In Missouri, Democratic senatorial challenger Geri Rothman-Serot is so strident on her message of change that the editor of a Washington newsletter told her she “would give a woodpecker a headache.” In Washing-ton state, Patty Murray invited reporters to sift through 20 years of personal cheeks in shoe boxes to back up her claim that she is an ordinary person running for the Senate-“just a mom in tennis shoes.” Sometimes the drive to be different produces bizarre twists. In Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, a progressive state senator, is relying on his sense of humor(he got a mock endorsement from Elvis in the primary) to upset incumbent GOP Sen. Bob Kasten, who is closing the gap. In Idaho, GOP challenger Rachel Gilbert is touting a reform proposal she calls “Congress Come Home.” It would allow members to vote from their districts, thereby avoiding the corrupting influence of Washington altogether.
All these new people coming in will make Congress look more like America. There will be more women, more blacks and more Hispanics. They may be running as outsiders, but most are not novices: Congress is often a career move up from local or state office. Still the new members will bring diversity and a sense that Congress is finally getting in touch with a changing society. But will they behave any differently? George Bush says that if he is re-elected he can work with a Congress that will have more than a hundred new faces in the House. Redistricting, retirements and a rash of scandals have combined to produce what could be the biggest turnover since 1932. Bill Clinton believes he can convert the newcomers to an army for change that will pass his programs. Even Ross Perot finds reason for hope. The class of ‘92, propelled by the same forces of discontent that created his candidacy, has already been dubbed the Perotistas. Whoever wins the White House, this wave of reformers will hold the balance of power. “They’ll be carrying pitchforks and torches to storm the castle,” says Rep. Dave McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The new Congress will be firmly Democratic, but that doesn’t make it any easier on the entrenched leadership or on Clinton if he wins. After the election, nervous Democratic leaders plan to fan out to the winners’ districts for outside-the-Beltway briefings. It is still a race between the forces of Good and Evil, as defined by the national interest versus the more narrow concerns of special-interest groups. Even if Bush pulls off a miracle and wins a second term, his victory will be premised on a promise to end the gridlock. The ‘92 election will mark, at least for a while, the end of divided government and the advent of a No Excuses Congress.
The prospect of ending divided government is scary even to some Democrats, who worry they cannot say no to the pent-up demands of special interests. Can Clinton tame the beast? If he wins, he’ll have the same mandate for change Ronald Reagan had in 1980. The 52 GOP House freshmen who became “Reagan’s Robots” are the model that Clinton hopes to emulate. They came to Washington with the same cry for change and reform that is at the heart of today’s campaigns. All over the country, candidates are calling for job creation and an end to congressional perks. When they get to Capitol Hill, they will discover the House Bank is closed and nobody is running up restaurant tabs anymore. They’ll have to embrace something more substantive if they want to maintain their aura of change.
That’s where Clinton steps in with a 100-day program that can almost be signed on the dotted line. If the Arkansas governor wins, he will own the label of change. And these new members, with few exceptions, will likely follow in the “Just Do It” spirit that Perot has tapped into. Clinton is more like Lyndon Johnson than Jimmy Carter. Johnson used to boast he knew every congressman “from ankle to eyeball.” Carter was a loner who disdained the camaraderie that congressional egos demand. Clinton, a born schmoozer, will work Congress like the biggest cocktail party of his life.
This is, of course, a best-case scenario, and it depends on a sense of urgency on the part of all the players. The K-Street lobbyists are advertising their connections with an incoming Clinton administration. It won’t take long before the political-action committees have their hooks in the new recruits, who will soon be worrying about where they’ll get the money to be re-elected. Anticipating a push for health-care reform, the medical-industrial complex has boosted its congressional campaign contributions by 20 percent, up from $18.6 million two years ago to $22.4 million. Many of the same forces that led to gridlock under Bush are lying in wait for a new president. Moving quickly is the best defense. Reagan essentially completed his revolution in the first seven months of his first term. Even then, he got more tax cuts than he wanted and fewer spending cuts, an imbalance that led to today’s deficit.
