In Campaign With Few National Themes to Propel It, GOP Goes Local

Listen to Rep. George R. Nethercutt Jr. (R-Wash.), and this fall’s House election sounds like a referendum on the future of dams on the Snake River. Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-San Diego), meanwhile, is bragging about what he’s done in Congress to clean up beaches. And Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale) is spotlighting the concerns of his district’s vast Armenian community.

With few major national issues dominating this year’s campaign, many Republican House candidates are trying to win in November--and help the party retain control of the chamber--by focusing on local, often parochial, issues. And that political strategy is leaving heavy footprints on Capitol Hill’s legislative agenda.

As this year’s session draws to a close, GOP House leaders aggressively are using their power to help vulnerable incumbents get what they need--pork-barrel projects, pet legislation, hometown publicity--to score points with voters.

That is the main reason Rogan was given the green light to push an obscure bill condemning the slaughter of thousands of Armenians more than 75 years ago. House action on the measure, expected early this week, will fulfill a pledge made by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) when he campaigned in the Glendale area with Rogan, who is in a tough fight for reelection in a district where Armenian Americans form a crucial voting bloc.

It is hardly unusual for leaders of either party to try to help their weak incumbents. The Clinton administration recently sought to give a boost to Rep. Calvin Dooley (D-Visalia) by sending a Cabinet member to his district to announce a major economic development initiative. But the determination with which GOP leaders are pursuing such aims represents a shift in political strategy from recent years, when House Republicans tried to propel their candidates with broad national themes--most notably in 1994, when congressional candidates nationalized the campaign around a common conservative agenda, the “contract with America.”

“Our strategy in this election cycle is completely different than the strategy in 1994,” said James Wilkinson, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This time . . . many of our candidates feel like they are running for city council.” The difference, in part, reflects a dramatic change in the political environment over the last six years. It is harder to run a nationalized campaign because polls show there is no single issue dominating the landscape the way anti-government sentiment did in the early and mid-1990s.

“It is harder to find things that get a great number of voters excited,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “There’s not a major outcry about Washington, as there was in 1994, or concern about the economy, as there was in any number of elections in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

And to the extent that some issues resonate around the country, they are topics voters tend to associate with Democrats: health care, education, Social Security.

For that reason, it is Democrats who are trying to nationalize this year’s congressional election. They are urging their candidates--regardless of the region--to campaign on expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs, regulating managed health care and shoring up Social Security. In response, GOP leaders have scrambled to offer their own legislative versions of Democratic priorities, an effort to blur distinctions between the parties.

But the more aggressive Republican approach has been to provide vulnerable incumbents opportunities to address their districts’ local concerns. And that, in turn, has meant that year-end appropriation bills are laden with local projects.

“You can’t point to a single vulnerable incumbent who hasn’t been taken care of in the appropriations process,” boasts Tony Rudy, deputy chief of staff to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “Since Day One, we’ve asked our vulnerable members what they need and how we can help them get it. These guys don’t have to run a one-size-fits-all race.”

Earlier this year, for example, GOP leaders expedited a $50,000 appropriation sought by freshman Rep. Robert “Robin” Hayes (R-N.C.) to pay for the cost of razing a chicken plant in the North Carolina town of Hamlet. The plant burned nine years ago, but the charred remnants were never removed. (In a twist that underscored the intense politics around the project, the Hamlet City Council recently voted to reject the grant--a move some locals think was designed to deprive Hayes of favorable press.)

In the transportation agreement reached last week, GOP leaders included an additional $94 million for an interstate highway for the Arkansas district of Republican Rep. Jay Dickey. “They are worried about him,” a senior GOP aide said.

An earlier agreement on energy and water funding included $71.5 million for Arkansas projects--an example, Dickey said on his campaign Web site, of what he can do for his district as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

That energy and water appropriations bill became so loaded with home-state goodies that the final version totaled $2 billion more than the $22.2-billion version passed initially by the House--to the dismay not only of fiscal conservatives but of President Clinton as well.

The GOP leaders also have sought to steer favorable publicity toward endangered incumbents. A few weeks ago, for example, when Republicans shifted their budget strategy to emphasize debt reduction rather than tax cuts, it was a freshman, Rep. Steven T. Kuykendall of Rancho Palos Verdes, they turned to to drive home the message. Kuykendall--in a tight reelection race against Jane Harman, the Democrat who formerly represented the South Bay district--was tapped to deliver the GOP’s weekly radio address on the debt issue.

Republicans are even seeking to hand legislative credit to candidates who have not yet been elected to the House. In Las Vegas earlier this year, House GOP leaders told local reporters that legislation to ban gambling on college sports--anathema to Nevada because it is the only state that now allows such betting--was dead for the year. And they gave some of the credit for its demise to the lobbying of Jon Porter, the local Republican running against Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley.

In recent budget talks with the White House, GOP leaders fought for language to keep the Clinton administration from breaching a series of dams on Washington state’s Snake River--a move pushed by environmentalists to revive the annual salmon run. The GOP position aimed to help two endangered Washington state Republicans--Nethercutt and Sen. Slade Gorton--who say breaching the dams would do serious damage to shipping, irrigation and the region’s power supply.

The administration kept the language out of any spending bills, but an ad back home for Nethercutt highlights his fight on the issue.

Nethercutt also has been campaigning on his bid to open new food markets in Cuba to U.S. farm products--a major shift in U.S. policy that would be a big boon to his wheat-laden, export-dependent district in the eastern part of the state. Late last week, his efforts were rewarded when GOP leaders signed off on a compromise allowing expanded trade with Cuba.

Nethercutt’s parochial campaign focus is emblematic of how much the GOP’s political strategy has changed over the last six years. When he ran for the House in 1994, he defeated House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) on one big national issue: the need for term limits to oust entrenched incumbents such as Foley. (In his reelection campaign, Nethercutt has breached his promise to serve only six years.)

Bilbray is another example. He ran for election in 1994 as a proud signatory of the contract with America; now, his campaign Web site highlights his position on electricity deregulation--a hot issue in San Diego, where the price of electricity has gone through the roof. And the first issue he lists in his record of “successes” in Congress is his work on a bill to clean up coastal waters and warn beachgoers when water is contaminated.

His rallying cry: “A day at the beach should not result in an appointment with the doctor.”