POLITICS : In Power, the GOP Proves as Conflicted as the Democrats

It was only a matter of time. After an alarmingly long period (14 days) of decorum, the new-look House of Representatives last week fell into a fine fit of chaos.

It all started when some spunky Democrat attacked Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) not-really-aborted book deal. Republicans moved to strike her remarks from the record; Democrats accused them of “totalitarianism” and “abuse of power;” and soon enough, congressmen and aides from both parties were sprinting from their offices to the House floor, like children desperate not to miss out on the school year’s first playground scuffle.

And what fun it was. But for the serious political spectators, the most interesting and important battles are not between the parties but those simmering inside them. Interesting, because they are less predictable but still just as amusingly nasty. And important, because they will help determine how the parties handle their new, reversed roles. For the Republicans, in fact, these factional fights may prove to be the biggest potholes in the road to their self-styled “revolution.”

At the moment, though, all eyes are on President Bill Clinton, who gives his State of the Union Address Tuesday. Since the election, Clinton’s ears have been ringing with conflicting advice from his party’s two wings: New Democrats, led by the President’s old pals at the Democratic Leadership Council, who have scorned him for abandoning their faith and urged that he return to the centrist fold; and Old Liberals, most of them in Congress, who want him to “go back to his base.”

So far, he’s sent encouraging signals to both. DLCers rejoiced as Clinton revived his campaign rhetoric of a “new covenant” between government and the governed, and defended his national-service program against an attack by Gingrich. Meanwhile, liberals were cheered by the choice of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) to head the Democratic National Committee, and by word that Clinton may propose a hike in the minimum wage. In truth, however, the debate in the White House has been less about ideology than tactics: Should Clinton be conciliatory or confrontational with the GOP majority? The answer is classic Clinton: both.

Neither faction will be satisfied. But though irritating New Democrats will not cost Clinton much in dealing with Congress--most got thumped in November--annoying Old Liberals may cause trouble. Already, the House Democratic leader, Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), has upstaged the President twice; talk of him challenging Clinton in 1996 has the White House spooked. Worse, few members of the new congressional minority feel loyalty to Clinton, who they blame for their predicament. “They weren’t reliable allies in the first two years,” says a White House aide, “they’re less reliable now.”

That the Democrats should find themselves behaving like scorpions in a sock is not startling--their party has always seemed genetically programmed for fratricide. Republicans, by contrast, have not. Over the past two years, in fact, their unity has been fairly breathtaking: thwarting Clinton’s health-care plan, obstructing all business in the last Congress’ final days, signing on en masse to the “contract with America.” But now, not three weeks after taking control, there are signs that, on a range of issues, GOP unity is cracking.

The most visible fault lines run between Gingrich’s hard-charging House and Bob Dole’s (R-Kan.) more stately Senate. Like their baleful leader, Senate Republicans are suspicious of grand schemes--their interest lies in governing less, not least. And so, in recent days, several senior Republicans have made it clear they have no time for some of the contract’s modest proposals: cutting off federal aid to legal immigrants; denying welfare to women under 18; passing a balanced-budget amendment that would also require a three-fifths vote to raise taxes. Nor do many senators have an appetite for term limits.

The party’s governors have their own ideas for House Republicans, too--on welfare, balanced budgets, unfunded mandates and so on. The bluntest is: Send us cash and leave us alone. But now that they hold the purse strings, the Newtoids are discovering that their fondness for the New New Federalism goes only so far. “If we just give them money with no strings attached,” asks one philosophically challenged GOP congressman, “what’s the point of us?” Exactly.

House Republicans are also finding out that chopping $200 billion from the budget is a lot easier on paper than in practice: Huge rows are already raging. Toss in a few personal conflicts--between Dole and Gingrich, who annoy each other intensely, and between Dole and his potential rival, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.)--and it looks like an accident waiting to happen.

Indeed, Gingrich is a walking, talking, one-man intraparty rivalry. First came his suggestion a week ago that Republicans might reconsider some of the more Draconian elements of the contract’s welfare plan--which earned him the displeasure of the party’s gurus. Then there was the urging of many Republicans--all of whom backed him at first--to drop his increasingly smelly book deal.

If a GOP crack-up comes, though, it won’t be just because of individual or institutional strains. It will come because, at bottom, Republicans are deeply divided (maybe as deeply as Democrats) about what they believe in.

On economics, the party is split between true-believing supply-siders, like Gingrich and Gramm, who think tax cuts will cure every U.S. ailment including the common cold, and fiscal prudes, like Dole, who used to talk--at the height of the Reagan years, no less--about raising taxes to deal with the deficit. The true believers want to destroy the “failed liberal welfare bureaucracy.” Dole and his ilk think farm subsidies make sense.

And don’t forget foreign policy, where the party’s internationalist Establishment is waging a constant battle against a virulent strain of populist, nativist, protectionist isolationism that takes its lead from Patrick J. Buchanan and Ross Perot. This pessimistic clan made itself a pain within the party in the fight to pass the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; it is now doing the same again on Clinton’s proposed Mexican bailout.

That these fissures are threatening to open up now, a time of GOP ascendance, is less surprising than it seems. Actually, it’s predictable. Cast your mind back to early 1991, when George Bush’s victory in the Gulf War made him one of the most popular Presidents in modern memory. Was his party joyous and united? It was not. Instead, conservatives were so bitter over Bush’s decision to raise taxes that they were calling him a failure and a fool, a man of no firm convictions.

The moral of this story is not that Republicans are as prone as Democrats to stabbing each other in the back--though they are. The moral is that opposition is easy. Being out of power allows a party to put aside its petty (and not so petty) bickering and attack the other guy. What congressional Republicans are fast discovering is that governing is different, harder--especially if you’re trying to keep promises as grand and conflicting as those in the “contract with America.” Hard choices and unpleasant compromises lie ahead. There is little doubt that most voters are clueless about what’s in the contract. But they know that Republicans promised big changes, and if they don’t deliver, the party will be held accountable. For 40 years, the GOP enjoyed what Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) calls the “luxury of irrelevance.” Now they are coping with the strictures of power.*