Though the turnout at the polls across the country should have been bigger, the resounding messages the voters sent Tuesday were pointed and pertinent. So pertinent that the intended recipients can ignore them only at their own peril - and that of the entire country, too.
To President Clinton and his fellow Democrats, the message was for them to swing away from the left of the political spectrum or risk losing the White House two years from now and possibly more seats in Congress, too.To politicians of all stripes, one message is that a sour economy may help challengers but a rebounding economy does not necessarily benefit incumbents.
To voters, the message is to get ready for more mudslinging and possibly for more governmental gridlock, too. Though the public says it detests negative campaigns, more such campaigns can be expected as long as they seem to pay off in the voting booth. For this unhappy situation, the public itself is responsible to the extent that Americans focus more on what they are against than what they are for.
To Republicans, the message is to temper their understandable elation with some caution. With control of both the House and Senate, the GOP is in its strongest position since the Eisenhower administration but still can see its initiatives fillibustered to death just as the previous Republican minority fillibustered Clinton proposals. Even so, the GOP still gained more power in Congress than may be indicated by vote totals alone. For one thing, his fellow Democrats seem bound to blame Clinton for some of their losses in Congress, losses that were much bigger than those usually suffered in a midterm election by the party occupying the White House. Consequently, it will be harder for Clinton to win the support of his own party on crucial issues in Congress. Even without that factor, there are enough conservative Democrats in Congress to give the Republicans a working majority on many issues.
Besides, control of Congress gives Republicans the ability to set the legislative agenda and allow GOP chairmen to use their committees to promote conservative causes and investigate the Clinton administration.
But if newly powerful Republicans are to be responsible and effective, they must show not just what they can expose and stop but what they can produce. Continued stalemate and gridlock will only convince more voters that Washington never changes and there's no point in casting a ballot.
One item on the agenda should be health-care reform - not the administration"s sweeping changes involving more federal meddling but small, incremental steps that emphasize tax breaks to induce patients to save for future treatment. Even then, the taxpayers can't in good conscience avoid some burden to provide help for the small hard core of patients consisting of the persistently indigent.
Another such item should be welfare reform. Democrats and Republicans agree on the need to address this problem. Where they differ is on the specifics of the solution. Clearly, the voters are telling them to avoid solutions that involve big, new federal programs.
Still another item should be lobbying reform. Public opinion polls show that an astonishing 89 per cent of the public agrees that lobbyists have more impact on members of Congress than the voters do. If this perception did not persist, incumbents might well have fared better than they did on Tuesday and term-limitation drives might not have succeeded as well as they did outside Utah.
Meanwhile, though it's a relief that the long, nasty 1994 election campaign is finally over, this is no time to relax. Instead, it's a time to start healing some of the wounds inflicted in recent months.
What's needed are not tests of partisan strength in Washington but the pursuit of consensus. That's what produced the historic new laws by which the United States is leading the drive to lower trade barriers. The challenge now is to put the same bipartisanship to work in seeking to lower the levels of acrimony and increase the level of legislative and executive accomplishment in Washington.