WASHINGTON -- The Democratic Party thought it had received a gift from above this fall when the Republicans trotted out their 10-point "Contract with America" and accompanying pledges to slash committees and committee staffs, audit Congress' books and otherwise assault business-as-usual if they took control of Capitol Hill.
The contract, the Democrats said, was nothing more than boiled-over Reaganism featuring such old conservative turkeys as a balanced budget constitutional amendment, a presidential line-item veto and congressional term limits. The Republicans promised only that they would bring the 10 issues to the House floor for a vote within the first 100 days of taking over. But the Democrats brushed that caveat aside in their zest to ridicule the contract and paint it as a smoke screen for cuts in such sacred cows as Social Security and Medicare.
The GOP agenda and promise to force votes on it, however, clearly struck a chord with millions of voters fed up with congressional gridlock and perks who blame the Democrats who XTC have held both the executive and legislative branches the past two years. Candidate Bill Clinton had told them gridlock would be broken if his party controlled both branches, and the voters emphatically judged him a failure, despite some important successes like deficit reduction.
Now the House Republicans are conspicuously setting themselves to the task of carrying out the contract, knowing that if they fail to do so, their newly built credibility will be shattered. They know, too, that they have a rare opportunity to identify themselves with the electorate as the party of change that Clinton told them the Democratic Party was in 1992.
Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich, the principal architect of the contract supported by more than 300 Republican candidates before the election, has appointed a Republican transition team to plan his party's takeover of the House. But he clearly sees it as a brain trust, with the Senate also in Republican hands, to take over the whole federal government, never mind the minor detail of a Democrat still occupying the Oval Office.
In retrospect, the decision to pledge only to bring the contract agenda up for a vote was a shrewd one, putting the Republicans in a no-lose situation.
On the line-item veto, President Clinton has already said he favors the change and it should be enacted, to the Republicans' credit. Of the other items, it may take a presidential veto to stop them, enabling the Republicans to cast the Democrats as obstructionists.
Politically, the significance of the "Contract with America" is that it caught at just the right time the public demand to shake up Congress and made the Democrats seem to be defending the status quo. The irony in that is that the Democrats sought important congressional reforms in the last session, notably in campaign financing, reducing perks and putting new clamps on lobbyists, only to be stymied by Republican stalling tactics.
With the midterm election lost, many Democrats continue to assault the contract as phony, arguing with considerable persuasion that the kinds of spending cuts that would be required to balance the budget would devastate a range of programs beyond Social Security and Medicare.
The Republicans reply that they have no intention of cutting those two programs -- thereby making the budget-balancing task all the more difficult, or impossible, the Democrats insist.
But the Democrats have little choice now but to stand by as the Republicans try to implement their ambitious talk. If they propose deep spending cuts, the Democrats are demanding, what specifically are they?
But once again the Republicans have the political protection of a Democratic president in the White House who can bail them out by vetoing a bill bearing unrealistic budget cuts.
Gingrich no doubt had the contract in mind when he said the other day that he was ready and willing to "cooperate" with Clinton but not "compromise." That's a formula for confrontation if ever there was one -- do it my way or not at all. If Gingrich is more interested in winning political points than achieving constructive reform, the prospect will be for more gridlock, no matter how loudly the voters demanded an end to it on Nov. 8.