Democrats in House Retain Current Leaders

House Democrats, groping for answers in the wake of their worst defeat at the polls in 40 years, reelected their leadership Wednesday after rejecting conservative appeals to move the party more to the right.

Despite bitterness and recriminations over the Nov. 8 election results, Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Democratic Whip David E. Bonior of Michigan both easily defeated more conservative challengers for the top two Democratic leadership positions in the Republican-led Congress that convenes next January.

Gephardt, running this time for minority leader, defeated Rep. Charlie Rose of North Carolina, 150 to 58, while Bonior brushed aside a challenge from Rep. Charles W. Stenholm of Texas for the whip’s post, 145 to 60.

Rep. Vic Fazio of West Sacramento turned aside a challenge from fellow liberal and Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Kweisi Mfume of Maryland for the chairmanship of the Democratic Caucus, the party’s third-ranking post. Fazio, who as one of the party’s chief election strategists faced criticism from fellow Democrats after the defeat at the polls Nov. 8, nevertheless handily defeated Mfume, 149 to 57.

But while they chose to retain their old leadership as they move into the minority for the first time since Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in the White House, rank-and-file Democrats made it clear in their comments both before and after the closed-door elections that they remain deeply divided and confused over the direction the party now should take.

Indeed, the leadership election results seemed likely to weaken the party further, with several conservative Southern Democrats threatening to defect to GOP ranks and even a number of liberal lawmakers confessing privately that they are dissatisfied with the leadership choices.

“Everyone is still groping and watching the leaders grope,” said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), acknowledging that none of the candidates had been able to offer a clear strategy for winning back a majority in the House in 1996.

“I’m disappointed,” said Rep. W.J. (Billy) Tauzin (D-La.) after the vote. “I told Gephardt yesterday that when a team has a one-and-nine record they generally hire a new coach.”

Tauzin was one of a handful of Southern Democrats who said they are so disillusioned with the party’s liberal leadership that they are thinking of switching their allegiance to the GOP, a move that could leave the Democrats with less than 200 seats in the 435-member House. Democrats now hold 204 of the seats in the new Congress to the GOP’s 230. (There is one independent and several non-voting delegates, who are permitted a vote in the Democratic caucus.)

Tauzin, who met earlier this week with incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to discuss a switch, said after the secret-ballot vote that he would wait until a Dec. 13-14 meeting at which the Democrats will vote on new rules for committee assignments before deciding whether to desert the party. If the conservatives do not receive key committee slots, then as many as a dozen of them may bolt, Tauzin said. “It’s no threat,” he told reporters. “It’s just a fact.”

Moving to bind up the party’s electoral wounds, which have been reopened in the two days of often bitter and soul-searching debate that preceded the caucus vote, the new leaders pledged that conservatives would be given more say than they have had in the past in determining the party’s still-uncertain direction.

“This was no cakewalk,” Fazio said, alluding to the criticism that he and other party leaders endured during the closed-door debates. A lot of “pain and anguish” was voiced by members, but one thing they all agreed upon was “the need for greater inclusion in the party,” he added, promising that the leadership will listen more attentively than it has in the past to the conservative wing of the party.

“There is more agreement than I have ever heard before on the need for change and, from that point of view, I take heart,” Stenholm said.

But while the leadership pledged itself to change, other Democrats said they are still troubled by the fact that no clear strategy for redefining the party and winning back the House has yet emerged.

“The American people . . . spanked our bottom rather hard on Nov. 8, and they now want to make sure we understand why they did it,” Rose said. “If they (the leaders) don’t get that message, we may literally wander in the wilderness for 40 years.”

Rose added that he and other Southern Democrats, many of whom were either defeated or survived very close reelection races, were worried that Gingrich and other GOP leaders would be able to portray the outcome of Wednesday’s leadership contests as evidence that the Democrats cannot change. “I hope we have some good answers to that,” he said.

One reason answers have been slow in coming, other Democrats said, is because the leadership has not been able to come to terms yet with the main contradiction facing the party in the wake of the midterm elections. The same elections that brought the Republicans to power in the House and the Senate also decimated the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, with Southern and mostly conservative Democrats losing their seats, resulting in a Democratic minority that is, if anything, more homogeneously liberal than it was before Nov. 8.

“Our biggest difficulty now,” said a liberal lawmaker who asked not to be quoted by name, is that “we are likely to be more resistant to change on one side of our brain even as we recognize more than ever the need for it on the other.”