Elections Wake-Up Call

By MICHAEL DUFFY

As voters across the country trooped to the polls last week, George Bush voted with his feet. He canceled a two-week swing through Asia, set for later this month, in the face of scathing complaints from Democrats about his lackluster handling of domestic affairs. The decision was draped in an unusually flimsy pretext: Bush said he needed to remain in Washington to "protect the American taxpayer" during the last days of the congressional session. Explained a more candid aide: "Given the choice between upsetting Americans and upsetting the Japanese, we'll take the latter every time."

Bush's expedient conversion to domestic priorities did not prevent voters in Pennsylvania's Senate race from sending him a chilling message. They demolished former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, a Bush surrogate for whom the President campaigned actively, 55% to 45%, and elected liberal Democrat Harris Wofford, a campaign neophyte who had hammered away at the Administration's poor economic performance. The voters, Wofford declared, "are fed up and want action to get our economy off dead center and get us moving out of this recession. It's time to take care of our own."

Elsewhere the message was mixed, but dissatisfaction with the status quo was the unifying theme. In Mississippi, Texas, New Jersey and Virginia, incumbents were washed out of office by a wave of antitax, antirecession, antigovernment sentiment. Though both parties posted gains as well as losses, the results reflected a sour, throw-the-bums-out mood that threatened officeholders everywhere. Only Washington State seemed to buck that trend by turning down a ballot initiative that would have imposed strict term limits on the state's congressional delegation. But milder term-limitation measures applying to local officials were approved in Houston and Cincinnati, and at least a dozen states will consider variations next year.

At a bizarre 6:40 press conference the morning after the elections, Bush tried to put the best face on the results. "There is a message here for the Administration," he said, "and a message here for the U.S. Congress." He admonished the press not to "look at the part of the glass that is only half full." But the fact that he had called the sunrise gathering just before departing for the NATO summit in Rome suggested, like his abrupt cancellation of the Asian tour, that the President was starting to worry about his political future. For the first time since his Desert Storm triumph last February, Bush's hammerlock on a second term seemed to be slipping.

Even the part of the Republican glass that was half full contained muddy water. In Mississippi businessman Kirk Fordice ousted Governor Ray Mabus, a progressive Democrat. But Fordice's anti-liberal, antiquota, anti-welfare campaign had a strong racial undercurrent that could prove embarrassing to the national G.O.P. -- especially since ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, running as a Republican, may well ride the same themes into the Louisiana Governor's mansion in this week's runoff.

Fearing that a Duke victory could discredit and divide their party, some of Bush's advisers urged the President to campaign for Democrat Edwin Edwards, a former Governor who was indicted twice on charges that he had conspired to rig state-hospital approvals while out of office. "You've got to put a stop to this now," said one leading G.O.P. official. "Duke is to Republicans what Jesse Jackson was to the Democrats ten years ago." Though he refused to stump for Edwards, Bush went so far as to say he would vote for him if he were a Louisianian. Although the President had hedged his criticism of Duke at first, he described him last week as "an insincere charlatan" who "has a long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry that simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign."

But nothing did more to shake Bush's complacency last week than the Pennsylvania outcome. Wofford, a former John F. Kennedy adviser, successfully turned the White House's inaction on health care and other domestic matters into a powerful Democratic issue. Appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of John Heinz in April, Wofford held his party's traditional blue- collar wards and reached deep into suburban Republican strongholds to erase a 46-point opinion-poll deficit and beat Thornburgh, a two-term former Governor.

Thornburgh, who exudes the aura of a man who hasn't got into a cold car in two decades, played right into his opponent's hands. He reveled in his Washington experience and boasted of returning to the "corridors of power." Paul Begala, Wofford's campaign manager, later quipped that Thornburgh's eagerness to identify with Washington was like "running on a pro-leprosy ticket at the time of Christ."

Wofford's most effective pitch was to convert the public's low-grade concern about affordable health care into a palpable anger over what the squeezed middle class is not getting from government. His stunning victory effectively ended the internal White House feud about whether to propose a health-care reform package before the 1992 election. Budget Director Richard Darman, who has backed such a plan for months to no avail, will now have wider berth to draft a Bush proposal.

In Congress, meanwhile, both parties were vying to seize the initiative on health care. Nineteen Republican Senators, headed by minority leader Bob Dole, proposed a package that would provide medical services to the 34 million uninsured Americans by offering them tax incentives to purchase private insurance. In the House more than 60 Democrats called for a Canadian-style | system providing universal health care through a publicly administered program. Yet both parties must explain to voters how they plan to lower medical costs and provide quality care without raising taxes or increasing the deficit.

The most formidable threat to Bush's re-election chances remains the economy, which had begun to recover in July and August but sputtered again in September. Bush has recently attempted a precarious balancing act, acknowledging that "people are hurting" from the recession, while reassuring Americans that "this is a good time to buy a car." He has also sought to boost consumer confidence by calling on lawmakers to reduce the tax on capital gains -- a political non-starter that unfairly favors the wealthy. The Democrats have countered with proposals for tax cuts that would mainly benefit the middle class, whose discontent was the only common thread in last week's elections.

As Bush appeared increasingly vulnerable on key issues, the Democrats saw their 1992 prospects brighten. Many began to speculate aloud that Bush might actually be defeated. James Carville, the Louisiana consultant who engineered Wofford's Pennsylvania upset, insisted that the Democrats could turn Bush's habit of changing his mind to their advantage. "You can move him around real good," said Carville. "If I were running against him, I'd be like a mosquito in his face." Said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin: "Just two months ago, a lot of us looked at 1992 as a positioning exercise for 1996. Now we're looking at next year as a chance to elect a President."

Many Democrats were looking to Albany, where New York Governor Mario Cuomo continued to play his tedious maybe-yes-maybe-no game. Cuomo's entrance, into the Democratic race would make him the instant front runner and draw increased attention to the six other contenders. But Cuomo cannot wait much longer: his indecision is becoming a lampoonable liability in a contest for a job that requires far harder judgments than the one he's wrestling with now.

No matter who runs against him, Bush retains tremendous advantages. Though his approval ratings have dipped to 63%, they remain higher than Ronald Reagan's a year before his 1984 landslide re-election. Polls also show that the Democratically controlled Congress, not Bush, still receives the largest share of the blame for the limping economy. More worrisome for the White House, however, are pollsters' findings that 57% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.

; Bush's position seemed unassailable after Desert Storm. But popularity born of foreign crises has never been a guarantee of support once a country's attention turns inward. Consider the fates of Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War and Winston Churchill at the end of the Second: within months of great triumph abroad, both men suffered stunning defeats at home. Nothing says such a reversal is inevitable, or even likely, for Bush. Nor does anything say it is impossible.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Elizabeth Taylor/Philadelphia