Rep. Waters Fights the GOP Tide : Congress: The Democrat from L.A. makes no concessions to the Republican landslide of ’94. She remains an outspoken, unrepentant liberal.

Minutes before, she was cheek-to-jowl with celebrities and gang members alike at the grand opening ceremony for a youth program, exhorting some, reproaching others, signing an expressive “Maxine Waters, Congresswoman” across scraps of paper lofted to her by an adoring crowd.

But now Maxine Waters is staring out a second-floor window, looking distantly across her South-Central Los Angeles district. A virtual machine of perpetual motion, she sits oddly still, a petite figure in a plastic chair. The woman reviled by her critics as a blowhard and a bully has turned reflective, a tired frustration gathering in her voice.

“I really do think that a lot of time is wasted flying back and forth to Washington and running to the floor (of the House) to keep getting voted down, you know what I mean?” she says. “What it really is now is I have to have my votes recorded so that people will know that I’m there.”

Those sound, she is told, like the words of someone tempted to throw in the towel. She nods agreement.

“There are times when I have thoughts of approaching politics in very different ways than politicians know it or understand it or perhaps even (than) would be accepted. . . . Maybe, you know, I may have some bold step or something I may do,” she says.

“I think about it all the time and I do know that I’m not happy doing it in the tradition that I understand it to be.”

In this, the 19th year that Democrat Waters has held elective office, at 56 years of age, things as she understood them to be have been turned on their ear. After serving since 1976 in strong Democratic majorities, first in the California Assembly and for the last four years in Washington, one of the nation’s most prominent liberals now labors under the shadow of a conservative Republican Congress.

Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, have begun their assault on a circle of issues dear to her--welfare reform and affirmative action among them--and many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party are in full retreat. Even the President in whose campaign she labored has moved to the right in his quest for reelection.

Still, Waters remains that most politically incorrect of politicians: an outspoken, unrepentant liberal. Other Democrats may be reeling in the face of their party’s vast losses last November; the party itself still may struggle for a way to claw back to preeminence. But Waters says she is uncowed. Her talk of retirement has less to do with the rise of Republicans than her sense, she says, that political life leaves little time to connect with the people she wants to serve.

“Despair--I think that’s something that’s almost foreign to me,” she says, suddenly stiffening in her chair. “But you know, I really lose my patience with some of the younger conservatives. . . . This new group and Newt kind of disgust me.”

*

It would take more than a Republican takeover--nuclear annihilation, maybe--to curb the legendary Waters vitriol. This is, after all, a woman famous from Sacramento to Washington for her relentless badgering of ideological opponents.

Her take on Speaker Gingrich?

“He knows how to take advantage of ignorance and he knows how to play to the crowd in terms of their fears and suspicions about others. And I think that he will stoop to whatever level it takes in order to exploit fear and ignorance and insecurity. . . . He’s corrupt. I think that he probably is the epitome of what’s wrong with politicians.”

California governor and presidential candidate Pete Wilson?

“Typical of this new breed of politician who will go whichever way they think the wind is blowing. He’s so adept at saying, ‘Oh, if it takes me coming out against affirmative action, that’s what I do.’ . . . A politician who will do whatever it takes to win.”

But if it has not changed her views or her outspokenness, the Republican ascent has dramatically changed the way Waters does business.

These days, she operates more as a fixer uniting needy projects and private donors than as a conduit for government funding. Optimistic pledges of help have given way to blunt remonstrations about these “very difficult times.” She functions as a political bereavement counselor, trying to convince her constituents to accept the demise of activist government.

At the South-Central Family Health Center, a sunny and well-kept medical clinic that serves a largely uninsured, partly illegal population, Waters is being grilled about the new realities by medical director Carol Jennings. The clinic is largely dependent on government largess.

“With more certainty of funding, it would be really good to clone some place like this,” says Jennings.

Waters cuts off the reverie.

“It would be wonderful,” she says. “But it’s not going to happen soon.”

*

She is 70 miles from her district, out in Riverside County’s Moreno Valley. The draw today is a welfare mother who called Waters on a radio talk show and invited her out for a visit.

Now, among past and present welfare recipients, Waters is blistering the Republican majority, trying to make clear that no amount of cajoling is going to change the views of this Congress.

“They don’t believe government’s responsibility is to help poor people. They don’t like it,” she says. “They don’t care. It’s not about convincing them. They are already convinced. They’re convinced that the taxpayers spent too much money. They really believe women have babies just to get welfare. They really feel that people don’t want to work.

From one of the women comes a naive plea about Gingrich:

“Can he be fired?”

It is one of the oddities she continues to bump up against, Waters says: Now that it should be obvious that a change from Democratic to Republican control really does affect government policy, she is discovering that few of her constituents have a clue about the workings of democracy.

Even now, with all the publicity about Congress’ first 100 days, her constituents are so disconnected that they show little more than spiritless dismay.

“We’re not doing anything,” she says. “We’re just saying those people are doing that stuff and we don’t have any power.”

The same complaint of powerlessness could come from Waters herself, isolated as she is from the political center of gravity. There are no illusions anymore that Waters is a force to be reckoned with. Yet she is convinced she can still be a player, even if her strategy sounds more than a little mercenary.

She sits on the House Banking Committee, where Republicans are vying over alternate approaches to deregulating financial services. So, anxious to exercise whatever leverage she can, she is putting out the word that she will deal with whoever promises to better serve her constituents.

“It’s time now to be sharp enough and clever enough to find out the vulnerable points where you have Republicans kind of struggling against each other,” she says. “Team up with either side, it doesn’t make a difference.”

*

In a sun-warmed parking lot not far from the flash point of the 1992 riots, nearly three years to the day after they erupted, Waters is celebrating a program that under almost anyone’s definition reeks of liberal Democratic government.

Called “Youth Fair Chance Plus”, it seeks to steer troubled young people into worthwhile lives not with the threat of increasing jail terms, but with free schooling, job training and a $50 weekly stipend to cover transportation costs, food and other necessities.

Waters is regaling more than 100 assembled young people with sweetened street patois that would send throw-away-the-key conservatives over the edge.

“We say no matter what you’ve done, you don’t get too bad for us. We ain’t scared of nobody; we don’t run from nobody, because you belong to us,” she says. “We your mama, we your grandmama, we your aunt. . . . We don’t think you could have done nothing so bad that we can’t transform you.”

The words are meant to convince skeptical youths that the program is here to stay, but they also represent Waters’ unstinting commitment to continuing a war on poverty.

“I’m not one who would say that every program that you ever create would go on forever, but we must determine what it is we want to accomplish,” she said. “We should not have political responses and say, ‘Oh, the people are hurting now, middle-class America is mad so let’s feed ‘em something. Feed ‘em the poor people.’ ”

If she has little patience with Republicans on this count, she also has some harsh criticisms of her fellow Democrats, particularly those whose response to the Republican onslaught has been, she sneers, “better act more like them.”

She was left cold by President Clinton’s April speech to the Democratic convention in Sacramento, in which he pleaded with party members to be sensitive to the frustrations of “angry white males” upset about affirmative action.

“Dangerous”, she calls that approach, and asks if Clinton meant to evoke sympathy for the likes of Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh: “If someone said ‘Mr. Clinton, is this the angry white male you were talking about that we should try to understand?’ I think he would say ‘Oh, no.’ ”

“You can’t go around just having political responses. . . . You just have to confront problems a little bit differently. I think that when you do, people may respect you a lot more than you think.”

That is ultimately what Maxine Waters believes she deserves, even grudgingly--respect for standing her ground even as the nation’s political earth is shifting.