‘92 POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE : Mixed Expectations About Election’s Impact on Capitol Hill : While analysts agree that change is coming, they vary as to whether it will be merely cosmetic or result in legislative and congressional reform.

The Republican challenger to 17-term Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) is legally listed on the Nov. 3 ballot as Elias R. Non-Incumbent Zenkich. In California, meanwhile, campaign ads for Republican Sen. John Seymour do not even acknowledge that he is an incumbent.

Faced with unrelenting criticism this year, incumbents in Congress are leaving Washington in droves. And many of those seeking reelection are downplaying their incumbency. In district after district, the watchword is “change”--and indications are that it is coming.

Retirements, coupled with primary defeats and what is expected to be an unprecedented number of incumbent losses in the general election, could produce 150 new members in the House of Representatives--the largest turnover since World War II.

One result--a more diverse Congress--seems obvious. With 106 women nominated by the major parties for House seats and 11 for Senate seats, a record number almost certainly will be elected. Blacks could win as many as 38 House seats--an increase of nearly 50% from the 26 seats that blacks now hold (a number including the non-voting delegate for Washington, D.C.).

Overall in the Senate, 11 seats could change hands--with Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun hoping to become the chamber’s first black female member. And victories by Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer in California would make the state the first represented by two women in the chamber.

“Whether you’re rich or poor, male or female, black or white or Hispanic, you’ll find people in the (next) Congress like you,” said Jane Danowitz, executive director of the Women’s Campaign Fund.

Beyond diversity, however, the impact that these newcomers will have on Capitol Hill is harder to divine.

Having run for Congress by campaigning against it, the new members will arrive with a mandate for reform. But apart from eschewing congressional perks and making sure that their checkbooks balance in the wake of the House Bank scandal, what impact will they have on legislative reform?

Will they slide easily into the system, working with the party leadership to boost their chances of winning favors for their districts? Or will they waste no time in throwing down a generational gauntlet, clamoring for term limits and rebelling against the seniority system?

In short, will the change that is coming be truly cosmic, or merely cosmetic? History offers some clues.

“In the past, the big turnover years--’48, ’64 and ‘74--all brought with them classes of new members who arrived with some kind of mutual resolve,” said Bill Frenzel, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Those classes each had specific missions--to rescue Harry S. Truman from a “do-nothing Congress” in 1948, to pass Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society reforms in the mid-1960s, to check the excesses of the executive branch in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in 1974, Frenzel noted.

But the Class of ’92 appears likely to be less focused, its demand for change more nebulous and its challenge to make government “work” again more elusive than the mandates that brought previous waves of reformers into office. “This year I don’t see anybody out there on a real crusade,” Frenzel said. “They’re all for change, but they all seem to have different ideas of what the changes should be.”

No one doubts that, if Democrat Bill Clinton wins the White House, major change will be apparent in at least one way. Despite the expected influx of new faces in Congress, the turnover, according to most projections, is unlikely to affect the partisan balance. Democrats could lose a few seats in the House, but almost assuredly will retain control of both the House and Senate by comfortable margins.

With Democrats in charge at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the accountability that has been missing during 12 years of divided government will be restored.

“If Clinton wins and the Democrats screw up, they will have to take all the blame. They can run, but they’ll have nowhere to hide in ’94 and ‘96,” said one Republican congressional aide.

Already mindful of this, Democratic leaders are working on a must-pass agenda of legislation for the first 100 days of a Clinton presidency. Also, a flurry of organizational meetings would be held in December in the hopes of having all new committee and subcommittee chairmen picked by early January.

“It is going to be Year One of the anti-Reagan counterrevolution,” said William Schneider, a political analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. “If Clinton wins, the Democrats are going to see it as a mandate to pass a whole spate of legislation that was bottled up or vetoed” by Bush in the 102nd Congress.

At the top of that list likely will be an economic stimulus package, along with health care and campaign finance reform.

But on an institutional level, analysts disagree over the extent to which the newcomers will succeed--or even try--to truly reform Congress.

“The newcomers will run around, crusading against congressional perks. They’ll renounce free parking privileges and maybe close the barbershop,” said Schneider. “But if history is any guide . . . then like the Class of ‘74, the first thing they’ll do when they get here is figure out how to get reelected.”

Congress “is very resistant to change and I don’t see the Class of ’92 breaking through that,” agreed Frenzel. He predicted some changes in rules “to allow the freshmen to say they voted for something new,” but doubted that the reforms would be radical enough to “ruffle any feathers.”

“Anyone who believes that real reform can come out of Congress ought to find a very large pumpkin patch in which to wait on Halloween,” Frenzel added.

Most analysts agree that for significant reform to happen, not only the seniority system but the authority committee chairmen have in setting the congressional agenda must be challenged.

“The biggest problem Congress has is the fragmented way in which we deal with things,” said one senior Democratic aide. “We tend to go out and look for problems that can be solved within the jurisdiction of an individual committee chairman, when in fact we rarely encounter problems that don’t cut across the jurisdiction of at least four or five committees, none of which have the capacity to work together.”

On the Democratic side, that system is already being challenged by left-of-center House members who want to transfer the agenda-setting power that the committee chairmen wield to a policy group composed of both Democratic leaders and rank-and-file members.

A caucus committee charged with rewriting the rules seems likely to come down on the side of the chairmen, who are fiercely resisting any attempt to undermine their authority. But the liberals hope to enlist the support of the freshmen to force more radical changes.

William Galston, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, said he believes that the freshmen will be a potent force for change in the new Congress because the “overwhelming majority” of them will owe their elections to “public disaffection” with the system.

“They know that unless Congress cleans up its act, they are going to be tarred by the same brush,” Galston said.

But Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, said the key to real change will depend on whether the Class of ’92 can keep diversity, its major hallmark, from becoming a handicap that prevents the new members from coming together and finding “common ground as reformers.”

If they act in unison, and in alliance with reform-minded incumbents, they could at least force the leadership to come up with “a very aggressive reform package this year,” said Rep. Leon E. Panetta, the Carmel Valley Democrat who chairs the House Budget Committee. But, Panetta added: “It’s a roll of the dice. . . . With such a large class coming in, we just don’t know what kind of dynamic will develop.”

Congress’ Class of ’92

The Nov. 3 election could produce 150 new members in the 435-member House of Representatives--the largest turnover since World War II. Eighty-six new members are assured, even if every incumbent wins. Here is how that minimum turnover compares to other years. The 33 new members in 1988 is the lowest for the ‘80s, a decade that saw relatively little change in Congress: THE NUMBER OF NEWCOMERS 1948: 118 1964: 91 1974: 85 1988: 33 1990: 45 1992: 86*

*Minimum; estimates range to 150