Clinton’s centrist impulses have a better chance of surviving than did Carter’s, whose health-care proposal, for example, was defeated because it didn’t go far enough to earn Sen. Ted Kennedy’s support. Yet Clinton may do well to reconsider before he plucks such respected moderates as Rep. Les Aspin or Rep. Lee Hamilton for key jobs off the Hill. If Aspin were to become secretary of defense, his successor, drawn by seniority, would be either Rep. Ron Dellums or Rep. Patricia Schroeder, both far more liberal than Clinton and insistent advocates for greater defense cuts.
If women alone had voted in the House, they would have overridden every one of Bush’s 36 vetoes, from family-leave legislation to granting most-favored-nation status for China. Women are expected to boost their paltry numbers in the Senate (to four or more) and increase from 28 in the House to more than 40. Reapportionment coupled with court-ordered gerrymandering to produce racially unified districts will increase the number of black and Hispanic lawmakers to almost 60. The gains, mostly in the Democratic column, will help shift the power issues of the ’90s to economic-security and family concerns.
Yet gender and color do not necessarily correlate with liberal votes. Incoming minority members tend to be pocketbook realists, many having held local office and having faced cutbacks. Women are not monolithic either. The GOP’s most showcased woman candidate is Donna Peterson, 32, a graduate of West Point, who is challenging “Good Time Charlie” Wilson, a 10-term Democrat with a reputation for womanizing who would qualify as Congress’s lounge lizard if his liver hadn’t forced him to quit drinking a few years back. Wilson was once quoted as saying that he hired attractive women “because you can teach them to type, but you can’t teach them to grow tits.” This year, in their closely contested race, Wilson is testing the thesis that sexism and feminism are not mutually exclusive. He is pro-choice, supports family leave and was a cosponsor in Texas of the equal-rights amendment. Peterson opposes abortion rights and embraces the GOP’s far-right platform.
Name the top five issues that concern voters, and you can be sure Congress has addressed none of them. Once the excuse of divided government is gone, lawmakers will have no one to blame but themselves. The apparent repudiation of Bush is a case study of how a politician can be punished for inaction. “If the next president doesn’t produce, we’re looking at a bloodbath in ‘94,” says Mark Gersh of the National Committee for an Effective Congress. After a year in which voters sent a loud message of disgust with politics as usual, Congress is on borrowed time. Doing it differently is fine as long as something gets done.
NEWSWEEK POLL If elections for Congress were held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for? 53% Democratic 39% Republican If after the November elections there were 100 new members in the House of Representatives, would it: 58% Change Congress for the better 30% Not make much difference 2% Change Congress for the worse From the NEWSWEEK Poll Of Oct. 15-16, 1992. 751 registered voters polled; margin of error, +/-4 percentage points.
PHOTO: Congress may look more like America: Carol Moseley Braun campaigns in Illinois. (BARBARA KASHIAN)
PHOTOS (2): Blue suede shoes and tennis sneakers: Feingold invoked Elvis in Wisconsin, Murray says she is proud to be just a mom’ (MORRY GASH, MATTHEW McVAY-SABA)
RACES TO WATCH
Incumbents are in trouble, women and minorities have a leg up:
Dianne Feinstein vs. GOP Sen. John Seymour and Barbara Boxer vs. conservative radio and TV commentator Bruce Herschensohn. Will Calif. be the first state with two women senators? Feinstein appears headed for an easy win, but Boxer could be overtaken.
Carol Moseley Braun vs. GOP Rich Williamson. Could become the first African-American woman elected to the Senate. Tightening.
Dem. Lynn Yeakel squandered a big lead against Sen. Arlen Specter, a pro-choice Repub., who-aside from his tough questioning of Anita Hill-has a good record on women’s issues. A tossup.
Patty Murray vs. GOP Rep. Rod Chandler: “Just a mom in tennis shoes,” Murray’s amateurism is a plus for some, a problem for others. Close.
Sen. Alfonse D’Amato vs. Dem. Robert Abrams. A referendum on Senator Pothole’s questionable ethics and one of the nation’s nastiest races. Abrams is benefiting from Clinton’s coattails, but GOP D’Amato is spending major bucks. Abrams has a slim lead.
Dem. Sen. John Glenn vs. Mike DeWine. Glenn’s “right stuff” aura is almost gone (he was the first man to orbit the Earth). DeWine bounced checks as a member of the House, but Glenn is an 18-year veteran and was mixed up with the Keating Five. Dem. Mary Rose Oakar is the only woman on the list of top 22 House Bank abusers. She’s behind and so desperate she’s attacking Martin Hoke for getting speeding tickets.
