Whether it’s a race for county office or for president of the United States, there’s a cliche that often gets mentioned during election years, something about “That’ll never happen ... it’s an election year.”
The meaning, of course, is that politics will prevail over policy.
Although one can never escape politics in Washington, lawmakers are sure to examine issues through an exceptionally partisan prism this second year of the 104th Congress, observers of Capitol Hill say.
“It’s pretty unusual when the president is running for re-election and the majority leader [Senator Robert Dole (R-Kan.)] is the other candidate,” said Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
It’s not only uncommon — it’s the first time in American history that a Senate majority leader is his party’s (presumptive) nominee for president, Hess pointed out.
Congress is not such a great launching pad for the presidency. Three decades ago (when Dole was first elected to the House) then-Senator John F. Kennedy was the last sitting member of Congress to make the move to the White House.
Usually if a member of the Senate does run for the presidency, “they tend to be ‘backbenchers,’” Hess said, citing Kennedy as an example.
Backbenchers, analysts say, are usually able to give the core party members who nominate them more of what they crave — the “red meat” issues — because as a backbencher, they don’t have to answer to as many constituents as a Senate majority leader, who must deal with differing ideologies within the party while sheperding legislation.
Some may quibble with the backbenchers label — among the 14 candidates for president who were members of the Senate at the time their parties nominated them were Henry Clay (1832), Daniel Webster (1836), Stephen Douglas (1860) and Robert La Follette (1924).
Of the 14, only two won: Kennedy in 1960 and Warren G. Harding in 1920.
Hess termed the atmosphere inside the Beltway this year as “partisanship squared, if you will. ... Everything has to be looked at through those lenses.”
Candice Nelson, an assistant professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C., agrees. “Whatever happens reflects on them [the two candidates],” she said. “If there is [legislative] gridlock, they can both be blamed for it.”
Although both parties will attempt to score points with constituents across the country by their actions in Washington, that shouldn’t necessarily trivialize what they are doing, Hess said.
“Each party is fighting for the heart and soul of the American people,” he said. “These are real issues. A lot of it is symbolic, but that’s not to say that it’s unimportant.”
Some of the issues, Hess said, that he puts in the “symbolic” category, are clashes over assault weapons, the minimum wage and abortion.
“A lot of what’s going on up there is politics not in the pejorative sense; it’s issue politics,” he said. “It’s the turf on which they do battle.”
And if legislation is passed, Nelson said, the candidates’ campaigns will “vie to claim credit for it.”
Action or inaction in Congress may serve as a backdrop to the themes of the presidential campaigns. There will be a “heap of muddying [of] the waters,” this year, Hess noted, citing TV campaigns airing already by both parties blaming each other for blocking a tax cut.
The parties are, even now, attacking the candidates for politicizing their jobs. “You can’t stay as majority leader and sit on the floor every day and refuse to engage on the problems people need solved in this country,” Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said recently in an interview with The Washington Post.
One incentive that could break any logjams this year would be the entry of a thirdy-party candidate into the race. That would create incentive, Nelson said, to “get some things through” for fear that the third-party candidate will point at Clinton and Dole and say, “Look, these two people haven’t done a thing.”
“We won’t see a balanced budget agreement,” said Nelson. “They agree on the ends but not on the means. They’ll say in their campaigns, ‘Look, I tried.’”
Nelson said both candidates will take credit for a recently-passed health care bill sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan). “The president can say ‘We wanted to do more, but we did something.’ And Dole can say the same thing.”
“There is lots of negotiating going on,” Hess said. “Whether bigger items like welfare can come out of this quagmire, I don’t know.”
“A session of Congress is like an assembly line,” he said. “You don’t see the product until it rolls off the end.”
In addition to presidential politics this year, Congress has several recesses before it is scheduled to adjourn, including a 10-day Memorial Day break, an eight-day 4th of July break, and a month off between Aug. 3 and Sept. 3 for the national conventions. That leaves about 83 weekdays between April 29 and Oct. 4, the date set for adjournment.
“Right now through June is a very key time,” Hess said.