Now We Know What Voters Don’t Want : Tops on the list--taxes and crime. Now both parties must figure out what voters do want.

Tuesday’s elections showed what the voters don’t want--higher taxes, more crime and career politicians. What’s not so clear is what they do want.

Traditional liberals such as Jim Florio and David Dinkins were defeated, and New York City joined the national trend toward term limits. On the other hand, voters in California, Virginia and Washington state rejected candidates and initiatives that would have made radical changes in education and/or reductions in taxes.

Voters, in the words of the rock group U-2, still haven’t found what they’re looking for. So we are left with angry centrism. The chief beneficiary of this politics of disgruntlement is Ross Perot. The chief victims are politicians who in normal times would have seemed adequate, but now are getting bounced after a single term. Remember George Bush?

The giant sucking sound you hear is your tax money vanishing into a bureaucratic black hole, with less and less true social welfare coming back in return. The New Deal model of interest-group liberalism, created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to include the excluded, is painfully out of date. Goals such as equality of opportunity should endure, but techniques to achieve them must adapt to the times. As F.D.R. said in 1932, “New conditions impose new requirements upon government and upon those who conduct government.”

A year ago, nobody seemed to understand that better than Bill Clinton. Since then, however, Clinton seems too comfortable with big government as usual, as evidenced by his budget and health-care plan. A similar comfort level with the stagnating status quo did in Florio, Dinkins and for that matter, Bush. Their reelection message to the voters was: Things may not be too good, but this is as good as it’s going to get. No wonder they lost!

GOP Chief Haley Barbour is crowing that Republicans won the ’93 Trifecta, this year’s two gubernatorial races and the Big Apple, for the first time in history. But he must realize that his candidates had an easier time of it than the policies they stood for. Some Republican issues, such as strident opposition to gun control and abortion rights, are losers outside of Northern Idaho.

The defeat of Proposition 174 in California is a severe blow to the conservative crusade for school vouchers. For the near term, hopes for education reform in Cali fornia rest with Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature. Lotsa luck, kids.

The fracas over Wilson’s new-newer-newest education proposal is typical, and hardly encouraging. Next year’s showdown gubernatorial election already provides the backdrop: Wilson says spend more, while the Democrats say spend a lot more. Lost in this debate over inputs is any meaningful discussion of outcomes.

The threat of vouchers forged a cynical alliance between the Establishment wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties. That populist threat having been repelled, they can resume their insider squabbling. The political duelists in Sacramento deserve the worst they can inflict on each other. But the children of California, watching their schools gain ground on Mississippi, deserve better. Efforts such as LEARN are a nice try, but they’re the equivalent of the Postal Service getting a new logo--can’t hurt, but don’t expect real progress without real change.

Thomas Jefferson said the states are the “laboratories of democracy.” The Golden State goes one way, the Garden State goes another. New Jersey’s governor-elect, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, is a strong proponent of school choice. Working with Bret Schundler, the Jack Kemp-style mayor of Jersey City, Whitman has the opportunity to make vouchers a reality in one urban proving ground. The people of Jersey City--mostly poor, minority and Democratic--have had a chance to observe the decadence of the bureaucratic welfare state up close for some time. That two-thirds of them, in their desperation, voted for the Republican Schundler earlier this year shows the breakout potential for new and better ideas.

So what does Clinton do? The same blade of change he used to whack Bush last year is cutting at him today. And he can even learn from Pete Wilson what happens when a chief executive raises taxes and then fiddles, Florio-like, while things get worse and worse. Clinton’s smart enough to see that mere more of the same will turn all incumbents into one-termers.

Clinton ran as a “New Democrat” in ’92 and it worked. No doubt he’ll run as a “New Democrat” in ’96. For the country’s sake, let’s hope that he starts behaving like a New Democrat in between.