While GOP Just Watches, Democrats Eat Their Own : Politics: Are the Republicans really Clinton’s worst enemy? Not while the Democrats are around. The fiercest fight is intraparty.

It seems like a natural political entente. Bill Clinton needs congressional Democrats to be successful. The Democratic Party has an enormous stake in a successful Clinton presidency. If ev erybody gets with the program, every body wins. Indeed, Clinton made this a centerpiece of his campaign, promising the “end of gridlock” in Washington.

But between the idea and the reality falls the Democratic Party. Consider Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (D-N.Y.) first conversation with the Clinton team. It did not take place over the phone, or even via fax. It happened in the pages of Time. Moynihan let it be known that his phone worked but that, inexplicably, no one from the Administration knew his number. “Not since November,” groused Moynihan, “not a single phone call. . . . I would have thought someone would have gotten in touch by now. I just don’t get it.”

Reach out and touch someone. With the elevation of Sen. Lloyd Bensten to Treasury secretary, Moynihan ascended to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee. Virtually every piece of major Administration legislation dealing with the economy must pass through Moynihan’s committee. Later in the same article, a “top Administration official” answered Moynihan: “Big deal, Moynihan supported Bob Kerrey during the primaries. He’s not one of us, and he can’t control finance like Bentsen did. . . . We’ll roll right over him if we have to.”

Well, maybe not. Just in case, Bentsen was dispatched to disown the remarks. But this offered a glimpse into a featured attraction in the Age of the End of Gridlock: Democrats eating their own.

Behind the scenes, Democratic cannibalism has been the rage since the election-night celebration in Little Rock. United ‘til then, Democrats had devoted all their atavistic energies toward savaging George Bush. The election returns held the promise of a Democratic renaissance. All seemed well.

But within days, everything changed. And, in a way, it was understandable. Democrats had been out in the cold for so long that jobs in the Administration caused otherwise sensible people to resort to desperate behaviors. Defeat after defeat had only whetted their appetite for a shot at the big time. When they finally won, they could probably be excused for body-slamming each other in the rush to get a good seat at the table.

When Democrats start feeding on themselves, no one in the party is safe. Look what happened when Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s friend since Oxford, made it known that he wished to be Commerce secretary. His request was vetted by the transition team of high-priced lawyers headed up by Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan. Reich at commerce was troublesome. The Business Roundtable didn’t want some weird, bearded academic cutting deals at Commerce; they wanted someone who understood business. Ronald H. Brown would be fine, they said. Clinton offered Reich another job--labor secretary. Brown got Commerce.

One would think that Brown, who had taken over the Democratic Party in the depths of its despond following the Dukakis disaster, would have been greeted with praise from Democrats of all stripes. He had, after all, raised an enormous amount of money for the party, run a nearly flawless convention and presented candidate Clinton with an impressive organizational and political apparatus in the fall campaign. But Brown was savaged as a morally degenerate lobbyist who had sold out for a stash of Japanese yen and a pile of Baby Doc’s cash.

It would have been a routine case of sour grapes had Republicans been slandering Brown’s reputation. But Republicans weren’t touching Brown; they were too busy praising his selection. Indeed, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) served as a character witness at his confirmation hearings. The people (“informed sources” in journalese) savaging Brown were Democrats, mostly liberal Democrats of the good-government kind.

This depressing spectacle played to a small crowd, however. Only the political community was paying attention and most of this was behind closed doors.

But the intraparty slice-and-dice went public, on network television no less, during a Transition press conference. Clinton, frustrated by the inability of his fellow Democrats to rise above provincial concerns, lashed out at one group, the “bean-counters” in the women’s movement, that was pressuring him to appoint more women to his Cabinet. The reaction of these “bean-counters” was instructive: They said they’d keep the heat on Clinton. He nominated Zoe Baird for attorney general.

The Baird nomination was the first indication that something was seriously wrong in the fledgling Clinton Administration. Her appointment was Clinton’s way of showing “them”--in this case, feminists and their lefty friends in the special-interest community--that he was in charge. And it worked, short term. It was good political theater: The new Democrat telling off the bad old Democrats on a matter of real substance. When the nomination ran into stormy weather, however, the bad old Democrats took their revenge and left Baird’s nomination bleeding all over the Senate floor.

The Baird debacle left many in Washington scratching their heads. The Administration was less than a week old and it felt very much like President Jimmy Carter and the congressional barons getting divorced over water projects in 1977. There were ominous references to Carter II throughout the Baird debacle, which would resurface during the amazing gays-in-the-military disaster that hit the Clinton Administration like Hurricane Andrew on speed.

To be fair, Clinton had been clear about his intention to lift the ban on gays in the military. He had said it early in his campaign and he said it early in the transition. Indeed, he said it on Veteran’s Day, lest anyone miss his point.

What was astonishing was how ferociously Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, turned on his President and forced him into a debilitating political battle on a loser issue when he was trying to rebound from the collapse of the Baird nomination. Nunn derided the Clinton political operation as useless and challenged the President’s authority to mandate such a change in military policy. The press went wild--sex always being the best story--and the Clinton Administration seemed frozen in the glare of the klieg lights.

Finally, the Senate majority leader stepped in, declaring Nunn the winner by TKO, and engineered a compromise that postponed the issue for six months. The dust-up took its toll. Clinton had gone head-to-head with a congressional baron. The pros scored it a clean kill for Nunn.

There were other dust-ups that hit the front pages. The White House floated a deficit-reduction proposal--capping Social Security cost-of-living allowances--and was promptly flattened by a blizzard of negative comment from Democratic barons on the Hill. The President gathered together the congressional leadership to gin up some enthusiasm for campaign-finance reform, a major political issue, but both sides didn’t really want to talk about it, and everyone was clear that no matter what happened, campaign finance reform would not take effect until after the 1994 election cycle.

House Democrats, meanwhile, eager to give their new leader a boost, rushed through passage of the Family Leave Act, apple-pie legislation that the bogeyman Bush had vetoed but that would now pass, proving that “gridlock in Washington has ended.” Democratic congressmen and women actually said that.

But the really hard political decisions--on defense spending, deficit reduction, health care, trade and other major issues--are still down the road.

Meanwhile, Clinton is said to be busy working on his economic program for his first State of the Union Address on Feb. 17. His fellow Democrats will applaud him lustily when he enters the room and when he offers his proposals for economic revival. But the extraordinary Republican Party discipline that enabled President Ronald Reagan to roll over Capitol Hill in 1981, and that sustained virtually all of Bush’s vetoes during his tenure, will not be imitated in a Washington that’s “all Democratic now.”

After the cheering stops, Democrats will return to their old behaviors, and commence firing upon the prize that eluded them five out of six times between 1968 and 1988. If they are as accurate as they were in 1977, the Clinton Administration will be a long, long haul.