Buoyed by Polls, Democrats Work on Blueprint for Recaptured House

It’s not yet probable that Democrats will regain the political initiative after next fall’s election. But it’s no longer inconceivable.

Republicans still hold their share of high cards. Retirements of eight Democratic senators place recapture of the upper chamber virtually out of reach. In the House, advantages in fund-raising, candidate recruitment and the continuing realignment of the South all bolster the GOP majority.

But recent polls show that voters now prefer Democrats by a larger margin in congressional races than Republicans enjoyed just before their landslide in 1994. Combined with President Clinton’s consistent double-digit lead over presumptive GOP nominee Bob Dole, these signs of a potential GOP meltdown have Democrats dreaming of redemption faster than seemed remotely possible only six months ago.

Even the Wall Street Journal headlined its lead editorial on Friday: “Minority Leader Gingrich?” Democratic control may still be only a dream, or a nightmare, depending on your point of view. But the prospect is tangible enough that it seems timely to ask: What would Democrats do if returned to power?

Democrats are asking the same thing. Party leaders Richard A. Gephardt in the House and Tom Daschle in the Senate are preparing a joint agenda--a sort of Democratic contract--they hope to release by early summer. Clinton is unlikely to sign on to that document. But White House officials say January’s State of the Union address, with some potential minor embroidering, has already previewed the priorities that would guide a second term, if the president is reelected.

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Matching Clinton’s blueprint with the emerging congressional plan reveals some areas where a reelected president and a reinstalled Democratic House could move in harmony. But also lurking are more of the disagreements within the party that undermined Clinton’s tumultuous first two years and fueled the Republican landslide in 1994.

Clinton and congressional Democrats could most easily agree on measured steps to combat economic insecurity. In his State of the Union address, Clinton stressed pension security, job training and ensuring that workers could keep their health insurance when they change jobs. Democrats will highlight all of those issues in their blueprint this summer. If Congress doesn’t approve a minimum wage increase this year, Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have committed themselves to moving quickly on one next year.

One big question for a Democratic majority would be how far to push health care reform. After the failure of Clinton’s plan, few are eager for another frontal assault on guaranteeing universal coverage. But Clinton and congressional Democrats alike are talking about incremental steps to expand coverage, especially if Congress concludes work this year on the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill to improve insurance portability.

Clinton has proposed one small further step: offering subsidies to help unemployed workers purchase coverage. Gephardt is mulling a more ambitious idea: providing the uninsured a greater tax break to offset the cost of purchasing insurance. But White House officials worry that the cost could prove prohibitive.

If returned to power, Democrats would also face great pressure to finally produce welfare reform (assuming, as seems likely, Congress and Clinton don’t resolve their differences this year). After resisting Clinton’s more modest reforms in 1994, every House Democrat last year voted for a party alternative that imposed much sterner obligations on welfare recipients than the president’s original plan.

It was easy for Democrats to vote for that bill because the legislation had no chance of passing in the Republican-controlled House. It’s less clear that all of them would vote for such tough-minded legislation again if it could become law. Still, a surprising number of Democrats are optimistic the party would reach agreement--if only because of fears that failing to resolve the issue could “leave the door open” for Republicans to impose harsher reforms, as Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, puts it.

Even this far away, it’s possible to foresee Clinton and congressional Democrats clashing on other issues beyond welfare. Some congressional Democrats want to shape corporate behavior with new tax incentives, but the White House recoils. Conversely, any efforts from Clinton to fulfill his pledge to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement could run into great resistance from an alliance of populist conservatives and liberal Democrats.

The biggest area of conflict would be the budget. The seven-year plan for balancing the budget Clinton released earlier this year proved a brilliant tactical maneuver. But the plan’s substantial reductions in Medicare and Medicaid ($183 billion over seven years) and domestic discretionary spending (nearly $300 billion) would have enormous difficulty passing a Democratic-controlled House; one senior administration official estimates that not more than two-thirds of House Democrats might actually vote for the Clinton plan, and even that might be optimistic.

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A Democratic House would inevitably exert great pressure on Clinton to restore some of those reductions, perhaps by jettisoning his middle-class tax cut. “I don’t think we would want to pass that [Clinton] budget,” says Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), a leading House liberal. “I think we would want to rethink the question of how we lower the deficit, but at the same time make our economy more prosperous and prepare our kids for a future global economy.”

Gephardt says most Democrats recognize that political reality still impels them to lay out a plan to reduce the deficit to zero. But revealingly he says the goal could be stretched out beyond the seven years Clinton and congressional Republicans have proposed. “‘What’s seven?” he says. “Where did that come from? It doesn’t relate to much of anything.” Nor is Gephardt certain that Democrats should replay 1993 and devote all their effort to passing a multiyear, deficit-reduction plan as their first priority if they are returned to power in 1997. “You may hold that for the second year,” he says.

The prospect of such disagreements might have Clinton wondering whether a second term wouldn’t be easier if the election left the Republicans chastened but still narrowly holding Congress. The answer to that question would turn on another: whether Democrats have learned from the mistakes they, and then the Republicans, made during the past three years.

Republicans are prepared to argue that Democrats have learned nothing. Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.), the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, says a Democratic recapture of Congress would mean “higher taxes, bigger spending [and] continued resurgence of the deficit and debt.”

Congressional Democrats, naturally, insist they’ve been born again as moderates. But the coolness toward Clinton’s budget is an early sign that House Democrats with a majority might not accept the president’s shift toward the center as quiescently as they have done while in the minority.

In some respects, Democrats do appear to have taken the right lessons from the rout in 1994. Most important, Gephardt, like Clinton, has sensibly concluded that the Democrats (like the Republicans since) ran into trouble partly because they tried to do too much, too fast. “I call it tiny steps for tiny tots,” Gephardt says. “We have to go back to some very basic, sensible, moderate, modest things that people want done.”

Much less certain is whether congressional Democrats have absorbed the other major lesson evident from the last four years. In serial fashion, the Democratic and Republican congressional majorities have demonstrated that neither party can sustain public support while satisfying their ideological extremes and rejecting cooperation with moderates in the other party. For either side, accepting the discipline of attracting bipartisan legislative support offers the best prospect of producing an agenda that can maintain broad public support.

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Though voters have recoiled from the excesses of the Republican revolution, surveys leave no doubt that Americans remain much more skeptical about expanding government than the typical House Democrat. To stay within sight of public opinion--much less muster a majority of a closely divided House--a new Democratic regime would have no realistic choice but to aim its agenda at centrists in both parties. If Democrats haven’t learned that overriding lesson, victory in November might be just the prelude to another collapse in 1998.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.