Stung by Defeats, Clinton to Take More Bipartisan Tack : Politics: Focus on Democrats has cost him dearly in Congress. Key test is how to forge new majority.

As their bus caravan rumbled up the highway through northern Virginia on the weekend before Inauguration Day, Bill Clinton’s team poured into Washington riding a wave of what one senior aide now calls “partisan euphoria.”

Swept up in the glow of victory and convinced that one-party control of both the White House and Congress provided the key to unlocking gridlock, the President and his top aides seemed temporarily to forget they had won only 43% of the votes in the November election.

In the critical first weeks in office, they set about forging an agenda that depended almost entirely on attracting Democratic partisans in Congress and around the country. Gone was the campaign trail talk of banishing “brain-dead politics in both parties”--with its implicit promise of building a bipartisan alliance for change.

Bowing to the preference of the Democratic congressional leadership, Clinton shelved his demands for reductions in the size of congressional staff. Most important, he designed a budget plan aimed not at the middle the country, but of the Democratic caucus.

“The frame of mind was, let’s put together a majority among Democrats and then, perchance, let’s see if we can get anybody else to come along,” said a senior White House aide.

This consciously partisan strategy cost Clinton dearly. Republicans and Ross Perot labeled Clinton’s plans as a return to discredited Democratic policies of “tax and spend.” Voters quickly began to question his willingness to redeem his outsider campaign rhetoric with reforms that challenged entrenched Washington practices. At the same time, Clinton painfully learned that party loyalty counted less than he expected on Capitol Hill, particularly for a President who lacks majority support in the country.

His proposed economic stimulus package suffered a quick setback in Congress, and his public approval rating declined much faster than any of his recent predecessors, further diminishing his leverage on Capitol Hill.

“As we have discovered,” says the senior White House aide, “governing in a way that does not expand a plurality is not a sustainable proposition.”

Now the Clinton White House faces a critical decision on how to assemble and command a stable majority in the country and in the Congress.

On each of the major issues rolling toward him in the months ahead--health care, the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform--Clinton must decide whether to build his coalition from the left in, or from the center out. In other words, he can continue to aim his legislative proposals principally at a coalition that extends from the left to the center of the Democratic Party. Or he can attempt to create a new coalition that can attract more moderates in both parties, at the price of possibly angering liberals.

Neither path guarantees smooth progress.

“I am sympathetic to Clinton’s dilemma,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank with ties to the Administration. “He is being asked to take a leap of faith. There is a (liberal) constituency he knows and he knows how to placate it. There is a putative (broader and more moderate) constituency that can be organized around the new Democratic philosophy, but there is no guarantee that it can be materialized.”

White House aides--and the President, himself--are sending clear signals that they have learned from their mistakes and will now seek a more bipartisan approach in legislative affairs. In recent weeks, on matters both symbolic and practical, Clinton has moved toward a program that his aides hope can quell the ideological warfare. He has hired former Republican White House operative David Gergen as a senior aide, dropped the controversial C. Lani Guinier as a nominee for assistant attorney general, scaled back spending plans and renewed emphasis on issues such as welfare reform.

But as Clinton aides concede, changing tactics and improving techniques in dealing with Congress are only first steps. Building the new majority will require Clinton to surmount the underlying divisions in the country as a whole. “The difficulties in the popular coalition are reflected in the legislative coalition,” says Clinton’s senior adviser George Stephanopoulos. “Getting the balance is almost impossible at times.”

During his presidential campaign, Clinton strongly suggested he would find the balance by following a center-out path. He often emphasized his departures from traditional Democratic policies, and talked of inviting Republicans and Perot supporters into government.

Clinton “campaigned as an outsider, and he called Congress ‘brain-dead,” said Oklahoma Rep. Dave McCurdy, a leader of Democratic centrists. “But as soon as he was elected, people said, ‘you’ve got to end gridlock,’ so he hooked up life-support to this institution that is brain-dead. I think that is a fundamental mistake.”

A senior White House aide agrees. “During the transition, I believe the greatest fear of the top people was we would look like Jimmy Carter. That fear drove us to prove that we excel at the inside game.”

That decision shaped the Administration’s first months. Although Clinton had repeatedly praised bipartisan government, no Republican or Ross Perot supporter received a top-tier job after industrialist John A. Young withdrew from consideration as commerce secretary.

Neither did he follow the other possible outsider route--a strong populist assault on the wealthy and powerful--an approach discouraged by his Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty and chief economic adviser Robert E. Rubin.

Instead, Clinton decided to rely on Democratic congressional insiders to pass his economic plan and found himself searching “for the center of the Democratic Party, not the center of the country,” as one White House adviser put it.

There is little indication that any significant number of Republicans ever would have supported an economic plan that reversed Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts on the wealthy. But at key points during the spring, the Administration made virtually no effort to attract even a fig leaf of bipartisan support.

