Atwater Calls Tax Cut Vote an Important Day for Bush Presidency

Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater on Friday described House passage of the capital gains tax cut as “the most important political day of the Bush presidency.”

The reason, he said, sitting poolside at a posh Beverly Hills hotel, is that the vote highlighted a split in the opposition just at a time when Democratic leaders said it is time to stand up to the President, to stand up for something.

Atwater spoke to reporters during one of his periodic working visits to Southern California.

Southern Californians heard a different view Friday from Democrat Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas and a possible 1992 challenger to Bush. Speaking over breakfast with reporters, Clinton said that the House vote on capital gains was more a matter of self-preservation by congressmen trying to retain their seats.

Sixty-four House Democrats, two-thirds of them Southerners, abandoned Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and supported the President’s tax cut on investment earnings.

Atwater said that was double the Democratic support he had expected. “I think from a purely political point of view it was the most important political day of the Bush presidency so far,” he added.

Atwater said the Democrats plus the nearly solid bloc of Republicans--only one defected from the President--is “very reminiscent of those coalitions” that former President Ronald Reagan enjoyed in the early years of his presidency.

“I’m not naive enough to think that this is a permanent coalition . . . . (But) the Democratic leadership was hard-core on this. For the President to go and get 64 votes I think is very encouraging . . . . When you get this many Democrats on a vote that was this strongly denounced by the party leadership, that is a good sign for the future. I think it is a potential coalition for the future,” the GOP chairman said.

Clinton said Democrats were suffering from a lack of true national leader who could pull the party together.

“The Democratic Party in the Congress has become largely an entrepreneurial enterprise . . . . We haven’t won the White House since 1980 and Democratic members of Congress have become used to having to fend for themselves and to be responsible for getting themselves elected,” he said.

In this light, it is understandable for Democrats to follow the wishes of constituents back home. In particular, Clinton said, the timber industry was influential in winning over Democrats in the South with their arguments that a tax reduction on trees was important for jobs.

“I don’t think we can take the fact that a lot of them defected from the party leadership as evidence the party is dead.”

The House vote Thursday of 239 to 190 could hardly have come at a worse time for Democratic leaders or a better time for Bush. Just this month, influential national leaders of the Democratic Party, including National Chairman Ron Brown and New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, had begun sounding the call to end the party’s honeymoon with the Republican President and stand up for the things Democrats believe in.

sh Cuomo Accuses Democrats

In a fiery speech in Los Angeles earlier this month, Cuomo accused Washington Democrats of dormancy, timidity and “cordial contentment.”

“For myself as a Democrat, respectfully, I think we have given an appropriate period of deference to the newly victorious President,” Cuomo said.

In private meetings over the last couple of weeks, Brown has spoken out just as forcefully, telling Democrats it was time to start focusing on Bush’s “failures.”