NEWS ANALYSIS : ‘Break Gridlock’ Image Suffers Double Blow

When the history books are written, Thursday just may be recalled as the day President Clinton’s luck--and with it his effectiveness--finally ran out.

For more than a year-and-a-half, Clinton, despite being elected with only 43% of the vote, has managed to eke out of Congress a eries of one- and two-vote victories--”Clinton landslides,” his aides joked. Thursday, they stopped joking.

When the House rejected the $33-billion crime bill and its leaders informed the White House that they would have to delay floor debate on health care, the chief rationale for Clinton’s presidency--that he could “break gridlock” in Washington--suffered two grievous blows.

Setbacks this large would damage any President. But for Clinton, who has held out “effectiveness” as the chief counter to Americans’ widespread questions about his character, the damage is far worse. For him, a series of legislative defeats would leave him little ground to stand on.

Administration officials, confident that the crime bill enjoys overwhelming public support, spoke defiantly about bringing the bill back.

“Voting no is the wrong side to be on on this issue,” said one White House strategist. Officials also insisted that, despite the scheduling setbacks, health care reform will prevail in the end. If either of those things happens, those major victories could erase much of this week’s damage.

Moreover, anticipating large Democratic losses this fall, White House aides already had been laying plans for moving from a strategy based on legislative accomplishments to one based on more populist, more sharply toned, attacks on opponents.

Clinton previewed that strategy in an angry press conference after the crime bill vote--vowing to fight on and denouncing opponents for bowing to “special interests.”

“I worked my heart out on it and I did everything I could. And on this day the (National Rifle Assn.) and the Republican leadership had their way,” Clinton said. “I believe the American people will not like viewing this as some sort of political circus up here. I’m on their side and I think we better see who’s on what side.”

Some White House aides are hopeful that such an approach, less tied to negotiating endless compromises through Congress, could revive Clinton’s standing with voters. In any case, Clinton has little choice.

“If your platform is getting stuff done and you can’t get anything done, you better find a new platform,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

But even if that shift in strategy should prove effective in the future, for now Clinton strategists made no attempt to hide their gloom. “This is very bad,” said one. “It’s beyond gridlock.”

For months, Clinton and his aides had held up the advancing crime bill as the symbol of his ability to break gridlock with “new Democrat” ideas that bridged the divides between liberals and conservatives. Because of that, the failure of this particular legislation suggests that the institutional, ideological and partisan roots of gridlock are even more difficult to reach than the President believed.

White House officials were quick to blame the problem on Clinton’s Republican opposition. But while the Republicans did run a fierce campaign against Clinton all year, they were not his main problem.

Democratic vote counters had predicted that they could win if they got 10 Republican votes; 11 Republicans sided with them and they lost. The reason was Democratic defections and the list of defectors illustrates Clinton’s problem.

The President did suffer some losses on the left, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and nine other members of the 38-member Congressional Black Caucus. They said that they could not support the bill, despite its extensive new spending provisions for urban areas, because it contains several new death penalty provisions.

But Clinton lost most heavily among his fellow Southerners and among conservatives, for whom alliance with Clinton has become a political millstone. The unwillingness of 58 members of his own party to link arms with Clinton on a major issue resembled nothing so much as the unraveling of the last Democrat to win the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter. And the fact that many congressional Democrats have dramatically and perhaps irrevocably severed their interests from Clinton’s clearly cannot bode well for the health care debate.

Some of the individual defections show how Clinton’s many problems have combined into a witch’s brew of political trouble.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), for example, is the sort of party loyalist whose vote a Democratic President ought to be able to count on in a pinch. But “he’s so angry at the President on these other issues, we can’t get him,” a White House official said before the vote, referring to Hamilton’s displeasure at Clinton’s uneven leadership on Bosnia, Haiti and other foreign matters.

Similarly, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), is the sort of moderate, Southern “new Democrat” Clinton had hoped to build a coalition around. But he has been alienated from the White House on health care. He voted no. So, too, did Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), who followed Clinton as leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization of moderate and conservative Democrats.

The crime bill’s defeat was remarkable not only because the House leadership almost never loses on procedural votes but because the legislation was buoyed by two enormous tail winds.

One was intense public concern about crime--in many states the top public concern. A recent Times Poll showed Americans supporting the bill 67% to 26% even after they were told about the large amounts of new spending that Republicans decried. The assault weapons ban had even wider support--71% to 24%.

The second reason that many expected the bill to pass was the huge pot of money the legislation offered to interests all across the ideological and political spectrum: nearly $8 billion in social programs favored by liberals, almost $9 billion for mayors to hire police officers, $1.8 billion to states to help pay for the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants and $6.5 billion for prison construction, the top crime-fighting priority of conservatives.

Even so, the bill was strafed by ideological, partisan and special-interest cross-fires that testify to the extraordinary difficulty of breaking gridlock--even on an issue of intense public concern.

Once the crime bill cleared the Senate on an overwhelming bipartisan vote last November, it quickly ran into ideological problems with House liberals, who considered the Senate measure too focused on punishment and prisons.

To mollify House opposition, the Administration agreed to add billions of dollars in “prevention” programs and to strip out some of the most sweeping new penalties imposed in the Senate legislation, such as an effort to add gun crimes to the list of federal offenses.

But in what may have been a critical turn for the bill, House liberals went one step further--inserting a provision that would allow prisoners on Death Row to challenge their sentences as racially biased. That measure held up the bill for weeks as the Administration labored without success to broker a compromise between House liberals who supported the so-called “racial justice” measure and the Senate, which adamantly opposed it.

While those talks dragged on, the bill lost momentum, and the NRA launched a renewed offensive against its ban on 19 types of assault weapons.

Those efforts came amid an atmosphere of intensifying partisanship. As the bill came out of conference in late July, Republicans sharpened their denunciation of its social welfare spending--even though the prevention spending in the final conference product differed only slightly from the House bill that 65 Republicans had voted for in April.

That intensely partisan atmosphere persisted right through Thursday’s vote. At one point during the debate, for example, Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.), the chair of the House Republican Conference, turned heads by staring at the Democrats and bitterly describing Clinton as “your President.”

Some sympathetic observers also agreed that the Administration had given the Republicans ammunition through the compromises they made to minimize liberal discontent in the House. In addition to narrowly targeted prevention programs, such as drug treatment for prisoners, the bill also contained vast, loosely defined grant programs for cities and social welfare agencies--including a $1.8-billion formula grant program that appeared closer to revenue sharing than to a crime-fighting measure.

The bill suffered from “congressional bloat,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank with ties to Clinton. “Bills up there grow like kudzu and become big leviathans that people are rightly skeptical of.”

That the task of winning legislative victories in an undisciplined and polarized Congress is difficult was small consolation to Clinton Thursday night, however.

After all, overcoming major obstacles to deal with major problems is what being a successful President is all about.