After the Revolution

A mark of the biggest traumas is that they reach down to the smallest levels. On the morning after Election Day, the 8-year-old son of a defeated Democratic Congressman walked slowly into his third-grade classroom at Horace Mann School in Washington and announced sadly, "My dad lost." The boy was worried that he might have to move, and his teacher tried to console him. "He's too little to understand the full implications," says principal Sheila Ford. "But he knows enough that it's been real hard on him."

Well, that's how it is for more senior Democrats these days too. As the aftershocks of the G.O.P. triumph go rolling through the city, every day is moving day now in Washington. What's moving is everything. Amid the teeming arrival of the ins, mostly Republicans, and the gloomy expulsion of the outs, mostly Democrats, any number of things are in motion. The battle lines in Congress, the power flow in both houses, the political center -- all is in play. So is Bill Clinton, who's being tugged by both sides of his party while he also manages, in that way of his, to pull himself back and forth.

The great challenge for the Democrats, still reeling from their drubbing at the polls, is to keep their footing as the G.O.P. pulls the rug out from under them. Clinton's handling of the first major surprise to be sprung by soon-to- be House Speaker Newt Gingrich was anything but surefooted. Right after the election, Gingrich declared that in the next session of Congress, House Republicans plan to introduce a constitutional amendment to permit school prayer, an item that didn't appear in the G.O.P.'s "Contract with America." When reporters asked Clinton about it in Jakarta, where he was attending the summit of Asian Pacific leaders, he replied with a small surprise of his own. "I certainly wouldn't rule it out," he offered. "It depends on what it says."

His placating instincts got him in trouble. By first appearing to endorse Gingrich's proposal, Clinton opened himself to attack from liberals who oppose school prayer. White House aides spent the next day backtracking, explaining that what the President had in mind was not a constitutional amendment but a legislative act to permit a moment of silence in classrooms like the one he had signed as Governor of Arkansas in 1985. While that could be acceptable to many Democrats as well as Republicans, the way the White House handled it reinforced Clinton's image as the Great Vacillator.

Although Clinton seemed completely unprepared for the first rhetorical challenge from the emboldened G.O.P., for Gingrich to start off with the school-prayer amendment made political sense. It probably seemed like the perfect thank-you gift to the Christian right for its substantial role in the Republican triumph. Even though leaders of the Christian right say it's not high on their legislative wish list, polls show strong support for some kind of classroom prayer, making it less contentious than an antiabortion measure they might prefer. Best of all, Gingrich could offer the amendment without fully expecting it to come to pass, with whatever messy, real-world consequences it might entail. Even if approved by both houses of Congress -- affording Gingrich the delicious spectacle of watching Clinton agonize over a veto -- constitutional amendments must be further approved by three-quarters of the states, a long and bumpy road where most of them stall.