THE GOP

Yet you still hear it said (Eleanor Clift on a recent Crossfire) that the Republicans were repudiated in 1996. And she’s not the only one who thinks so; look at the House Republicans themselves. They have been acting like whipped dogs. No, they’re not going to take a stand on budget issues before the president does, or bring forward their own budget; they might get attacked for it, after all. And they’re certainly not going to say anything about Medicare and entitlements; they got hammered on Medicare in the last election and they’re not going to let it happen again, no, sir. Instead, they’re going to hunker down and let what they think is an automatic sixth- year-of-a-presidency jinx reelect them in 1998. Maybe then they might begin advancing their views on public policy.

It seems that Republicans have gotten just about everything precisely wrong about the 1996 results. Victory is not automatic for Republican incumbents in 1998. As the Democrats found to their dismay in 1994, institutional advantages can keep you in power only so long; they fail when someone else comes along with more attractive ideas.

More important, House Republicans do not understand that they did more than just survive the Democratic onslaught against their 1995 plan to slow the growth of Medicare. It used to be said that entitlements like Social Security and Medicare were the third rail of American politics: Touch them and you die. Someone should tell the House Republicans and the press that the third rail of American politics seems to have shorted out.

True, Republicans did not begin making their case on Medicare — and addressing Democratic caricatures of their proposals — until October 1996, three weeks before the election. At that point, in a concerted campaign of advertising and public appearances, Republicans made a three-pronged argument in defense of their actions. First, they said, the Medicare system was broken, and they had testimony from Clinton’s own Social Security trustees to prove it. Second, the Republicans had a plan to fix Medicare not by cutting but by slowing down its growth. Third, the Republicans had devised a so-called lock- box system to ensure that all Medicare savings went right back into the Medicare system.

The strategy, it may surprise you to learn, worked. Democratic pollster Peter Hart told me that the Medicare issue simply stopped working for Democrats in mid-October. Charles Cook nicely summarizes the so-called generic numbers in his invaluable Cook Political Report. From May through early October, voters over the age of 65 who were asked whether they would cast their ballot for the Democratic or Republican candidate in their district chose the Democrat by a huge margin, 47-31 percent. But in a poll taken November 1-4, the Democratic advantage among the elderly was down to a statistically insignificant 41 to 40 percent. On Election Day, exit polls showed the 65-plus vote dead even, 49-49.

Even Arizona and elderly-laden Florida, the two states Bill Clinton lost in 1992 and won in 1996, told the same story. Medicare did not tip the balance to Clinton, the exit polls show; Clinton’s popularity among Hispanic voters did (environmental issues made a difference as well). And even if Medicare did take votes away from the Republican presidential candidate in Florida and Arizona, the issue did not cost Republicans any House seats. In fact, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives received 56 percent of the vote overall in Florida and 61 percent in Arizona. (And in the two Florida districts with the nation’s largest percentage of elderly residents, Republicans Clay Shaw and Dan Miller each got more than 60 percent of the vote.)

But wasn’t the Republican victory just an accident? Didn’t they just squeak through because news of the Clinton Asian-money scandal broke in the last two weeks of the campaign? Certainly, many House elections were decided by close margins. But the Republican gains in the last weeks were not the result of Democratic missteps. If you look at elections all over the world in the last decade or so, you will see that the party of the Right usually wins — not by leading throughout the campaign, but by surging ahead in the final weeks or months.

Why? Because until then the media, sympathetic to parties of the Left almost everywhere, tend to control the dialogue. Only in the last weeks can the Right get out its message relatively unmediated and undisparaged by the press. This was true in the United Kingdom in 1992, in the U.S. House elections in 1994, in Ontario in 1995, and in Israel in 1996.

The same pattern held for Republicans on the subject of Medicare. By October, the press had been writing for months that Medicare was killing the Republicans, and since their Medicare stories had already been written, they turned to other things. They did not bother to look very deeply at the Republican Medicare counteroffensive, nor did the Republicans encourage them to do so (because they would then try to trash it). They did not check the poll numbers Hart was noticing during the campaign and Cook chronicled after. They did no reporting and let their previous characterizations stand — the more so because that outdated reporting pointed to a result most reporters had long been predicting and wanted to see themselves: a chastising defeat for an overreaching Republican majority.

Press bias is unable to determine the results of elections, but it can shape how almost everyone sees them before and after. Two hundred days of stories about the possibility of Republicans’ losing the House have not been forgotten, and their cumulative effect has tended to overshadow the two days of stories about how they actually won it. Even during those two days the victory was understated. The press declared two Republican incumbents beaten in Washington state while there were still 40,000 absentee votes out; both won.

Moreover, Republicans may have been in better shape even during those 200 days of negative stories. There is some reason to believe that public polls in this campaign cycle may well have been tilted against the Republicans. This was certainly true of the public polls immediately before the election, almost all of which suggested Bill Clinton would win by a wider margin than actually occurred and that Democrats would win the House by margins like those in 1988, 1990, and 1992. The final polls were, with one exception, in the statistical margin of error these polls always warn about. But the likelihood of all the polls’ being off on one side of the political spectrum and none on the other is something like the odds of shooting seven straight sevens in craps: It could happen, but a sensible person will start to wonder whether the dice aren’t loaded. (One theory — and it is no more than a theory so far — is that conservatives are more likely than others to refuse to respond to polls, particularly those polls taken by media outlets that conservatives consider biased. If so, they’re hurting their own cause.)

The efficiency of the political marketplace, like the efficiency of the economic marketplace, depends on the full dissemination of accurate information. Today almost all the players in the political marketplace seem to think that the Republicans got pasted in House elections and that they ended up retaining their majority by a fluke. Acting on this misinformation will produce less than optimal vote-winning behavior, especially for the Republicans. They seem to think that if they avoid stating any positions on issues, the electoral calendar will take care of them. But just the opposite could be true: If they fail to give voters any reason to vote for them, the Democrats might seize the opportunity to do that, and win back the House.

This may already be happening. When Bill Clinton’s plan for dealing with Medicare was announced last month, it received strong criticism for being a centralized, command-and-control scheme that would not work and would deny seniors the choices others have in choosing medical plans. Who made the argument? Not Republicans, who might have argued that their Medicare plans do offer choices to seniors. No, it was made by newly elected senator Ron Wyden, who began his career as an advocate for seniors and who is one of the few Democrats to win a seat formerly held by a Republican between November 1992 and November 1996. Wyden is thinking intelligently about public policy and politics. Republicans seem to be bunkering down, like dogs puzzled about why they have been whipped and hoping to avoid being hit again.

Today power is flying out from Washington to the states, to local governments, to private organizations and mediating institutions and families and individuals. That movement is in line with what most Republicans have urged for years and against what most Democrats have urged.

The smart move for Democrats is to argue for small government interventions, to help individuals and families make their way, and this is what smart Democrats like Wyden are doing. The smart move for Republicans is to argue for continued dispersion of power to give individuals and families choices about how to make their way. But most Republicans seem frozen with fear. They believe their policies are unpopular and that their only hope is to conceal what they are doing. Bill Clinton knows he won in 1996. When are House Republicans going to wake up and realize they won the last election too?

Michael Barone is a senior editor at Reader’s Digest and co-author of Almanac of American Politics.