Instead, Clinton backed away from budget cuts that might have broadened the package’s appeal to moderates, some participants in the internal deliberations say. He also loaded his stimulus package with pet projects dear to various Democratic constituencies--”one-eyed cats and three-legged dogs” in the disparaging phrase of one Democratic congressional leader--that proved impossible to sell to a public fed up with government spending.

“We approached the hill with a Hill mentality, not a presidential mentality,” said one participant in the budget planning. “In the plan we cut anticipatory deals. We had anticipatory cave-ins before people could even object. Someone would say, ‘Congressman Jones would object and he’s the subcommittee chairman,’ so we would change the plan. That became the dominant view.”

Later, after the budget plan became public, the Administration continued to cut deals to pacify Democratic members of Congress--creating an indelible impression among Washington interest groups that Clinton’s White House could be rolled.

Although the package may now have cleared the most difficult reefs--having been passed, in differing forms, by both the House and Senate--success has come only after that cascade of deals exposed the divisions in Democratic ranks and eroded support for the package and the President.

Looking ahead to the House-Senate conference committee, which will craft a final budget bill from the two chambers’ versions, Clinton still must broker a deal between liberals who fear he has abandoned his public investment agenda and Democratic oil-state senators who want to substitute budget cuts for energy taxes.

“Everybody’s getting their little piece of Clinton now,” says Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles). “Every time the conservatives win one, it makes me just want to fight harder.”

It is largely this bruising fight over the budget that has the White House talking about a less partisan strategy for the months ahead.

In some areas Clinton is already showing progress in expanding his legislative coalition. His national service plan has won broad support on both sides of the aisle in Congress, albeit in a substantially scaled-back form. His plan for aid to Russia--seemingly endangered only a few weeks ago--passed the House earlier this month with bipartisan support and seems likely to pass the Senate.

But on many issues facing Clinton--from gays in the military to taxes and spending--the ideological gulfs between him and his opponents may simply not be bridgeable. On others, he faces difficult substantive choices about how much to disappoint liberal Democrats, particularly in the House, to hold conservative Democrats and attract moderate Republicans.

And on some issues, the Republicans, encouraged by their success so far, may decide they have no reason to cooperate at all.

On health care, for instance, many Republican moderates are sympathetic to the need for reform that will provide greater access to coverage. Others support health reform as the only way to control Medicare and Medicaid costs--the major items driving up the federal deficit.

But any mandate on business to provide insurance for their employees or any large general tax increase to help cover the uninsured likely would drive away most Republicans.

“Republicans are of two schools about what we are for on health care,” says Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who is preparing one GOP alternative to Clinton’s plan. “But we are fairly united about what we are against.”

Similarly, on the North American Free Trade Agreement--even if he can resolve the complications posed by an unfavorable federal court ruling this week--Clinton will walk a tightrope between satisfying Democratic critics of the treaty and alienating Republicans who supported it under President George Bush.

Clinton has sought to make the treaty more acceptable to Democrats, environmentalists and organized labor by negotiating side agreements that attempt to compel Mexico to enforce its environmental and labor laws. But these negotiations have unsettled some business leaders--and thus Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“If he makes the side agreements into a social charter, the whole business community walks and the base of support within the Republican Party crumbles,” said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), a treaty supporter.

The crime bill repeatedly ground to deadlock under Bush. Now Clinton must persuade Democrats to accept changes that will attract more Republican Senate moderates on such issues as limiting Death Row appeals--or resign himself to another Senate filibuster, key Capitol Hill aides say.

If legislation codifying the right to abortion is to advance, Clinton will have to confront House liberals who prefer a bill that would wipe out virtually all state restrictions on abortion, like parental notification laws, Administration officials acknowledge.

On questions like these, Republican conservatives have already demonstrated an eagerness to highlight disagreements that can ideologically polarize the country and Congress. But Clinton’s hopes of forging a bipartisan coalition could still be aided by Republicans’ fears that a public backlash against gridlock could hurt them as badly as it hurts the President.

Already, national surveys show that identification with the GOP stands at a low ebb, and few see the GOP as offering constructive alternatives to the Administration’s policies.

If gridlock persists, both Democratic and Republican analysts fear a likely result would be a deepening of the cynicism that already has gravely weakened the two-party system and given impetus to third-party movements.

“If there is all-out war between the Republicans and Democrats here,” says McCurdy, “I can tell you who the winner is going to be: Ross Perot.”

If Clinton and the GOP cannot find an accommodation that produces meaningful progress on the economy and social problems, it would “lead to new alignments in our politics, based on new ideas,” predicts the Progressive Policy Institute’s Marshall. “Without new ideas, the two parties’ market share is going to continue to dwindle, and the ranks of the alienated are going to continue to grow.”

Search for Majority

Last in a series on the three-way competition among President Clinton, the Republican Party and Ross Perot to build a majority coalition in American politics * PART ONE: An examination of the differing priorities and attitudes of the three major blocs in the electorate. * PART TWO: A look at the key issue dividing Americans: What is government’s role in society and the economy? * PART THREE: How President Clinton’s efforts to build a legislative majority on Capitol Hill have exacerbated--and been complicated by--his lack of majority support in the nation.