was suggested in bantering opening remarks by Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

New opinion polls show that Democrats are favored, 37% to 21%, on a wide variety of issues--but over Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, Ornstein joked.

Rep. Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.) expressed the concerns of many in the audience when he said, “we are being criticized that we as a party were unwilling to exercise power” in the Gulf crisis.

A panel of foreign policy specialists, however, advised them not to worry about their majority vote Jan. 12 against the war resolution authorizing the Administration to attack Iraq. The panel members suggested that the President could be challenged successfully.

“All (international) problems can’t be solved by bombing the bejesus out of some small country,” said Madeline Albright, president of the Center for National Policy and former adviser to 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis.

She said that growing problems pitting rich nations against poor nations and the global warming issue, for example, could not be resolved by military force.

“There are amazing new opportunities at the United Nations . . . without the Cold War focus,” added Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who specializes in national security issues, said that the Democrats should not neglect traditional issues of social justice and education while dealing with international concerns.

The House Democrats also were told to pick and choose among military weapons systems rather than giving their support to another across-the-board military buildup.

“It’s ludicrous to say that because the Patriot (missile) worked, we should go for the Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as ‘Star Wars’),” Albright said.

Hodding Carter III, former assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Jimmy Carter Administration, suggested that Democrats endorse a pullout of U.S. ground troops from Europe, Korea and Japan.

Their security--like that of the Gulf states--could be assured by U.S. naval and air presence and pre-positioning of weapons, Carter said.

But Nye added that the presence of relatively small U.S. force structures in Europe and Japan could be used as a bargaining chip with those nations on trade issues.

The concern among Democrats about their majority vote against the war resolution last January was a pervasive theme in the discussions, some of which were held behind closed doors.

Maynes, however, dismissed the political concern. Those who voted for continued sanctions instead of authorizing the use of force, he said, should be called “Schwarzkopf Democrats,” after the U.S. theater commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who also once favored continuing sanctions rather than using force in the early days of the buildup.

On the domestic front, Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) suggested that the Administration could be accused of “complacency” about the loss of U.S. economic strength at home to foreign competition.

“We should not sit idly by while U.S. industries go down the drain,” Levin said. “We are doing the Democratic Party a disservice and the nation a disservice if we leave here without dealing with that issue.”

The conference was called by the House Democratic Caucus as part of its efforts to stimulate discussion of major issues facing Congress.

“We enter this gathering in a time of great challenges,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), chairman of the caucus. But Hoyer reminded the participants that Democrats gained nine House seats last November and should not be discouraged by Bush’s record high ratings in public opinion polls.