GOP Whip Newt Gingrich vs. Tony Center. The instigator of much of the anti-incumbent anger against the Democratic Congress, Gingrich may be a victim of the same forces he helped generate. A tossup.
Chicago politics will get a new face, Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who is assured election-plus Illinois’s first Hispanic representative, Democratic alderman Luis Gutierrez.
Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Native American, is favored to win an open Senate seat in Colorado.
Mild-mannered and pro-civil rights, Dem. George Wallace Jr. bears no political resemblance to his race-baiting dad. He should take his Republican district.
title: “No More Excuses” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Kristin Tabor”
That was in the early 1960s. Sixty souls lived in Pominovo then. These days there are 14–and no stores, not even a kiosk. “We lived better under communism,” Kuvarin says, glancing around his dying village–and not even trying to conceal his disappointment in its most famous son.
Surely, one might think, Kuvarin’s discontent is misplaced. By all indications President Putin is cruising smoothly toward an overwhelming victory in Russia’s March 14 presidential elections–a fitting reward, boosters say, for his remarkable success in rescuing his country from the chaos that threatened to engulf it just a few years ago. Russia (with plenty of help from national TV networks that are once again under firm state control) is exulting in good news these days. Incomes are rising, unemployment is falling, the budget is balanced, the ruble is stable. The economy has increased by a third since Putin took office. Pensions and wages are again being paid. Rebellious regional governors have been brought to heel; unruly (and hugely unpopular) oligarchs have been tamed. All this has made Putin a hit with voters. In December, they awarded his party a whopping majority in parliamentary elections–and have driven his approval rating to an eye-popping 80 percent.
Yet all is not well for Putin, despite certain victory next week. For many ordinary Russians, his real record is to be found in Kuvarin’s dying village. While prosperity may be gushing in Moscow and other big cities, where sushi bars and middle-class cars abound, vast swaths of the Russian hinterland are pocked by Pominovos– communities bedeviled by problems that continue to defy solution after a decade and a half of attempts at reform. Polls give poor grades to Putin’s government in almost all areas of life–from Chechnya to corruption to health care–even while his own test the stratosphere.
Not even his most ardent supporters expected him to cure all of Russia’s ills in a single term, of course. But today a new mood is in the air. Russians no longer accept once reasonable explanations for why their lives never seem to improve–that Parliament is too weak and divided, that Putin’s own power is checked by entrenched politicians and business tycoons protecting special interests. For four years now, Putin has consolidated power, exposing him to savage criticism (more in the West than in Russia itself) as an autocrat and antidemocrat. He has closed down independent newspapers and squashed political rivals. His allies of the siloviki–loyalists from his old KGB and the military–run the Kremlin’s ministries. He owns Parliament. Yet because of all this, the old alibis no longer hold. Call it the era of no more excuses, says independent journalist Yelena Tregubova. “Russians are saying, ‘OK, take away our freedoms; you can have them. But in return, give us real reforms, real solutions to our problems. Let’s have them’.” Russians will judge Putin not by the yardsticks of democracy but those of economics.
Putin has recognized this challenge all along. In an interview with Western reporters last autumn, he summed up his ambitions for a second term: “To improve the lives of ordinary Russians,” chiefly in terms of infrastructure improvements and needed social programs. Already he has enacted a number of reforms, among them reducing and simplifying taxes and formalizing the right to buy and sell land–a post-Soviet restoration of private property. He has been outspoken about the need for more–and far more draconian–changes to come. First and foremost: administrative reform, a pledge to reduce the immense dead weight of the state bureaucracy. The “superfluous presence of the state in the economy,” Putin said recently, stifles entrepreneurship and encourages corruption. “The state retains a monopoly in such socially important spheres as housing and public utilities,” he added, and noted the results: “Low quality of services, high costs and growing citizens’ dissatisfaction. In fact, people pay twice and even three times: first with taxes, then for services and, on top of that, bribes.”
