NEWS ANALYSIS : Turmoil in GOP Ranks Tied to Misreading of ’94 Vote

It was only a year ago that the GOP ruled the political roost. Jubilant over their historic victory in the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans talked boldly of establishing an enduring political legacy. As for the presidency, all they had to do to regain it, many in the party felt, was simply choose a standard-bearer. Anyone, they believed, could beat Bill Clinton.

In the past few months, their world has been turned upside-down.

GOP legislative leaders, once heralded for their boldness and cunning, have been outmaneuvered and upstaged on Capitol Hill. The party’s presidential campaign has turned into a winter of discontent and disarray--a disarray that only deepened Saturday as Steve Forbes revived his campaign by winning the primary in Delaware.

In recent days, senior Republican figures have even begun to publicly discuss the possibility that the party could find itself split in two by midyear. Patrick J. Buchanan has begun warning that his followers might go elsewhere if he is denied the party nomination.

On the other hand “if Pat Buchanan becomes the nominee,” the result would be “a third party,” warned William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education. “I’m pretty confident that would occur.” Bennett, who last year considered running for the nomination himself and is now chairman of Lamar Alexander’s campaign, made his remarks Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

How did this stunning reversal of political fortunes come about?

One clue can be found in an already notorious utterance made last week in New Hampshire by Sen. Bob Dole, the once seemingly invincible but now much-beleaguered White House aspirant.

“I didn’t realize,” the Kansas senator remarked, almost offhandedly, “that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign.”

But the seeming inability to comprehend the deep-seated economic anxieties of average Americans and the resulting “he just doesn’t get it” impression left by Dole are only part of the explanation for the Republican decline. And withdrawing from their blind alley will, by the same token, require more than just remedying Dole’s rhetorical lapses.

Indeed, the cumulative problems the GOP now faces are rooted in the 1994 election and the misreading by party leaders of that event. Ever since the final days of the Reagan administration, Republican strategists have been looking for a new and compelling set of ideas that could hold together the coalition that Ronald Reagan built. The lack of such ideas led to a frustrating stalemate during George Bush’s presidency and contributed to his defeat. With the 1994 victory, many Republican strategists thought their search had succeeded. But subsequent events have proved that judgment premature.

“They thought [November 1994] was the Russian revolution,” said conservative spokesman David Keene, the campaign strategist for Dole’s 1988 presidential bid. “And so they set expectations for the public and their own troops that were unrealistically high and led to disappointment and frustration.”

Several major blunders stem from this initial miscalculation. Among them:

* The GOP congressional leaders sold themselves on the “contract with America” but never got around to selling the public on a program whose details had been only dimly sketched out to voters.

“We know from the polls that only about 1 in 4 voters even knew about the contract, and only half of that quarter supported it,” said George Edwards, director of the Center for Presidential Leadership at Texas A&M; University. “When you start believing your rhetoric, but no one else does, that can be a danger.”

* Balancing the budget and other legislative objectives became ends in themselves to the Republicans, while the benefits those goals would supposedly bring to citizens whose living standards had stagnated went unexplained and unmentioned. “They defined the economic issue too narrowly,” said John J. Pitney, a congressional affairs specialist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

“They were talking about dollars and cents. They should have been talking about people.”

* In setting out to delineate the national political agenda on a scale no previous modern Congress had attempted, the Republicans underestimated their own inevitable disunity and the constitutional and political power of the president to block their initiatives and dominate public debate.

“There was an unfortunate tendency among House Republicans to assume that the center of the political system is in Congress and to believe that a revolution can begin and end with Congress when the separation of powers precludes that,” said Bill Connelly, a political scientist at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., and co-author of “Congress’ Permanent Minority?” a book about the House Republicans published before the 1994 election.

The current crop of Republican leaders is scarcely the first to overestimate the significance of its own success.

“Whenever there is a surprising result, and the Republican takeover of the House surprised most people, we reach out for that concept of the mandate,” said Charles Jones of the University of Wisconsin, author of “Separate but Equal Branches,” a book about Congress and the presidency.

