Now that the ugly, foul-mouthed campaign of 1994 is over, is there anybody here who knows how to govern?
The voters have signaled - no, shouted - that they are desperately unhappy with the status quo. Beyond that, the election has proven little about what direction they want President Clinton or Congress to take.So much time and money was spent by candidates tearing each other apart that the bloodied survivors who will assume power in January will find themselves operating in a kind of political vacuum. It's clear what the voters didn't want. It's less clear what they do want - beyond giving the Republicans a chance to do something different.
Optimists, who are in the minority, believe the historic transfer of power to the Republicans in Congress could end gridlock and force a genuine consensus with Clinton on issues like health care, deficit reduction and welfare reform.
Divided government is nothing new. "As a country we know how to do this," says Charles Jones, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution. "Since World War II, Congress and the White House have been divided by party 60 percent of the time.
"Clinton beat Bush in part because Bush couldn't work with a Democratic Congress," Jones said. "Now it will be Clinton's turn to test his own leadership. The same is true for (Senate Republican leader Bob) Dole and (House Republican leader Newt) Gingrich."
Curtis Gans, who heads the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, says to rebuild public trust in the political system after the nasty tone of the `94 election, "We need a sustained exercise in successful government, a sense of true bipartisanship and incrementalism."
Gans argues that over the next few years, "We need to civilize the dialogue. If this election doesn't spur people to action, I don't know what will spur them. This has been a horror show."
Failure to debate issues instead of attacking opponents will mean "our politics will continue to disintegrate at the grass roots. It will be difficult to reach any political consensus."
Republicans, beneficiaries of this year's voter fury, must decide whether to strike a bargain with Clinton or make life miserable for the Democrats as the 1996 presidential campaign draws near.
For his part, Clinton will have to eat a certain amount of humble pie and adopt a more conservative agenda if he is to carry a credible record into his own drive for re-election.
Republican pollster Ed Goeas said if he was advising the president, he would urge Clinton to go to the voters within a day or two and acknowledge, "I was going in the wrong direction and I was going too fast."
Ironically, because of the Republican triumph, especially in the South, the Democrats remaining in the new Congress, while diminished in numbers, will be collectively more liberal and thus more likely to support generous government programs and more likely to resist budget cuts than those Democrats who occupied the House and Senate during Clinton's first two years in office.
That will make life even tougher for Clinton, who will find himself leaving liberal Democrats out in the cold as he moves toward compromise with the Republicans and conservative Democrats.
Clinton and the Republicans don't have time to dither. Important trade decisions await, and a new round of budget decisions must be made. The federal health-care system, pressured by an increasing aging population, will eventually run out of money unless some reforms are enacted.
Elliot Richardson, a Washington lawyer and prominent figure in past Republican administrations, argues it is time to organize a "Cut the Crap Club" to break through the political timidity and partisan gridlock in the capital.
It is now time, Richardson says, for voters to tell the politicians, "If you level with us, we will level with ourselves."
Leaders of both parties should quit exploiting fear about crime by demanding the death penalty for more criminals and instead take on the real problems facing the country, such as competition from abroad, rising health-care costs and the budget deficit, he said.
Unless it happens, the Democratic process is going to continue to deteriorate, he said. No longer, said Richardson, can the country afford to adopt simplistic solutions to complex problems and indulge in a compulsive "Don't-just-stand-there-do-something syndrome" that produces politically satisfying bursts of action with no useful result.
Few neutral observers, however, believe the Republicans elected on Tuesday will do much to reach out to Clinton next year.
"Crime and immigration are going to stay on people's minds," said Gary Jacobson, a congressional scholar at the University of California in San Diego. "None of the debate about those things is going to make it easier to create jobs for Americans to compete in a highly international market."
"The kinds of jobs now being created are not the kind that will make the middle class feel more secure economically," he said.
"So, nothing that happened in this election will change the source of the frustration which underlies the dirty ads and the general nasty tone of the campaigns," he said. "Public anger is generated by the inability of politicians to get together and solve problems, but it is not in the political interests of the Republicans to help Clinton.
"Unless there is a crisis of some sort," he said, "it should be perfectly possible to muddle along in a kind of grumpy mood at least until after the '96 election."
Because Clinton and the Democrats accused the Republicans of planning to savage the Social Security system and Medicare benefits for seniors, Jacobson says the president has foreclosed any serious move to strike a deal with the Republicans before the 1996 campaign.
"If Medicare and related programs are to be fixed, it will have to be bipartisan, everybody will have to get their hands dirty," he said.
Jacobson said eventually Clinton or his successor will have to push through politically painful budget cuts or tax increases, just as former President Bush and Clinton signed federal budgets in 1990 and 1993 with accompanying self-inflicted major political damage because they included tax increases.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff cautions newly powerful GOP House members and senators against making the same error that Clinton did after his own election in 1992.
"I think all parties over-interpret their mandates," he said. "They read their own press clippings in Washington and they bring themselves to a frenzy in their enthusiasm."
But given the accusations back and forth between Clinton and the Republicans during the campaign, McInturff said, "I don't see how any political party can seriously talk about entitlement cuts.
"There is no public judgment out there that they want to cut Social Security and veteran's benefits, and no one is making the case in a way that is politically safe," McInturff said.