Clear the decks: campaign '94: the political storm ahead.

Maybe along with the World Series we ought to cancel the elections on November 8. The Democrats, sure losers, wouldn't complain; even the confident Republicans have problems. But it is the republic that may have the greatest troubles of all.

The citizenry might as well be on strike. Turnout will be low, a mortal hurt for Democrats. Bill Clinton has many excellences, but neither his pragmatism nor his conciliatory instincts rally the multitudes, and his policies have not offered a battle cry. The electorate will be disproportionately white and upper income, overrepresenting the kind of voters who lean Republican and care about issues like crime, a major theme for the Bush boys, George and Jeb, in their gubernatorial campaigns in Texas and Florida, and for more substantial candidates elsewhere.

Gloomy all summer, the Democratic mood suffered from the crime bill's stumble to passage and from the failure to deliver on health care; so far, things are no better than they were in August (see my "Summer '94: The State of Politics," Commonweal, August 19), and probably a little worse. Democrats can now expect to lose at least four seats in the Senate (including two, in Maine and Ohio, that they had reason to count on) and something like twenty to twenty-five in the House. Thanks to Douglas Wilder's withdrawal, Senator Charles Robb should beat Oliver North in Virginia, but it isn't a sure thing; Ann Richards has a nominal edge for governor of Texas, but Kathleen Brown is fighting uphill in California and Mario Cuomo is trailing in New York.

Such good tidings as the Democrats have received recently have come mostly from foreign policy, despite Clinton's established reputation for bumbling improvisation. (Actually, here as in many things, the president's record is better than his press; the administration has a number of successes - in the Middle East, the Baltic States, and Northern Ireland - that discretion forbids it to trumpet too loudly.) In Haiti, after a half-dozen false starts, Clinton showed strength enough to order the invasion despite the polls, and wound up with a deal that, problematic as it is, lets him curb the junta without over-commitment to Aristide. The relatively peaceful occupation gave the president's ratings a small, temporary lift. And Clinton's Republican opponents wound up sounding like isolationists and wrong in the bargain.

Confrontations with Caribbean dictators, in fact, may be the president's best suit. His handling of the latest Cuban refugee crisis was remarkably smooth and paid political dividends: Jorge Mas Canosa, that titan among Cuban conservatives, compared Clinton favorably to Reagan and Bush as a champion of "democracy and freedom" who had "stood up" to Castro, and Florida's Governor Lawton Chiles, the recipient of equally lavish praise, has become one of the least terrified Democratic incumbents.

In his policies toward Cuba and Haiti, moreover, Clinton understood that the desire to avoid massive immigration was his best lever on the electorate. And in both cases, a great many observers were pleased to see Secretary of State Warren Christopher relegated to the sidelines. In Haiti, Jimmy Carter got most of the headlines, but the political portent was Colin Powell's presence on the negotiating team, another of those carefully ambiguous intimations from the general that have been giving Republican strategists the sweats. But although Democrats will take what comfort they can, they know that such events are light airs at best, no change in the prevailing wind.

Not that the news is wholly rosy for the Republicans, although they are enjoying their prospective gains and the outside chance of taking one or both houses of Congress. Already, more voters blame the GOP for any gridlock in Washington than fault Clinton (by a margin of 48-32 percent). And things will get worse: the Republicans are relying on a vote against Clinton, but the closer they get to power, the more they will find themselves under scrutiny. Up to this point, the media have been generous: Bill Clinton does vacillate, for example, but seldom so dramatically as Phil Gramm did on the crime bill, which he described (in November 1993) as the "toughest crime bill ever passed," only to tell us (in August 1994) that it coddles criminals. There is also nothing like a positive Republican program. The closest approach, the "Contract with America" floated by House Republicans, was Reagan redux but without the master's charm: a balanced budget amendment, combined with massive tax cuts which supposedly will pay for themselves. The greater the chances for victory, the more people will balk at this sort of farrago: as George Pataki rose in the polls against New York's Governor Cuomo, the vagueness of Pataki's proposals attracted criticism from the left of his own party (New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani), but also from its right (Herbert London, the candidate for state controller).

Far from turning to the Republicans, the electorate is becoming "unanchored": in one poll, no more than 29 percent of voters expressed an inclination to vote for a Democrat for Congress, but only 23 percent named the Republicans. Almost half the electorate is in play; Virginia shows that independents and third parties are still likely to be squeezed out, but here and there (in Maine and Connecticut, for example), centrist third parties are serious contenders. Incumbents face an extraordinary discontent - an advantage for Republicans, in their role as outsiders ex officio, but only until they win. All our institutions - the parties, the Congress, the presidency, even the Constitution - are under challenge: 91 percent of voters told a Time/CNN poll that they had little or no confidence in government's ability to solve problems. Yet contrary to what Republicans might hope, this did not amount to an endorsement of the night watchman state; 90 percent also expressed a desire for "change" - for most, a demand for some sort of governmental activism - even though they didn't agree about what should be changed or who should bear the cost. Too many voters, after weighing the disharmonies of democratic politics and the restraints of constitutionalism, are finding them wanting.

