ARE THE DEMOCRATS GOING NUTS? AN INCLUIRY

“DIRTY ROTTEN STINKING… MEAT,” wrote the DSCC fiacks in bold letters. ” WARNER TO VOTERS: EAT THIS.” The relese went on to slam “E-Coli Republicans” for a vote fi?at “literally threatens Americans lives.”

“Next time you go to your loal supermarket and stand at the meat counter, beware,!” the fax concluded.

“Because what is lurking beneath the cellophane I wrapped cut of meat or chicken could literally kill you and your children.”

As an example of overcooked rhetoric, this is fine — -Matalinesque, even. Tone-deaf and tasteless, it is also a symptom, like the fabled Matalin memo, of something larger and even more entertaining. The Matalin memo revealed a campaign without purpose or intellectual weight. The DCSS memo is evidence of nervous collapse.

Capitol Hill is no stranger to bizarre behavior, of course; 1995 marks Robert Dornan’s seventeenth year in Congress. But even B-1 Bob might have found cause to cringe when George Miller, Democrat of California, announced after one Republican legislative triumph: “It is a glorious day — if you’re a fascist.” Several events this summer, considered cumulatively and examined with the cold eye of the diagnostician, suggest that the Democratic party, the world’s oldest and most honorable political institution, the party of Jefferson and… well, Jefferson, is cracking up — breaking down, wigging out, caving in, off to see the Wizard, bound for the nuthouse.

“Nervous breakdown” is not a medical term, and according to diagnostic textbooks it can denote any number of varied phenomena: delusions of grandeur, unexpected fits of temper and dyspepsia, a generalized disregard for conventional behavior. Breakdowns tend to strike, the textbooks note, “at times of transition or change, such as adolescence, middle age, entering or graduating from school” — or losing (to extend the list) the chairmanship of a powerful House committee.

This may be the case with Sam Gibbons, for example, who is today the ranking minority member on Ways and Means, though he seems unaware of the ” minority” aspect of his role. For years the Florida Democrat labored thanklessly in the shadow of Dan Rostenkowski, whose demise in 1994 left Gibbons briefly at the wheel of Congress’s most significant committee. Dethroned prematurely by the Republican Terror, Gibbons has been given to outbursts on the House floor. “You all sit down and shut up,” he explained, in a famous exchange with Republicans last March. “I will be as petulant as I want to be.”

Like the faded silent-film queen Norma Desmond, alone in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard, Gibbons has dealt badly with the fact that he is no longer a star.

As a member of the minority, for example, he has lost the authority to call committee hearings, with which he could command the attention and obedience of junior colleagues, his staff, and the press. So in August he called a committee hearing anyway.

The toy hearing had all the trappings of the real thing. Five Democrats (but no Republicans) gathered with him in the cavernous Ways and Means committee room. Lines of spectators — congressional staff and lobbyists, mostly — snaked out the door. C-SPAN broadcast the proceedings live. Gibbons called the hearing to order, administered the oath to panels of witnesses, and placed before him the offcial little blue light that glows whenever a witness jabbers overtime. He commanded the room with a chairman’s gravitas.

The theme of the hearing heightened the air of unreality. The Medicare trust fund, Gibbons intended to prove, isn’t going broke after all, and any intimations to the contrary — including those by the fund’s Democratic trustees, who warn of bankruptcy in seven years — are scare tactics. “It is sound today,” announced Gibbons, “and we’ll keep it riscally sound.” Several newspapers — caught in a ;lassic codependent relationship — solemnly reported the pretend chairman’s vow, without pointing out that he is in no position to keep it.

Other House Democrats have joined Gibbons in purring “Ready for my closeup, Mr. De Mille.” Charles Schumer, in happier times the chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee on crime, held his own pretend hearing in July. The subject Was the paramilitary groups terrorizing the American outback, and Schumer too deployed the trappings expected of a real hearing called by a real chairman: he little blue light, the panels of witnesses, the opening statements, the whirring cameras and obliging newsfolk, and the crowds of spectators. All that was missing were the little men in white coats, for Schuiner, like Gibbons, seemed unaware that he was no lnger chairman of anything. Congressmen who selected themselves as members of Schumer’s nonsubcommittee contributed suitably incendiary statements during Schumer’s make-believe hearing. Congressman Miller described the militias as “the Republican c) nstituency.” And Schumer himself called Republicans “mealy-mouthed mollifiers of the militias.”

Extravagance of speech, along vith uncontrollable alliteration, is symptomatic of nervous collapse, and large numbers of Democrats have uccumbed on and off the House floor. The Nazi trole has proved irresistible. “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile,” said New York’s Major Owens, of his Republican colleagues. “They’re worse than Hitler.”

“Nobody knew what was happening to the Jews,” said Charlie Rangel, also of New York, “and today when you see what is happeningseducation being knocked first on the list, health care for the poor as being knocked, welfare checks taken away — it just seems to me that there is a similarity.”

To Republicans who opposed he nomination of Henry Foster, Pat Schroeder advised: “Slow down. We don’t believe in lynchings. We don’t want to see that kind of goose-stepping over women’s rights.”

“This Republican proposal” — a welfare reform bill — “certainly is not the Holocaust,” John Lewis reassured the House in March. “But I am concerned . … They are coming for the poor. They:are coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.”

