Lawmakers Perfect Art of One-Minute Zinger : Congress: House members, enticed by TV coverage, limber up each day by hurling barbs at opposition.

Morning after morning as the 102nd Congress and the 1992 campaign draw to a close, lawmakers have lined up on the floor of the House of Representatives to heap epithets on the opposition party’s presidential nominee.

They do so because they have discovered an irresistible combination--House rules that permit members one minute apiece at the start of the day to talk about anything that strikes their fancy, and an ever-growing audience of C-SPAN cable TV viewers who watch Congress live.

“This is like taking the walls of the House and blowing them out from coast to coast, and expanding the gallery to include everyone,” said Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), one of the new art’s most accomplished practitioners.

The resulting exchanges have been spirited, infuriating and amusing. And they have added a new term to America’s political lexicon: the one-minute zinger.

Rep. Paul E. Gillmor, an Ohio Republican, kicked off a recent day’s name-calling with a biting attack on Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton. “Clinton has raised taxes so many times,” Gillmor said, “he should get . . . Congress to enact a Democrats’ frequent-taxer program.”

Alternating by party, the next speaker was Rep. James H. Scheuer (D-N.Y.). Scheuer retorted that President Bush “is defining himself not only as mean-spirited, cruel and insensitive, but also as hypocritical.”

Next, Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.) rose to denounce Clinton as a man who has repeatedly lied about his past. “The question today is,” Ballenger said, “what lies has he told about our future?”

So much for the decorum of the people’s chamber.

Representatives have learned that the C-SPAN cameras that pan the House chamber, gavel to gavel, are reaching an increasingly wide home audience.

The cable television public affairs network, which has carried live House proceedings since 1979, now reaches 57 million households, about 60% of the homes wired with cable hookups. And the people who watch typically are older and much more likely to vote than the general television audience.

“About 90% of our audience votes,” said Brian P. Lamb, C-SPAN’s Washington-based chief executive officer. “You don’t waste your time watching C-SPAN if you don’t vote.” Whether or not the C-SPAN viewers actually buy the messages at face value is anyone’s guess. But political analysts say that in any campaign, the first step is to get attention.

It is a lesson not lost on Dornan, one of the most conservative members of Congress. Dornan’s strident attacks on Clinton, particularly for a trip to Moscow that the then-22-year-old Oxford student took in late 1969, have prompted several hundred C-SPAN viewers to telephone Dornan’s Washington office in recent days, according to an aide.

Even more important than C-SPAN’s direct audience, which still represents a small fraction of television viewers, is the much wider group that representatives can reach through C-SPAN spinoffs to other news media. Newspaper and wire service reporters regularly watch C-SPAN’s congressional coverage, and television and radio producers, both network and local, often use feeds from the public affairs channel.

Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the conservative House Minority Whip, learned that lesson early, said Timothy E. Cook, author of “Making Laws and Making News,” an analysis of media strategies in the House. By delivering provocative one-minute speeches, Gingrich received widespread media attention, and earned national name recognition, Cook said.

“It soon became clear that what Gingrich (was) . . . really going after was trying to get a bounce into the news,” Cook said. “And that’s what’s going on here.”

It is a point well illustrated by what happened on the morning of Sept. 24, the day that Gillmor, Scheuer and Ballenger mounted their offensives.

The exchanges finally became too much for House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), who is accustomed to presiding over a chamber in which members by tradition refer to each other as gentlemen and gentlewomen.

“The chair believes that in order to maintain decorum,” Foley chided his charges, “certain minimal standards of propriety in debate should apply. . . . “

But moments later, Ohio Democrat James A. Traficant Jr. rose to speak. “The bottom line is, the President of the United States vetoed family and medical leave. It is time for Congress,” he said, grappling with a metaphor, “to tell the President to shove his veto pen up his deficit.”

Speaker Pro-Tem Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.) felt compelled to issue a rebuke. “The chair wishes to advise members to be a little more guarded in making analogies to anatomical factors.”

Rebuke aside, Traficant achieved his purpose.

His remark was picked up by the Washington Post, Newsweek and Gannett News Service. The Associated Press ran a reference to the quote, without using Traficant’s exact words, and that version of the story appeared in the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Cable News Network ran the C-SPAN feed of Traficant on its news shows that day, a network spokeswoman said.

“It said a lot in one sentence,” Traficant said later. “Our party is sensitive, we are very concerned about the welfare and the future of that veto pen.”

Traficant has not been alone in going after Bush, and that is no accident.

House Democrats have mounted a concerted, coordinated attack on a GOP incumbent as part of a larger program, that began in 1989, to get out the Democratic message.

Each day, 15 Democratic lawmakers assemble in the office of Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) to assess the news of the day and plan strategy for scoring points with the electorate. Known as the Message Group, the organization decides who will deliver one-minute speeches on the floor of the House, and generally what each member will say.

The assignments are parceled out to about 90 to 100 members of another group called the Message Board, composed of speakers known to be articulate and succinct.

“The message is not something that is delivered overnight,” said a top-ranking Democratic staffer, who asked not to be named. “It is the filling in of a mosaic, and it has to be assembled over a long period of time.”

Republicans have no similar message strategy, although Dornan said they should.

“We should be coordinated since they’re coordinated,” Dornan said. “But we’re not.”

Instead, the Republicans rely on an ad hoc network of party stalwarts to stand up and counterattack whenever the onslaught of Democrats begins. Among the defenders of Bush, Dornan said, are Reps. Gerald B. H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and himself.

And Dornan has been heard.

Last Aug. 5, Dornan exceeded the one-minute limit on his morning speech, during which he called Clinton “womanizer/adulterer” and “a classic draft-dodger.” As Dornan continued, Rep. W. G. (Bill) Hefner, a North Carolina Democrat and 18-year House veteran, decided he had had enough.

Hefner strode across the House chamber to the table where Dornan was speaking, and demanded that the Speaker cut off the California congressman. After Dornan finished, he and Hefner were heard to exchange words.

“I said to him, ‘Get out of my face. Don’t you ever do that to me again,’ ” Dornan recalled later. Said Hefner: “It wasn’t much of a chat.”