The Democrats: Ready to Think Smaller

"Three months is a generation in politics," Vice President Alben Barkley once observed, and as Democratic members of Congress returned to Washington this week from their holiday recess, they fervently hoped that Barkley's adage still held true. The 94th Congress was supposed to be a Democratic triumph, but in the past three months the session has turned into an almost unmitigated Democratic disaster because of a crushing succession of failures to overturn presidential vetoes. Nonetheless, the party's congressional leaders believe that time yet remains to salvage enough of their program to retrieve their self-esteem and arrest President Gerald Ford's momentum before the presidential campaigns begin in earnest next year. As a first step, House Speaker Carl Albert planned to meet with House committee chairmen to set a new Democratic strategy for the rest of the session.

Sorry Rival. On paper, the leaders had reason for some degree of optimism about finding a workable strategy. They still have their overwhelming margins of 289 to 145 in the House and 61 to 38 in the Senate. In theory, the Democrats could agree to make enough compromises--for example, cutting the dollar amounts on their spending bills--to persuade Ford to go along with their legislation or, alternatively, to win enough Republican votes in the critical battlefield of the House to override the President's vetoes.

But many experts still thought that the Democrats faced nearly insurmountable odds. Reported TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil: "In these assessments, Congress comes off as a sorry, almost pitiful rival to the President. The brave initiatives of last January have become the cruel frustrations of now. The Democrats have lost their momentum, their sense of purpose and esprit. They are floundering in a political morass. They see themselves as disarrayed and helpless. But if with 289 members of the House they cannot act, they might as well call in the dogs. The hunting will be over."

Six months ago, as Democratic leaders made their overly ambitious plans for the session, the situation was entirely different. Faced with an unelected Republican in the White House, they felt that the huge Democratic margins in Congress gave them a mandate to act on their own. Further, the election of 75 first-term Democrats had brought new energy and a more activist spirit to the House (see box following page). There was even talk in Washington of a "congressional government," meaning that the Legislative Branch would dominate the Executive. With relative ease, the Democrats passed their own $8.1 billion tax rebate, largely abolished the oil depletion allowance, canceled Ford's plans to reduce the food-stamp program and cut off further military aid to the non-Communist governments of Cambodia and South Viet Nam.

But the Democrats overestimated their own ideological unity and underestimated Ford's clout, particularly in the House, where he served for 25 years, eight as minority leader. In what amounted to a counterattack, he vetoed key Democratic bills that would have raised farm price supports to boost food production, stiffened regulation of strip mining, stimulated the housing industry through subsidies of mortgage interest and would have appropriated $5.3 billion to ease unemployment by creating 1 million public jobs. Each time Ford and his aides mustered enough votes among Republicans and fiscally conservative Southern Democrats to sustain the vetoes in the House. On the public jobs bill, for example, the 22 Democrats who voted to sustain the veto included 18 Southerners. Similarly, 35 Democrats, 26 of them from the South, voted to uphold Ford's veto of the housing bill. In their most embarrassing failure of all, the Democratic leaders attacked Ford's energy conservation program as weak and ineffective but could not pass an adequate alternative of their own. Complained Democratic Representative Richard Boiling of Missouri: "We're looking like a bunch of idiots." Indeed, as public approval of Ford increased (to 55% in the latest Gallup poll), public esteem of Congress plummeted.

Blaming Leaders. At the same time, events overseas worked against some of the Democrats' planned initiatives. The Communist victories in Southeast Asia led even doves to support the defense budget so as not to encourage Communist aggression elsewhere, particularly in Korea. In addition, the popularity of Ford's handling of the Mayaguez incident further undermined any lingering interest among the Democrats in launching a broad attack on his foreign policy.

Frustrated, many Democrats blame their leaders for the party's ineffectiveness in the House. According to a recent Washington Post survey, slightly fewer than half of the House Democrats are now satisfied with Albert and Majority Leader Thomas ("Tip") O'Neill. The survey found more discontent among veteran Democrats than among the 75 freshmen (54% of the veterans v. 49% of the freshmen were dissatisfied). But the senior members have tended to support the leadership in public, while the first-termers have voiced their complaints and even talked of trying to dump Albert as Speaker--a move that would doubtless fail.

Contributing to the freshmen's anger has been the fact that they were largely responsible for the revolt in January that dumped three committee chairmen and instituted about a dozen procedural reforms that weakened the traditional seniority system. The reformers wanted to make the House more responsive to new ideals and the will of the majority. To the dismay of the freshmen, the changes also further loosened party discipline. The liberal House Democratic Study Group has found that party unity on three of the attempts to override presidential vetoes was the feeblest in 20 years. In an unprecedented move, about 30 first-termers met recently with Albert and demanded that he exercise more control over Democratic votes on key issues, perhaps through the House Democratic Caucus. That body happens to be headed by Phillip Burton, a liberal from California and leader of the reform movement who is a possible candidate to succeed Albert if he should step down as Speaker.

Albert this year has, in fact, had unusual difficulty in making decisions, even minor ones. But "the Little Giant" from Bug Tussle, Okla., is unlikely to give up the fight. Smarting from the criticism, Albert and O'Neill consider the freshmen to be naive about Washington politics. In particular, the leaders reject the idea of using the caucus to bind members' votes as an unacceptable return to "King Caucus," which ruled the House for a decade before disintegrating in the early 1920s. Nor will Albert take a harder approach to his rank-and-file; as O'Neill has pointed out, the Speaker has neither the carrots nor the sticks to force recalcitrant Democrats into line. Instead, they plan to search for ways to trim their programs. Says O'Neill: "We won't have the broad package that we wanted, but we'll have a better package than Ford offered." More important at this point, such compromises may head off further unbeatable presidential vetoes and break the stalemate between the President and the Democrats.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.