For Clinton, Something Worse Than Losing the House : Politics: The Democrats that survive Nov. 8 will be the most liberal and the least reliable to back his agenda.

A few weeks before the 1954 congressional elections, President Eisenhower received a visit from his economic adviser, Gabriel Hauge. Hauge’s analysis of the likely outcome of the upcoming contests for the House and Senate indicated sizable Republican losses. What alarmed Hauge the most and what ultimately impelled the President to undertake a 10,000-mile, 40-speech whirlwind tour was the evidence that the toll of defeat would not fall evenly on all Republican candidates. Those deemed most likely to lose were those who represented swing districts in the East and Midwest, constituencies in which the numbers of Democratic and Republican voters were roughly equal. These members were the party moderates, and what their wholesale electoral slaughter presented to Eisenhower was the specter of the right wing of the GOP becoming the dominant force on Capitol Hill.

Despite Eisenhower’s dramatic two-week canvass in late October, the GOP lost 17 House seats and surrendered control of the chamber to the Democrats, who have held it ever since. Most of the GOP right-wingers survived.

Change the date, the party and the name of the President and you have almost precisely the grim-visaged political picture that faces President Clinton in 1994. To lose one or both houses of Congress would be bad enough, but would this “New Democrat” really like to wake up on the morning of Nov. 9 to discover that the rump of his decimated party in Congress was composed uniformly of members well to the left of him on many issues?

The House Democrats most likely to survive an Election Day massacre are those who represent the most reliably Democratic districts. It can be safely assumed, for example, that no Democrat in the 39-member black caucus will be defeated. These House members represent the most solidly Democratic districts and are consistently the most liberal in their voting records.

Paradoxically, the very certainty of the success of the African American Democrats in the House comes, at least in part, at the expense of many fellow Democrats whose districts have been drained of reliably Democratic black voters by the Voting Rights Act. By packing black voters into districts in such numbers as to assure the election of House members of their own race, the legislation strips white Democrats of an important general-election constituency. These white Democrats tend to be more centrist in their politics; their absence will result in a vastly more liberal contingent in the House.

Even where race is not a factor, redistricting in the aftermath of the 1990 census has not been kind to the Democrats. Some district maps that gave considerable advantage to the Democrats after the 1980 census have been replaced with more evenhanded alignments. Demographic shifts and voter realignments have drastically cut the number of Democratic members from the places most likely to produce political moderates--the South and border states.

In North Carolina, for instance, it is entirely possible that the state’s delegation to Washington after Nov. 8 might have as few as four Democrats among its 14 House and Senate seats. The only certain survivors will be the state’s two African American members.

With the House Republican Conference being overwhelmingly conservative and likely to become even more so after new members, supported by newly energized conservative groups, are sworn in, we will see a Congress more ideologically polarized than any since 1981.

For party control to change in Congress is rare. Ideological transformation is even rarer. There are some compelling examples of such upheavals. In 1958, while retaining control of the Senate, the Democratic caucus itself was altered from one dominated by conservative Southerners to one in which Northern, Midwestern and Western Democrats were dominant. The House that was sworn in January, 1981, was magnitudes more conservative than its predecessor, even as Democrats maintained a 50-seat advantage. In a political environment in which ideology has come to rival partisanship in securing the loyalty of politicians, the bare party numbers may conceal a great deal.

It would not surprise me to learn that President Clinton may already be pondering his relationships with a Democratic congressional caucus that is not only more liberal by reason of the subtraction of party moderates, but one that is well to the left of him.

Clinton can, of course, distance himself from the barn-burners and wrap around himself and the GOP the warm fleece of bipartisanship, as he did in the aftermath of the setback on the crime bill, but he can’t nestle down too cozily with them. In his quest for a second term, he will need the support or, at the very worst, the neutrality of the liberals just to survive the primary. As Jimmy Carter learned, there is no force more destructive to a Democratic President than alienated and disaffected liberals. By themselves they can not win the White House, but they are virtuosos in the art of losing it for others.