Jones blames the media for helping propagate the notion that the 1994 election represented a mandate for the GOP, instead of just a negative verdict on the Democrats. It was a particularly “goofy” notion, he says, because it depended on one branch of government, the House of Representatives, promulgating a drastic new political agenda.

What made the whole proposition even shakier, Jones argues, was that the supposed GOP mandate was built around a number of untested theories, such as “the idea that all state governments are better than the national government and that not making payments to welfare mothers would stop them from having more children.”

Nevertheless, these ideas went directly from being heralded on Capitol Hill to become staples of the rhetoric of nearly every Republican presidential candidate.

One of the basic Republican problems has been the sketchy nature of many of the items in the “contract with America.” Don Sipple, a Republican consultant who has taken on the assignment of strengthening Dole’s message, calls the Republican mandate “a post-election invention,” because it was not until after the votes had been counted that Republican lawmakers fleshed out the bare bones of their proposals.

During the heat of the election campaign, that did not seem to matter, said Rep. Charles Bass, a freshman Republican from New Hampshire, who, like many other GOP lawmakers, endorsed the contract but did not campaign on it.

“What was attractive was not the contract, but the fact that we had a plan, that we had proposed something new,” Bass said. No one worried much about details at the time, he said, because “the fact is, not many people thought the Republicans would take over Congress.”

Overshadowing even the contract as an article of faith for the GOP was the objective of achieving a balanced budget. That item became the centerpiece of the campaign planks of the two leading GOP contenders, Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, at the start of the presidential race (Gramm has since dropped out of the race).

But whatever its merits as public policy, balancing the budget has proved to have little political appeal.

“I’ve never seen a race decided on that ground,” said Sipple, who has been a longtime advisor to California Gov. Pete Wilson. “Eighty percent of the people say they want a balanced budget, but then you start doing it and they fall off you on the specifics.”

The lack of compelling ideas coming out of the campaigns of Gramm, Dole and the other early contenders left the way open for political outsider Steve Forbes to plunge in last fall, shelling out unprecedented sums to simultaneously promote his flat tax and to attack the rest of the field. Forbes’ televised barrage made a shambles of his rivals’ strategies and soured the mood of the electorate toward everyone involved, including himself, although his victory in Delaware--and his sizable checkbook--may allow him to revive his campaign.

Underlying the drive for a balanced budget has been a central belief among many Republican leaders that the main reason for voter discontent was dissatisfaction with government, particularly the federal government.

But the early success of Buchanan’s candidacy calls that conclusion into question, according to Texas A&M;’s Edwards.

“What Buchanan’s campaign is indicating is not antigovernment,” Edwards said. “He is actually asking government to be much more active, to intervene in the marketplace, whether by limiting immigration or doing something [to restrain] corporations and intervening in trade. That is not an antigovernment stance.”

Along with other analysts, Edwards believes that voters’ anger is not directed at big government per se, but more generally at other forces that seem to dominate their lives--including big business.

That sentiment was reflected in interviews with voters who backed Buchanan in New Hampshire.

“I’m for Buchanan because he’s for Main Street, not for Wall Street,” said John Stacken, an electrician who came to cheer Buchanan on at a rally in Nashua last week, just before the primary.

How do Republicans get out of the hole they have dug for themselves?

On the presidential campaign trail, analysts say, the challenge remains what it has always been--find a message that will appeal to voter insecurity about the economy and unease about the coarsening of the culture.

“The benchmark in presidential elections used to be peace and prosperity,” Sipple said. “But this campaign is really a referendum on how individuals can take control of their own lives.”

But the problem facing the party is not only that time is running short to craft such a message. Even if such a message can be created, the GOP will still need a candidate who can deliver it convincingly. And as even his supporters ruefully acknowledge, Dole, who remains the party’s most likely nominee, has during his 25 years on the national scene not yet shown that sort of talent.