Campaign Has All Earmarks of El Nino Politics

As point man in the Democratic drive to recapture the House, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri has been stumping the country this week warning of dire consequences if voters fail to rally behind his party’s banner.

Continued Republican control of both chambers of Congress, he told a group of Iowa senior citizens here, would threaten the very existence of Social Security. “This will be the defining issue of this election,” insisted Gephardt, who campaigns in Los Angeles today for Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).

But Gephardt’s words were scarcely out of his mouth when the House minority leader was ambushed by a covey of local reporters, who peppered him with questions about the impeachment threat to President Clinton as a result of his dalliance with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

The clash of these two dissonant elements--the Democratic attempt to capitalize on their devotion to widely popular federal programs and the hubbub over the Lewinsky case--has transformed the 1998 midterm campaign into an electoral enigma that strategists for both parties concede defies all conventional wisdom.

“This is the politics of El Nino,” lamented Saul Shorr, a Democratic media consultant working for about a dozen House candidates. “There is no way to figure it out.”

Polls tend to support the Democratic claim that they have taken charge of the national policy debate, giving them hope they will pick up the scant 11 seats needed to win control of the House.

The three-point Democratic blueprint:

* Defending Social Security, whose future, Gephardt claimed in Dubuque, is imperiled by proposed GOP tax cuts. “Your vote can help decide whether Congress saves the budget surplus for Social Security or uses it as a tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans,” he said.

* Championing reform of health maintenance organizations while casting Republicans as tools of greedy insurance companies. During a stop in Louisville, Ky., Gephardt cited GOP resistance to allowing lawsuits against HMOs and jeered: “The only people who are legally immune in this country are HMOs and foreign diplomats.”

* Promoting federal aid for public education, which Democrats contend would be jeopardized by Republican-backed vouchers that could be spent on private schools. In Janesville, Wis., Gephardt charged that Republicans want to ignore the hard work of fixing public schools. Instead, he said, their approach is “give everybody a voucher and go figure it out for yourself.”

But threatening to drown out these arguments is the Lewinsky controversy.

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For the time being, strategists with both parties say, public satisfaction with the economy continues to dominate the political environment, favoring the reelection of incumbents. And Republican and Democratic candidates alike have generally shied away from discussing the Lewinsky case.

Nevertheless, political pros contend the scandal has the potential to shape the campaign’s outcome by discouraging Democratic turnout, thus wrecking the party’s hopes of retaking the House.

GOP strategists, meanwhile, claim the Lewinsky affair will improve turnout by their voters, thus giving their party a shot at enlarging its House margin. Republicans, said GOP pollster Whitney Ayres, “already believe moral decay is one of the nation’s major problems, and here they have the leading Democrat as a prime example of that.”

Democrats warn that GOP leaders could hurt their party’s prospects by seeming too partisan in their attitude toward Clinton’s difficulties. “I think if Republicans handle this poorly, it could backfire on them and could cause our people to really come out,” Gephardt said in an interview aboard his chartered campaign jet. “I think you can argue it either way. I don’t think we know the answer yet.”

Yet Clinton’s predicament is so sensitive that it creates problems even for so practiced a politician as Gephardt, whose schedule today calls for him to attend private fund-raisers for Sherman in Bel-Air and Tarzana.

Earlier in the week, when he started his coast-to-coast campaign swing, Gephardt seemed to try to put distance between the president and congressional Democrats by calling Clinton’s conduct with Lewinsky “reprehensible” and declining to defend him.

But after his comments led some reporters to ask if he favored Clinton’s impeachment and provoked a phone call from White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, Gephardt sounded a more conciliatory tone. The next day, Gephardt said of Clinton: “I’m proud of the job he’s done as president.” For good measure, he added that he considered the president’s nationally televised confession speech, widely criticized for its grudging tone and lack of a specific apology, to be “forthright.”

Other Democrats insist that polls and their own contacts with voters show the general public would prefer a quick end to the lengthy investigation of Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

“Its time to stop the ‘Jerry Springer’ show in Washington and focus on the interests of the American people,” said Lydia Spottswood, the Democratic candidate for an open House seat in a Wisconsin district Gephardt visited.

During his stop there, Gephardt cited the continued high poll ratings Clinton gets for job performance as evidence the president can continue to effectively lead the country.

But to fully understand the public view of Clinton--and the possible political ramifications of that--one must also examine attitudes toward his character, according to GOP pollster Bill McInturff. For instance, The Times Poll conducted right after Clinton’s Aug. 17 confession showed that while more than 60% approved of his job performance, half of those interviewed said no when asked if Clinton had the honesty and integrity to be president.

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“Never in 50 years of polling has the president’s job approval been so much higher than his personal approval,” said McInturff, whose firm represents about 50 GOP House candidates. “That’s an enormously unstable finding, and I think his low personal approval will have an impact on this election.”

To some extent, that impact is already evident by the arm’s length attitude many Democrats seem to have adopted toward their party’s leader.

At Gephardt’s various stops this week, the president’s name was rarely uttered. And few Democratic candidates seem eager to invite him to join them on the trail.

“President Clinton isn’t on the ballot, I am,” Spottswood replied when asked why she had not mentioned the president’s name during a campaign speech. Spottswood added that she “did not know” whether her candidacy would be helped by a Clinton visit, though she made plain her gratitude for Gephardt’s appearance.

“Congressman Gephardt is very well respected and well liked, particularly here,” she said, leaving the unspoken implication that the same could not necessarily be said of the president.