This is not the language of someone seeking to preserve the status quo. Putin is keenly aware that “administrative reform,” however boring it might sound, is key to a whole raft of other promises to the electorate, such as improving the country’s health, education and pension systems. He also knows how an unwilling bureaucracy could thwart him. Eric Kraus, chief analyst with Sovlink Securities in Moscow, describes Putin as “Saint Vladimir” for his efforts to make Russia more business-friendly. In a recent newsletter to investors he wrote: “The Russian state remains world-class dysfunctional, sapped by massive corruption, bureaucratic layering, political fiefs, oligarchic interference and Soviet-era practices. If Russia is to continue its spectacular growth, root-and-branch reform is absolutely imperative.”
Putin has been setting the stage for his assault on this monster for the better part of a year, if not for much of his first term. (His Orthodox confessor once described the president as “fighting for his own independence.”) Much of this struggle has taken place far from the public eye. In recent months, though, it has burst into the open. First came his battle last summer with Russia’s richest man, the oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now completing his fifth month in prison after a murky feud with the president; the tiff has resulted in the near-collapse of the country’s leading business empire and frightened other oligarchs into a notable reluctance to criticize or oppose any of the president’s plans. That fight also brought the dismissal of Aleksandr Voloshin, the wily Kremlin chief of staff appointed by Boris Yeltsin who managed to stay in the job even after the presidency changed hands. He’s since been replaced by a young Putin confidant from the president’s hometown of St. Petersburg–reform-minded, yet loyal only to Putin.
The past few weeks have seen more dramatic developments. Surprising even his own senior staff, Putin abruptly sacked Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his entire cabinet. Kasyanov, too, was a Yeltsin holdover suspected of close ties to business tycoons on the losing end of showdowns with the president. In his place Putin appointed a hitherto obscure bureaucrat named Mikhail Fradkov. Promptly dubbed “Mr. Nobody,” he’s best known for a stint as head of the national tax inspectorate.
That may sound bland enough, but it actually signals the likely power struggles to come. For one thing, Fradkov’s former position, which gave him government-sanctioned insight into the financial affairs of every citizen in the country, has presumably provided him with intimate inside knowledge of the Kremlin bureaucracy–much of it terra incognita for many of Putin’s advisers. No less important, it doubtless served up plenty of kompromat to use against administrators and lawmakers who resist Putin’s line in the coming trench wars. Fradkov’s career path also means that he will be utterly Putin’s man. “He could become the most radical reformer in history,” says State Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov. “He won’t be like Kasyanov, who, when Putin called for a breakthrough two years ago, said, ‘No, we will do things gradually’.”
Putin’s determination to maximize his power could thus set the stage for a real breakthrough. But will he really use it as he and supporters claim? Or will he fall into the classic Russian trap of consolidating power, only to see it perverted? “With only one clan in power–Putin’s–we’ll have a high degree of corruption,” predicts opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. “We’ll have a high rate of economic growth as long as oil prices stay high. There won’t be any kind of reforms, except maybe tax reform. The Army is falling apart and will continue to fall apart. The medical system is falling apart and will continue to fall apart. Federalism is ending. The legal system will disappear.” So, say other critics, will democracy.
That’s almost certainly extreme. But clearly Putin’s second term will be characterized by what might be called “liberal authoritarianism,” or perhaps “authoritarian liberalization.” The president’s dilemma is evident. To make the changes needed in Russia, he needs power–something Western investors realize, which partly explains their sanguine attitude toward the erosion of democracy in the country. Once those changes are underway, however, Putin needs to disperse it–by creating more independent economic players in the market, by streamlining government and deregulating social and economic life, by developing truly independent courts and the rule of law. Pluralism, in a word.
How all this sits with Putin’s natural tendency toward autocracy remains to be seen. And even if his reforms lead to greater prosperity, such new wealth will be slow to trickle down. The prospect, at least initially, is more sushi bars for Moscow, not more stores for Pominovo or a better life for Vladimir Kuvarin. Yet what is the alternative–not to try? Meanwhile, Putin knows he must deal with other dire problems. Russia’s economy is fueled almost entirely by oil and gas exports. How to diversify and encourage small businesses? AIDS and drug abuse are rampant. Demographic trends point to a shrinking of the Russian population. Communist ways of thinking still hold sway in most of the country, especially outside large cities, as does the sullen passivity with which Russians have traditionally greeted waves of change emanating from Moscow. Russia’s problems are so deeply embedded, in the end, that it’s hard to imagine how any one man could fix them–even if he’s Vladimir Putin, fitted out with all the powers his country can bestow.
