GOP Congressional Primary Results Rattle Democrats : Confident Republicans Prepare for an Election Earthquake by Laying Out Alternatives to Clinton Agenda

Democrats in Washington are beginning to get the feeling that Southern Californians know well: the prickly chill in the bones on those hazy days when the cat is acting a little odd and the sky is suspiciously still.

The signs are just as numerous now that an earthquake is coming to Capitol Hill: Last summer, Republicans captured a Kentucky congressional seat that Democrats had held since the Civil War, President Clinton’s approval rating remains anemic, and the fall primary results are rattling some of the Democrats’ most prominent names.

All this points to substantial GOP gains in November. Republicans are so confident that they’re getting an early start on laying out their agenda that on Tuesday House Republicans will gather more than 300 GOP incumbents and congressional challengers on the Capitol steps to offer the GOP plan--what they call a Contract with America. Senate Republicans issued a similar, slightly less sweeping, plan last week.

The House contract in particular is an ambitious effort to nationalize the 1994 campaign: It presents a list of internal congressional reforms and substantive legislative proposals that Republicans promise to bring to a vote within the first 100 days next year--if they win back the House. Even if the GOP falls short of outright control--still the probable outcome--incoming Republican leader Newt Gingrich of Georgia will spotlight these ideas as an alternative to Clinton.

As a policy blueprint, the contract is an odd mix of new-wave conservative thinking and Ronald Reagan nostalgia. On social policy, it has a ‘90s feel, emphasizing efforts to establish clear rules (such as time limits on welfare recipients and increased pressure on states to adopt “truth in sentencing” laws for prisoners) and taking tough stands against out-of-wedlock births and absent parents who do not pay child support.

On other issues, the agenda reaches back to the formula that elected Reagan: It promises lots of tax cuts and more defense spending. It even exhumes Reagan’s call for a “Star Wars” missile defense to protect against “rogue nuclear states like North Korea.”

As a political document, the contract sharpens the lines of partisan disagreement with a clarity likely to define the Gingrich era. And it denies Clinton one option for the next two years: accusing the Republicans of having no agenda but to frustrate his own.

But the Republican plan has two flaws that could undermine its effectiveness as anything more than a campaign bludgeon.

One is that it takes positions too conservative in some areas (such as welfare reform) for the three dozen or so House Republican moderates. That could threaten Gingrich’s capacity to move these ideas even through a GOP-controlled House. In an interview, Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), who led the GOP moderates who negotiated the agreement to rescue the crime bill last month, stressed that he (and other moderates) had only committed to allowing a vote on the list: “It is not a guarantee of support,” he insists.

The bigger problem with the GOP plan is that it isn’t serious about reducing the deficit. It starts by endorsing the balanced budget amendment--and then promises to cut taxes for families with children, expand individual retirement accounts, reduce capital gains taxes, sweeten depreciation for business and repeal the increased taxes on Social Security benefits that Clinton’s budget plan imposed. On top of that it would reopen the spigots at the Pentagon.

After some Republican legislators complained, the leadership said it would add to the list a promise to pay for its other promises with specific spending cuts. Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), one of Congress’ most credible deficit hawks, says the cuts are available in the last two GOP alternative budgets, but the contract doesn’t lock in the Republicans to supporting any specific cuts except for a few social welfare reductions. Even if the GOP can find the trims, that begs the larger question: Should those hard-won savings immediately be frittered away on tax cuts? Especially since the GOP needs to find another $750 billion in reductions over the next five years to fulfill its balanced budget promise, according to Congressional Budget Office projections.

Even before release of the House Republican plan, the White House and congressional Democrats strafed it. The GOP blueprint could provide a negative focus for the last two years of the Clinton Administration, particularly if the GOP actually wins back either chamber of Congress. “Absolutely, you could just run against Congress,” one senior White House official says.

But that’s a risky reelection strategy for a President who ran promising to break gridlock--and whose approval ratings only moved above water when he could demonstrate bipartisan cooperation on such issues as the North American Free Trade Agreement. Better for Clinton would be a competition with the Republicans for the mantle of reforming the way Washington does business.

What could a Clintonite reform agenda look like? It could start with an intensified effort behind campaign finance and lobbying reform--initiatives that have been stalled all year in Congress and face uncertain fates in the session’s last days.

It could continue with a renewed drive behind Clinton’s reinventing government initiative--whose first year drew high marks from a Brookings Institution analysis that nonetheless warned the effort could still founder without “considerable creativity.”

Next could come a commitment to bipartisan welfare reform. The GOP contract may go further than Republican moderates can stomach by requiring all states to cut off aid for recipients after five years on the rolls. That leaves Clinton the chance for a deal with the moderates--if he’s willing to risk angering the left. “To get meaningful welfare reform done,” Castle says, “they’re going to have to go to the middle.”

The linchpin of any Clinton reform agenda would have to be another assault on the deficit--a prospect that traumatizes some White House aides still nursing the bruises of 1993.

No President in a position as weak as Clinton can relish the prospect of butting heads with the deficit again. But nothing would declare Clinton’s rejection of business as usual as forcefully as attacking wasteful federal subsidies to business (such as the $225 billion identified earlier this year by the Progressive Policy Institute) and imposing common-sense reforms--such as raising the Social Security retirement age and requiring greater income limits--on entitlement programs whose growth drives the budget deficit.

Focusing on a reform agenda would require Clinton to largely defer his goal of increasing public investment on social programs. The last budget fight taught that trying to increase spending while reducing the deficit muddies the message. (That logic also argues against entering a bidding war with the GOP on a middle-class tax cut.) And it could increase the risk of a primary challenge from Jesse Jackson in 1996.

But a Clinton reform agenda would offer a contrast with a GOP reaching back to the themes that elected Reagan. Pressed by reporters about the Reaganite tinge to the House GOP’s Top 10 list, Gingrich last week said flatly: “If (the Administration) would be willing to go to a national debate . . . I’m willing to pit Reagan vs. Clinton--you choose.” Clinton should take that challenge as inspiration to reinvigorate his own reform agenda, and then accept Gingrich’s offer to debate whether the answers for the next decade can be found in the last.

Preview of the GOP Package

House Republicans’ so-called Contract with America contains a series of internal congressional reforms and a package of 10 legislative initiatives. Details on some of the programs are still sketchy:

THE REFORMS WOULD . . .

* Force Congress to abide by the provisions of laws that it passes.

* Cut one out of three Congressional committee staff members.

* Cut the Congressional budget.

THE 10 LEGISLATIVE INITIATIVES INCLUDE . . .

* A congressional amendment requiring the President to submit a balanced budget and giving him line-item veto power.

* A reconsideration of the crime bill to limit death penalty appeals, transfer more money to prison construction and federalize any crime committed with a gun.

* Welfare reform that would require states to cut off benefits for all recipients after five years, and discourage out of wedlock births.

* A $500 per child tax credit for families with incomes up to $200,000 and expanded availability of individual retirement accounts.

* Tougher enforcement of child-support payments and anti-pornography laws.

* A restoration of defense spending reduced under President Clinton and an offer of full membership in the North American Treaty Organization for Central European nations such as Poland and Hungary.

* Allowing the elderly to earn more money without sacrificing Social Security benefits and repealing the Social Security tax increase approved as part of Clinton’s economic plan in 1993.

* A reduction in capital gains taxes and an overall lessening of government regulation.

* Tort reform that would discourage “excessive legal claims, frivolous lawsuits, and overzealous lawyers.”

* Term limits for members of Congress.

Source: House Republican Conference