Democrats to Issue ‘Families First Agenda’

Taking a cue from Republicans who issued the “contract with America” before their 1994 election triumph, House and Senate Democrats will stage a televised extravaganza Sunday to unveil a legislative agenda touting what they would do if they recapture a majority in Congress.

The Democratic plan--a call for a balanced budget, welfare reform, education tax credits, pension reform and other ideas that they call a “families first agenda”--will be less ambitious and detailed than the 10-point conservative action plan that guided House Republicans through their first 100 days in power last year.

But Democrats are embracing the GOP-pioneered notion that congressional candidates should band together and advertise what they would do if they win power, rather than campaigning in the traditional self-centered fashion.

The exercise is an emblem of Democrats’ concern that, for all the political mileage they’ve gained from opposing unpopular GOP initiatives, they will never recapture control of Congress unless they have their own agenda. And many Democrats believe their blueprint must send a strong signal that they have learned some lessons from the drubbing their party took in 1994.

“The ‘families first agenda’ is different because of what it does not do,” says the introduction. “It does not offer a new bureaucratic program for every problem we face. It’s not enough to say what we stand against--we have a responsibility to tell America what a Democratic Congress would stand for.”

Yet it has always been difficult for the fractious Democratic Party to get together behind anything but the blandest descriptions of what it stands for. It has been equally tough for Democrats to maintain the kind of spectacular party discipline that Republicans displayed when they pushed their contract through the House.

True to form, a splinter group of moderate Democrats already is planning to follow up this weekend’s extravaganza with a more conservative, business-oriented program.

“The Democratic Party is a bigger tent,” said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who is drafting the moderates’ agenda. He predicted that it will be endorsed by about three dozen House Democrats.

Even before the Democratic agenda was released, Republicans were slamming it as a publicity stunt designed to detract attention from what they call the Democrats’ record of obstructionism and to distance Democrats from their liberal roots.

“Ours was a contract with America, a contract for America; the Democrats’ is a contract, frankly, to deceive America,” said Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “They are looking to obfuscate their liberal tendencies.”

Republicans unveiled their manifesto with great fanfare in September 1994 at a rally that brought hundreds of Republican candidates and incumbents to the steps of the Capitol to sign the campaign manifesto. It promised that the House, under Republican control, would vote on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a presidential line-item veto, term limits, welfare reform and other issues that GOP pollsters had identified as enjoying broad public support.

Subsequent polls found that many voters were unaware of the contract when they voted in 1994, an election that gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Nonetheless, the manifesto was the GOP leaders’ blueprint for their first 100 days in power and most of its provisions were easily approved by the House. However, most of the measures were either killed, slowed or watered down in the less-conservative Senate. Several that survived were vetoed by Clinton.

Now, as they plunge into the 1996 campaign, Republicans are shifting their focus away from the 1994 contract. House GOP freshmen last week unveiled a “vision” statement for the campaign that was little more than a broad expression of support for reducing the size of government and other familiar axioms of conservatism. The focal point of the freshman event was not a legislative agenda, but a visual gimmick: a chair with four legs of unequal length, meant to symbolize how American institutions of government, family, religion and business are out of balance.

The Democrats’ desire to come up with their own agenda reflects a concern that voters do not know what the party is about--and that if voters do, they don’t like it.

“We need to have some product identity,” said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), a leading agenda architect. “We are a party that doesn’t have any identity today.”

Some Democrats are especially glad to have a program that they can use in their campaigns now that the Clinton White House has become embroiled in the Whitewater and FBI files controversies.

“Candidates need something to talk about when they are on the stump,” said a House Democratic aide. “And they are trying not to talk about the FBI files and Whitewater.”

Democrats will be unveiling their agenda not on the Capitol steps, but in five cities around the country, linked by satellite and televised live on cable. The proposals will be organized around three broad principles: security, opportunity and responsibility. Some proposals, such as balancing the budget and reforming welfare, would have been dismissed by Democrats as unthinkably conservative a few years ago.

Much of the agenda will be quite general. For example, it will not set a target date by which Democrats would balance the budget and will not spell out details of their welfare reform plan, according to sources familiar with the agenda.

Other elements include tax credits for education expenses; pension reforms to make it easier to save for retirement; measures to promote greater equity in pay between men and women; an initiative to improve access to health care for young children; proposals to promote “corporate responsibility,” such as discouraging the abusive use of child labor; an initiative to put more police on the streets, which follows Clinton’s much-vaunted effort to finance 100,000 more officers, and an effort to help local governments find ways to finance road repairs and other infrastructure improvements.