Policy Puts GOP Back in Control : Without relying on politics or personalities, the Republicans are setting the national agenda.

Republicans, without the White House, without either house of Congress, a political minority for most of the past half a century, are again seizing control of the national agenda.

It began with Richard Thornburgh.

Thornburgh was a popular governor of Pennsylvania, and after having picked up some federal experience as attorney general, he would have made a good U.S. senator. Instead, Thornburgh, a Republican, was defeated for a Senate seat by a Democrat named Harris Wofford, a distinct underdog, who had latched onto the public’s anxiety about rising health-care costs. Republicans were dismayed. As it turns out, however, Thornburgh’s stunning loss may well prove to have been a blessing in disguise.

When the heavily favored Thornburgh was sent crashing to defeat, Democrats across the country thought they had finally found the magic bullet that would end Republican control of the White House. When Bill Clinton did in fact win the presidency with health-care reform as one of his major issues, the Democrats were certain they had found the political equivalent of the death ray.

Clinton immediately staked a good part of his presidency on creating the national health-insurance program that had eluded both Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Once more, for the umpteenth time since 1920, we were told that a comprehensive national health program was an idea whose time had come. The President showed his commitment to the effort by placing his wife in charge. From every corner, policy wonks gathered.

And on this roll of the dice, Bill Clinton is about to come a cropper.

For one thing, Clinton misread his election victory. Like Ronald Reagan, who mistakenly interpreted the public’s rejection of Jimmy Carter as a mandate for the entire Reagan legislative agenda, Clinton thought the voters were electing him when, in fact, they were unelecting George Bush. And even then, 57% of the voters cast their ballots for the two candidates who advocated neither a national health program nor a major expansion of government.

The President’s second major miscalculation was the belief that congressional Republicans would either draw a line in the sand and suggest that people who were not wealthy should simply be left to die, or simply spin about ineffectually, caught between right-wing rhetoric and political fear.

In fact, Republicans had been hard at work for more than a year before Clinton’s election trying to devise their own programs to deal with what they, too, perceived as problem areas in the nation’s health-care system. They neither spun nor dithered. They came forth with solid programs that made considerably more sense than did Clinton’s. When one of conservatism’s brightest new spokesmen, William Kristol, stated boldly that the country had health-care problems but no crisis--a sentiment shared by the majority of Americans--Republicans had found their voice, and Clinton’s health plan began to lose steam rapidly.

Now, Clinton’s chickens are coming home to roost. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Oakland), the Ways and Means subcommittee chairman who gets first crack at the Clinton plan, has proclaimed large parts of it dead on arrival. And Stark, who is even more liberal than the President, says that all the President will get is a smidgen of the program he sent to Capitol Hill.

At the same time, voters told pollsters that their principal concern was the high rate of violent crime in the nation’s cities, precisely the message Republicans had been hammering home all through the Bush presidency. The best line of Clinton’s State of the Union speech (“Three strikes and you’re out,” he told criminals) was a Republican line.

Liberal Democrats now see their President pushing a welfare-reform program that is a virtual carbon copy of Republican initiatives. We are closer than ever to putting a balanced-budget amendment in the federal Constitution. The Administration’s campaign to “reinvent government” is nothing more than a stitching together of Republican reform proposals dating back to the early days of the Reagan presidency.

Republicans control no levers of power. They don’t have the White House, they don’t have a single chairmanship in Congress, they have no consensus spokesman, but in the long run what politics is all about is neither partisanship nor personality. It’s about policy, and policy is a game the Republicans are winning.