Part of the problem is that our leaders in Congress (and elsewhere) have grown too accustomed to going their own way, too reluctant to accept the discipline and responsibility of party. Norman Ornstein is right to urge a cultivation of "followership"; even William Safire has found some kind words for loyalty, and a dose of civility would not hurt at all. And that goes for the rest of us. When we judge leaders, we are prone to get it wrong - public opinion to the contrary, Ornstein observes, most members of Congress are not moved "primarily or even significantly" by the desire for more money - and worse, we are apt to miss the moral point. Private citizens tend to think of morality in private terms, principally in relation to avarice and sexual desire; they do not face, and hence may not recognize, the temptations of power, or that distinctive sin of democratic politicians, the craving for public love and favor. Local politics - the world of face-to-face parties and associations - used to offer a basic education in political morality through the curriculum of practice. The mass media, by contrast, speak to us in private places and appeal to private sentiments; they encourage our tendency to ask the wrong questions and to arrive at the wrong answers. And the saddest part of contemporary elections, including this year's, is that everyone knows the media are a central part of the political problem - we hear complaints all the time - but there are no serious proposals for reforming the role of the media in public life.

At least the economy is doing just fine, or so the experts say. Economists and corporate leaders, for the most part, can't see anything to worry about except the trade deficit and the possibility that some whiff of inflation will lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates yet again. Jobs are being created at a faster rate than expected and at a relatively high level of quality, or so some studies argue. Any other result would mean total disaster for Clinton and the Democrats, elected in 1992 on the promise of prosperity.

But the economic expansion, of course, isn't doing the Democrats much good. David Carlin is right ("It's the Culture, Stupid," Commonweal, September 23) that well-being on the economic front only allows Americans to worry about other issues like the generally sorry state of the culture. And as immediate fears recede for the comparatively prosperous, they are less apt to see economic difficulties as a common problem, and more likely to regard them as something experienced by largely undeserving others. At the same time, their own long-term economic anxieties haunt them: they recognize that the deficit has only been dented, and their conviction that good jobs are hard to come by - the result of twenty years of decline in real wages, buttressed by continuing corporate white-collar layoffs and celebrations of "leanness" - is not about to be changed by a blip in labor statistics. They experience prosperity as a momentary relief rather than the rebirth of the American Dream. In middle America, the mood is self-protective and ungenerous; since 1992, there has been a sharp fall in the percentage of Americans supporting aid to the needy. All in all, it is not surprising that in California, the major political beneficiary of Clinton-era job growth has been Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who has emphasized the strain on education and social services resulting from illegal immigration.

Health care, I suspect, has been another casualty of economic recovery. Something like 80 percent of Americans say they favor universal coverage, but any specific plan - and even more, any scheme for paying for one - loses supporters. And as middleclass Americans have grown less anxious about losing their own coverage, their concern to protect those existing plans has waxed while their enthusiasm for reform has waned. It is even a good guess that the mostly Democratic supporters of reform were not entirely unhappy with the failure to pass a bill: they can now run in favor of health care in whatever form seems likely to please their constituents, unencumbered by specific legislation. A comprehensive health bill was bound to be complicated and confusing; the Clinton plan, going beyond that necessity, amounted to Cambodian variations on the Byzantine, and the quest for a congressional majority added its own curlicues. The whole issue eventually made voters feel baffled, resentful, and inclined to play it safe, epitomizing the state of citizenship in contemporary America.

A growing number of Americans feel vulnerable and jerked around by experts and interests, dominations and powers. And more and more citizens are troubled by the moral and social fragmentation of American life. They know, as Carlin suggests, that we need to fix the foundations of our public house. It's no accident that both the president and Dan Quayle have been thumping the "family values" tub again.

But very few Americans are willing to pay the price of addressing these concerns in more than peripheral ways. Any effort to strengthen family or community in America runs up against deeply entrenched parts of our life - the two-wage-earner, two-generation household; personal mobility; the "information revolution"; the diminution of democratic politics in favor of proliferating "rights." Conservatives are unwilling to interfere with the individualizing logic of the economy; liberals are reluctant to constrain - or even to judge - freedom in "life style." Both sides find it easier to rest with the effort to persuade Americans to uphold the decencies against the pressures and temptations of the time. Yet even the way we talk reflects the problems we hope speech will help us solve: "values" are preferences, not ways of living, opinions only a little less mutable than the market. Values are not virtues any more than rights are equivalent to righteousness, but the latter terms are indispensable to genuine reconstruction. If American culture is in fact the real issue in 1994, we seem a long way from recognizing the depth of its crisis.