GOP Freshmen in House Betting on Right Turn

Blowing snow virtually obliterated the highway from sight as first-term Republican Rep. Dick Chrysler hurried toward a town meeting here last Saturday. But even when he couldn’t see much past the hood of his car, Chrysler rushed ahead with the confidence of a man convinced he knew every turn in the road.

Caution appears as inimical to his political nature. Despite polls showing public support for the GOP budget package plummeting in recent weeks, Chrysler was unwavering in his support for the seven-year plan as he toured his central Michigan district on a bitterly cold afternoon.

“We know exactly what needs to be done,” Chrysler told the dozen hearty souls who turned out at another town meeting earlier Saturday. “We need to keep our heads down, go straight ahead, ignore the attacks and get it done.”

Such ardor represents an enormous political gamble for Chrysler, an unassuming 53-year-old former businessman who is near the top of any list of Republican freshmen most vulnerable to defeat in 1996. In 1994, he won with just 51.6% of the vote in a district that President Clinton carried two years earlier; for next fall’s race, he’s already drawn a well-known and articulate Democratic challenger.

Most often, politicians from such so-called “marginal” congressional districts have sought to protect themselves by bending toward the center and seeking to establish their independence from both parties. But Chrysler and the 26 other Republican freshmen narrowly elected from districts that Clinton carried in 1992 have nearly without exception pursued the opposite strategy--placing themselves at the cutting edge of the conservative revolution in Congress.

While some of the vulnerable freshmen have recently looked to rhetorically separate themselves from House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, almost all of them have voted with the Republican leadership at least 90% of the time, according to calculations by Congressional Quarterly. “It is extremely unusual,” says Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at UC-San Diego who studies Congress. “They are the ones you would think have the most cause for caution.”

The gamble of these GOP freshmen is that they have more to fear from appearing too timid in changing Washington than they do from seeming too extreme in rolling back the federal government. The result of their bet could determine control of Congress next year.

The lengthening list of retiring Democratic incumbents makes it an uphill climb for the party to win the 21 seats it currently needs to recapture the House of Representatives next year. But if the Democrats have any prospects of regaining control, it is freshman Republicans they must defeat. And among the entire 73-member GOP freshman class, it is the 27 from the swing districts who top the list of the most vulnerable.

Already, Democrats and their allies are focusing their fire on the first-term Republicans from the marginal districts. Earlier this year, in a preview of things to come, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran ads “morphing” two such freshmen into Gingrich--adapting a tactic that Republicans used widely in 1994 to link Democratic candidates with Clinton.

The Sierra Club has aimed radio ads at about a dozen of the Republicans, accusing them of undermining environmental protections. Most significantly, the AFL-CIO has made the first-term Republicans a major target of the federation’s extensive yearlong advertising and organizing campaign.

Since last spring, the unions have poured nearly $4 million into five waves of television ads attacking GOP legislators, most of them freshmen, primarily over their support of the party’s budget plan. The latest ad, which last week began running in 22 districts--including Chrysler’s--accuses the lawmakers of voting “to cut Medicare, education and college loans, all to give a huge tax break to big corporations and the rich.”

Though the Republican National Committee Monday announced a new national ad defending the party’s budget plan, the GOP has done little to respond to this barrage. Party officials acknowledge that imbalance has raised anxieties among many of the first-term Republicans. “We’re getting killed in the air war,” laments Thomas H. Shields, a pollster who works for Chrysler. “We’ve never seen this much money being spent in the off-year before an election.”

Faced with such attacks--and districts that closely divide between the parties--most of the first-term Republicans have sought to establish their independence from the party leadership on some issues. Several of the marginal freshmen from the Northeast and Midwest have voted with the AFL-CIO on some narrow issues of direct concern to organized labor, and nodded toward environmentalists by opposing the House leadership’s efforts to block enforcement of 17 Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Chrysler, whose district includes Michigan State University, has introduced legislation that reprises Clinton’s proposal to make college tuition tax-deductible.

But these are modest exceptions to a pattern of exceptional party loyalty. In the 1993-94 Congress, more than half of the 16 Democratic freshmen who were ultimately defeated voted with their party less than 90% of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly calculations. But through September, just four of the 27 Republicans from the most marginal districts had party unity scores lower than 90%; Chrysler, for his part, voted with his party fully 97% of the time.

On the core issue of the budget, just one of these Republican freshmen voted against the seven-year GOP plan to bring the books into balance while cutting taxes by $245 billion; in fact, Rep. Michael Patrick Flanagan, who defeated Democratic Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois in a Democratic-leaning district last year, cast the only Republican vote against the GOP plan in the House this year.

If anything, Republican freshmen--including those, like Chrysler, from swing districts--have been the most ardent in insisting that the party hold fast behind its budget plan and concede little to Clinton.

As he toured his district last Saturday, Chrysler himself held fast to the bread-and-butter conservative themes of limited government that powered his victory in 1994. Much as members of Congress in earlier years might have trumpeted their successes at bringing home spending to the district, Chrysler brandishes like trophies his votes to cut foreign aid, taxes and social spending--and his lead role in the House effort to eliminate the Department of Commerce. At both his stops Saturday, Chrysler reassured edgy Republican partisans that the GOP ultimately will force Clinton to accept its budget priorities.

“Let me put it this way,” he says, “the Republicans are now in New York City, the Democrats are in Los Angeles, and when we settle this thing we’re going to be somewhere in New York State.”

Indeed, Chrysler presents the GOP budget-balancing plan as just a starting point in a long-term conservative reconstruction of federal policy. He touts his support for replacing the federal income tax with a consumption tax; he even calls for allowing Americans younger than 57 to voluntarily opt out of Social Security and privately invest the money that they and their employers now pay in federal payroll taxes.

Such vanguard conservative views create a stark contrast for Debbie Stabenow, a former Democratic state senator who’s already begun her campaign to unseat Chrysler. Stabenow cites Chrysler’s support for the GOP budget plan as Exhibit A in a populist argument that accents traditional Democratic themes. “Mr. Chrysler is a multimillionaire,” she says, “and he votes like a man who represents multimillionaires.”

Chrysler is prepared to counterattack by portraying Stabenow as a liberal “way too extreme for the district.” But his fate--like that of many of the Republican freshmen representing these critical battleground districts--may turn less on his own exertions than on whether his party can blunt the national Democratic attacks on the Republican Congress and the ultimate outcome of the GOP plan to reorder the federal government’s finances.

For Chrysler, the good news is that he still “has a year to educate the voters,” says Shields, his pollster.

But, Shields adds, if Republicans can’t improve attitudes toward the GOP Congress, “it’s going to be very hard for him” to survive.

* PRESIDENTIAL CAUCUSES: California straw poll plan puts GOP candidates on the spot. A3