WASHINGTON -- Some Republicans with very long memories are reminding their junior colleagues these days to remember 1964 before growing too complacent about the future.
That was the year Lyndon B. Johnson buried Barry Goldwater in a landslide that left the Republicans as demoralized as the Democratic Party is today. The Republicans then, like the Democrats today, were seeking scapegoats and assessing blame.
But only four years later, Republicans rose from the ashes as Richard M. Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. The GOP, it turned out, was not as hopeless a case as it had seemed in that 1964 debacle.
On the most superficial level, that precedent might seem to be both a warning to the Newt Gingriches of today and a source of encouragement to the Democrats. There are, however, significant differences in the two situations that suggest that the Democratic Party faces a far more formidable task in making a similar return to power.
Because they had lost both the White House and Congress, the Republicans of 30 years ago were in a position to reinvent themselves. The defeat they had suffered was so thoroughgoing that they were given what amounted to a clean slate.
Their first significant move after the 1964 election was the choice of Ray Bliss of Ohio, a renowned practitioner of what he liked to call "nuts and bolts politics," to be the party's national chairman. The first priority for the GOP was to put aside the ideological arguments of the past and focus on organizing for the future.
The Democrats have no such clean slate. Because they hold the White House, they have an opportunity to control the political agenda as President Clinton did in advancing his "middle-class bill of rights" tax-reduction plan Thursday night.
But Clinton can be effective only to the extent that he can dispose of all the political baggage he has acquired over two stormy years in the Oval Office. His proposals for helping middle-class Americans finance their children's education are enormously appealing. But they inevitably will be viewed in the ,, context of his broken promise on tax reduction from the 1992 campaign and, of course, the repudiation he suffered in the 1994 elections.
Nor can Clinton hope to re-establish his leadership simply by dealing with taxes and other concerns of those middle-class voters who provided critical support for him in 1992 and then turned against the Democratic Party and the president with a vengeance in the Nov. 8 election. The tax issue aside, the president has come to be perceived as ineffectual, weak and wishy-washy -- and too much a conventional politician. And those perceptions, opinion polls show, have become common all through the electorate.
What this suggests, of course, is that the president has much more to do than simply deal with the tax issue and appeal to the middle class. Now he must demonstrate not only that he can deliver a speech and offer an attractive program, but that he also can be effective in seeing that it is enacted. And if he accomplishes that much, he must move on and show similar leadership.
Clinton's problem is complicated, moreover, by the way his fellow Democrats are kicking him around. The leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an organization Clinton headed until 1991, felt no hesitancy about publicly blaming him for the Nov. 8 results. The House Democratic leader, Richard A. Gephardt, felt no qualms about proposing his own tax-cut plan in way to pre-empt the president. Both actions suggest that Clinton's first assignment may be to crack down within his own party.
In making their comeback 30 years ago, the Republicans enjoyed an advantage that may or may not accrue to the Democrats this time -- the scarring divisions within the Democratic Party over Johnson's policies in the Vietnam War. In the end, it was that intraparty turmoil that finally compromised Humphrey's candidacy and cost him the election by a whisker.
It is quite possible that the Republicans will be similarly burdened by internal arguments over such issues as abortion rights and homosexual rights, although none has the emotional content to engage a broad segment of the electorate in the way that Vietnam did in 1968.
The bottom line is that there are indeed some lessons to draw from 1964. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the imposing task facing Clinton in seeking a second term two years down the road.