Alone in the Middle

Voting in the midterm elections was still a few days away, but Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island was already feeling lonesome for the old gang. Surveying the voluntary departures of such Senate moderates as Minnesota's David Durenberger and Missouri's John Danforth as well as worrying about the loss of several others on Tuesday, a mournful Chafee said, "I'd like to say we're going to have some unforeseen support, but I must say, the middle is shrinking."

If any prediction about the elections this week could be considered safe, it was that Congress, paralyzed by bitter partisan warfare, was about to become even more divided along ideological lines. The Republicans, their ranks moving increasingly to the right, were poised to control more seats than at any time in the past 40 years. In the Senate, where G.O.P. control was only seven seats away, conservative candidates were faring better than more pragmatic hopefuls. In both parties, moderates were in retreat. The trend, said Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat and committed middle-of-the-road er, is "not conducive to bipartisanship and building coalitions."

Nor were the harsh, bridge-burning proclamations that rang across the country as the midterm campaigns went down to the wire. In fact the 11th-hour tactics -- as well as their implication for the next Congress -- seemed destined only to make voters angrier. On Halloween, Bill Clinton launched an eight-day, scare-out-the-vote tour, arguing that the Republicans would do everything from closing Yellowstone National Park to slowing racial progress. His favorite gambit was to claim at nearly every stop that Republicans wanted to cut the benefits of Social Security recipients by $2,000 each. However improbable -- and hypocritical, since Clinton's own budget director suggested a similar package of entitlement cuts recently -- the ploy helped the Democrats win 26 seats in the mid-term elections during Ronald Reagan's first term. And Democrats have been faithfully trotting it out ever since.

Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the Social Security tactic "the big lie." Conservative strategist William Kristol snapped that the fear mongering proved that Clinton was "brain dead" and "exactly what he once accused George Bush of being: an out-of-touch, visionless President with only a few questionable foreign policy accomplishments." At a minimum, Clinton's maneuvers will make it harder for either party to propose or accept cuts in spending and entitlements, which they both know is necessary in order to keep the deficit from ballooning again. At worst, the President's tactics were a harbinger of broader gridlock to come. Said a veteran Democratic Party official: "I don't know how Clinton is going to govern, given the tenor of what he is doing."