Candidates declare their independence

From coast to coast, Republicans are embracing the Declaration of Independence with fresh fervor this autumn. I can’t recall a campaign in which more Republican congressional candidates have run out of space on their brochures, and time on their TV ads, before they could list their party affiliation. Nor can I remember a year in which more of the GOP aspirants failed in their stump speeches even to mention the name of their party’s presidential candidate.

It is hard to believe that many of these men and women are the same folks who just two years ago lined up, four by four, to march down the steps of the Capitol and sign the Republican Contract With America. The message then was one of party unity, party solidarity, party responsibility. And it wasn’t just talk.

When the Republicans took over Congress, they moved on the agenda they had sworn to advance and they passed almost all of it (at least in the House) with an efficiency that dazzled the Democrats and neutral observers.

But then came the battle of the budget, the Medicare wars and the public backlash to the shutdown of government last winter. And then came the candidacy of Bob Dole. Suddenly Republican congressional and senatorial candidates everywhere discovered the value of political independence.

You don’t have to ask Republicans how they judge Dole’s prospects. Just watch what they do. I’m not talking about the extreme cases such as Massachusetts governor and senatorial candidate William F. Weld, whose Thursday schedule looked like it had been drafted for Ted Kennedy: A celebration of United Nations Day, a visit to President Clinton’s favorite AmeriCorps youth volunteer program and an NAACP dinner. More mainstream Republicans are also slip-sliding away.

Freshman Rep. Brian Bilbray (R) of San Diego gave away his tickets to the Dole-Clinton debate to others more eager to be in the same hall as the nominee. Here in Maine, GOP senatorial candidate Susan Collins never misses a chance to say that she opposes the centerpiece of the Dole campaign — his proposal for a 15-percent, across-the-board tax cut. Contradicting the party leader, she says a tax cut of that size would “make it too difficult to balance the budget.”

We are not talking ideology here. Bilbray was one of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s loyal allies for most of the past Congress. Now he advertises himself as a man “who stood up to the leadership of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party when I thought they were wrong.”

Collins is a protege and former staff member of retiring Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine, a leading moderate. But pragmatism is the main force. In 1992, Clinton carried both Bilbray’s district and Collins’ state. This year, both campaigns acknowledge, his margin is likely to expand. So the name of the game is to get voters to split their tickets. And that requires a show of independence by the candidates.

Democrats may speak with scorn of these survival tactics. But you know where the Republicans learned them? From the Democrats. From 1968 to 1992, Republicans won five of six presidential elections. But the Democrats never yielded their control of the House. They held on by persuading voters in dozens of districts to split their tickets — for a Republican president and a Democratic member of the House.

Turnabout is fair play, and the Republicans can only hope that the voters see it that way. If the Bilbrays and Collinses and their counterparts win along with Clinton, the severing of the two elected branches will be complete. And our theories of American government will have to be revised accordingly.

For decades, divided government was viewed as a formula for gridlock. I thought that myself. But David Mayhew of Yale came along a few years ago with a study arguing that the divided governments of the Nixon and Reagan years produced a steady stream of major legislation.

Even Mayhew had to concede that the stream dried up during the time George Bush was president and Democrats ran Congress. And certainly 1995 ended with a confrontation and shutdown that was gridlock with a vengeance.

But this year, a Republican Congress and a Democratic president have worked productively on welfare, health care, the minimum wage and environmental legislation — proving that it can be done.

Many voters seem inclined to keep the split government we have as one more way to stop government from going too far. Republicans are happy to indulge that conceit. They haven’t exactly written off the White House and the Dole campaign. But they have declared independence.

Today’s column by Washington Post writer David Broder was filed from Bangor.