And what will Republicans do when they nab them? Leon Panetta, discussing the Republican proposal to increase funding for the school lunch program by 4. 8 percent, suggested an answer. It “would really take food out of the mouths of millions of needy schoolchildren, toddlers, infants and mothers.”

When the Third Reich metaphor seems temporarily exhausted, the Democrats have fallen back on more general imagery. “All this bill does,” said California’s Pete Stark, referring to welfare reform, “is push poor people off a cliff.” Or, in Pat Schroeder’s alternative:

“The first thing being thrown off the ship are women and children.”

But House Democrats in extremis have refused to settle for words alone. They have shown themselves capable of action as well.

John Lewis, for example, was asked by the Congressional Institute in early August to appear with Newt Gingrich and other Georgia congressmen at a Medicare forum in suburban Atlanta. Lewis never responded to the offer, but in the end decided to show up anyway, with a four-bus caravan of union activists in train.

Lewis and his friends popped up at the Stouffer Waverly Hotel in Cobb County just as the forum was getting underway. The activists were outraged at the GOP’s plan to increase Medicare spending $ 1,900 per recipient over seven years. As they stormed the hotel ballroom, they carried signs and shouted: ” Where is Newt?” As it happened, Newt was in a back room. But not for long — he quit the hotel altogether rather than battle to be heard. Then the congressman and his colleagues chanted: “Newt is scared!” Lewis’s demonstrators marched onto the stage. They raised their fists. And then they left.

“At some point,” Gingrich later said of Lewis, “he needs to realize he’s a congressman.” Lewis does realize this, of course, but as his party collapses, the definition of what a congressman does, and can do, is being endlessly expanded, even to include the task of corralling mobs to shout down a colleague.

Pat Schroeder has learned the lesson as well. Four days after Lewis demonstrated in Atlanta, Gingrich held a book signing at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside, shouting “Down with Newt.” Their signs, more inventive than those from Lewis’s demonstrators, ranged from “Go Back to Hiding Under a Rock, Ya Lizard,” to “Newt, What’s Next? Concentration Camps for the Poor?”

A local radio host accused Schroeder of helping to organize the protest — a charge the congresswoman dismissed as “the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.” Hours later she issued a statement declaring herself”proud to have helped organize the protests.” Indeed, her staffers had faxed announcements of Gingrich’s appearance and even arranged “phone trees” to alert networks of activists. One flyer distributed by her offce implored Denver’s activists to match the successful efforts of their Atlanta brethren: “On Monday, Gingrich was met with such ardent protest in his home state of Georgia that the event he was attending had to be canceled. We want to show him that Coloradans are just as involved… and just as angry.”

Alas, despite the protests, Gingrich’s book signing proceeded undisturbed. He was even allowed to talk!

As anger seizes the Democrats and clouds their judgment, as the cracks in the crack-up grow wider and deeper, only one other politician has emerged to rival Gingrich as an object of their loathing and revulsion: their leader, President Clinton.

The loathing showed itself most clearly this June, when the President proposed a plan to balance the budget in ten years. Faced with the option of either criticizing Republicans or offering a constructive alternative to their plans, the President went constructive. David Broder and other establishmentarians cooed in admiration, but Clinton’s fellow Democratic politicians may never forgive him.

“I think it sucks,” said Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark. “It’s a quantum leap backward in social policy, and it will have long-lasting, explosive results,” said Congressman Don Payne. “The real losers will be the elderly and the families that support them,” said Majority Leader Dick Gephardt.

“There is no way, at this point, for us to deal with it,” said Congresswoman Louise Slaughter about Clinton’s budget. Dealing with it, of course, is the problem.

“I don’t want to deal with it,” said Rep. Vic Fazio. “He thinks we are like abused children who will come back and ask him to love us again,” said George Miller. “We WOIl’t.”

Rep. Sherrod Brown had the nost succinct counterproposal of all: “Maybe we need to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue.” Ka-boom.

In nervous breakdowns, there isanger, of course, but the shrinks speak of other symptoms, too: lassitude, a sense of disarray, a feeling of being tugged downward by forces beyond one’s control. At meetings of the Democratic House leadership, David (]rann reported in The Hill, attendance routinely hovers around 25 percent. Only five of nineteen leaders showed up for one recent strategy session. In the cloakroom Democrats snap at one another. When asked by Grann to comment on the performance of the Democratic leadership, Charlie Rangel replied, “Democratic what?”

In one noteworthy episode, the House Democrats and a rump group of Republican moderates were defeated on a vote they had won just three days before.

The reason for the unexpected defeat was that eight Democrats failed to show up for the second roll call. Before long the excuses began floating in. One congressman said he had been attending a Lamaze class with his wife. Several more had left town. Another was home with a sick baby. Congressman Sydney Yates said he missed the vote because he was feeling “queasy.”

It’s catching. Professional Democrats in Washington glumly admit to feeling queasy, dispirited, and so very alone. One of them has even compared their lot to that of Scott O’Grady, the American airman downed over Bosnia, who subsisted on bugs and the squeezings from his sweat socks.

“The difference between House Democrats and Captain O’Grady,” this House Democrat told the New York Times, “is that Captain O’Grady had allies.” Too true. Plus, Capt. O’Grady managed not to go insane.,

By Andrew Ferguson