Headline: DON'T DISCARD ALL THE `RASCALS'
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Fri., Oct. 28, 1994
Section: WAR PAGE, Page: 5C, Edition: FIVE STAR

DEMOCRATS ARE bracing to lose House seats in this midterm election year, worried about polls and pundits who tell them that President Bill Clinton is dragging them down to major defeat next month.
   The president's popularity has dwindled this fall. In many places, Democratic congressmen are keeping an arm's distance from the president, fearful that angry voters will take revenge on them as well. (Locally, Democrats Bill Clay and Dick Gephardt seem to be exceptions to the rule.) Many pundits predict big Democratic losses.

But historically, the defeats shouldn't be that major.
   The party of the person in the White House almost always experiences a net loss in seats in midterm elections, so the idea that the Democrats may lose some seats this time isn't that significant.

The Gallup Organization has been surveying voters for years on the president's approval ratings in October. Its surveys and the number of seats lost by the party the next month were compiled by Congressional Quarterly recently and point out some interesting, though inconclusive, patterns:

Clinton's approval rating of 41 percent this year is statistically identical to Ronald Reagan's approval rating of 42 percent in 1982.

History might suggest that in a normal year, while the Democrats would lose some seats this time, there would be no reason for panic.

But this is no normal year.
   Once again, voters appear to be restless. Many seem to want to throw out both the baby and the bath water. "It seems that if you're an incumbent, you're in trouble this election year, " said Lana Stein, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
   She adds that "Reagan was never quite denigrated and picked apart and made to seem so incompetent as Clinton has been. And now that the media has done that, Republicans are working hard to tie their opponents to him."
   Stein's not so sure how effective that strategy will be. "In many ways, Tip O'Neill was right when he said all politics are local, " she said. "There are factors that may be at work in one election that would not be the same in the next election. What's effective in one district isn't necessarily effective in another."

But perhaps we're seeing the development of a new trend among a frustrated electorate. Tired of congressional gridlock, even after a 1992 election where change had been promised, voters are ready to throw out another set of officeholders. Maybe we'll continue to see that for a while.

Clinton, the outsider, benefited from that trend two years ago. Candidate Clinton was the un-president, exactly who the voters wanted to see in office. President Clinton, however, occupies the Oval Office - and, by virtue of that position - has become a wrath-magnet for voters.
   I suspect that voters are sick of the bickering between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, over issues where nothing ever seems to get done.
   Frustrated by an economic upswing that they cannot feel, frustrated with a declining crime rate that they cannot see, many Americans have become fed up.

But as we consider throwing the "rascals" out, maybe we should give it a little more thought.
   There are no absolute solutions. When you clean a cluttered closet, you don't just grab handfuls of stuff and throw it away without looking at it. Instead, you consider what you have and whether it's useful. You could cause yourself more harm than good by simply throwing everything away.
   It's the same with Congress. Matters wouldn't necessarily change if we threw every single congressman out. The partisanship would remain. The new faces would take up where the old faces left off, with liberals and conservatives fighting all over again, completely ignoring the adage that "politics is the art of compromise."

Maybe we forget that congressmen aren't gods, and that perhaps they don't have the solutions to all of our problems in some mythical bag of tricks. Maybe we've got to resolve some of them ourselves.
   If we can face up to that and accept it, maybe we can finally get out of our state of perpetual frustration.

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