The White House started looking beyond Election Day weeks ago, and President Clinton's aides, deeply troubled by what they foresee, have been debating ever since what their strategy for 1995 should be.
"Tuesday will be bad," one of Clinton's top advisers said. "We will lose a lot of ground. Wednesday will be almost pleasant. People will wake up to the fact that we have done better than we might have and better than a lot of people predicted. At least we hope so. But Thursday will be terrible because everyone will begin to realize what a really difficult two years lie ahead."Of course, even that less-than-sanguine view may prove too optimistic. The Republicans may well take control of one or both houses of Congress, rather than simply emerging with strongly enhanced minority positions.
In any event, two possible approaches suggest themselves. The president can either plow straight ahead, pushing once more for comprehensive changes in health care and welfare, among other things, knowing that he will not succeed but hoping to lay the basis for a 1996 campaign focused on congressional refusal to pass his program. Or he can try to work out a deal with the Republicans.
By nature, Clinton is a compromiser - some say too much of a compromiser. On the day last summer when he finally secured passage of crime bill and simultaneously concluded that he was unlikely to get anywhere on health care, he told reporters the Oval Office that the biggest disappointment of his term had been his failure to develop a spirit of bipartisanship with the Republicans.
This time, the president could choose to announce (or decide without announcing) that as a result of the elections, he intends to re-emphasize the centrist New Democratic agenda that he ran on in 1992, then lost sight of, to some degree, in the pitched legislative and political battles of 1993 and 1994.
Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana is only one of the moderate Democrats who have been urging Clinton to "govern from the middle." Unless he finds grounds for bipartisan compromise, the result will be gridlock, which Breaux and others see as bad politics.
But it takes two to tango, and the better the Republicans do Tuesday, the stronger position they will be in to demand that their agenda, including such items as the balanced-budget amendment, be given priority. If the Republicans win the seven Senate seats they need to take control, their versions of health care reform (minimal) and welfare reform (rigorous) would move to the top of the list.