Clinton's re-election: the 'X' factor.

The presidential race will get tighter, especially when the polls begin to limit themselves to likely voters, but for practical purposes, the election is already over. The polls in june almost invariably forecast the outcome in November. In 1988, it felt dramatic when George Bush overcame the big lead Michael Dukakis enjoyed, briefly, after the Democratic Convention, but the voters wound up where they'd been at the end of the primaries. Harry Truman, that perennial exception, is the only candidate to make a true comeback, but Bob Dole is no Harry Truman. Barring some disaster, Bill Clinton will be reelected, and the realistic objective of Dole's campaign is to hold down the president's margin of victory.

Republican leaders know that, and have shifted their emphasis to retaining control of Congress. Through his campaign managers, Dole let Republican senators know that he prefers no bill restricting immigration to one Clinton would be willing to sign and for which Clinton could take credit. Dole urged them to add a provision allowing states to deny schooling to the children of illegal immigrants, because the president would veto such a bill, allowing Dole to label him soft-on-immigrants. But Dole's erstwhile colleagues-specially those from states where immigration is a hot issue - proved recalcitrant, showing a tell-tale disposition to shelter themselves from the coming storm.

That is especially true because the Republicans have a good shot at keeping their congressional majorities. In the House, they expect to capture more Democratic seats from the South, partly balancing their expected losses elsewhere and ending up, they hope, with a narrowed majority and Gingrich back in the Speaker's chair. Still, a Democratic House is at least a good bet, and Republicans will have to work to hold onto the Senate, where they began the year counting on making gains. Republican moderates - William Weld of Massachussetts, Rudy Boschwitz in Minnesota, and Richard Zimmer in New Jersey - have excellent chances of winning Democratic seats, but in state after state, conservative strength in the primaries has left Republicans with candidates far enough to the right to make Democrats competitive if not likely winners. And if Clinton wins @@ percent of the vote or more, there may be enough coattails to pull Democrats back into control on Capitol Hill.

How did it come to this, in a year Republicans thought would complete their conquest of power? The easy explanation, of course, is that Bob Dole is a bad candidate - too old, too marked by his years in Congress, too maladroit as a campaigner. But the Republican elite fixed on Dole, knowing his liabilities, be cause they considered him a safe candidate, unlikely to offend any part of what they took to be a winning coalition. The GOP leadership, in other words, overrated its strength with the electorate, and that, along with Bill Clinton's artful empathy, is the real story of the 1996 election.

The dominant feeling among the voters has edged away from anger, the Republicans, 1994 emotional stock-in-trade, and toward a sense of vulnerability. In economic life, this is a commonplace: Globalization and technological change, Mr. Gingrich's "new wave," is threatening jobs and unsettling communities, especially among Americans thirty-five and older, who essentially predate the "information revolution" and who recognize, in ugly neologisms like "outsourcing," euphemisms for their own dispensability. More Americans are working and doing reasonably well, but this modest yet uneasy prosperity only underlines their "fear of falling." And since voters are less influenced by their immediate economic circumstances than by their expectations about the future, that worry is bound to be potent at the polls.

However, as the party of the private sector, inclined to let the market have its way, Republicans find it almost impossible to speak to that uneasiness. Dole's proposed tax cut isn't catching on. Voters doubt he can pull if off, they also suspect - shrewdly, given New Jersey's experience under Christie Whitman - that they will pay elsewhere for any loss of income-tax revenue, they're apt to recognize that Dole's program would accentuate America's escalating inequality,. and most important, they see that lower taxes do not have any necessary connection to better and more secure jobs. Dole knows as much. He tends to dodge questions about international competition and his comments about work are few and syntactically obscure. Compared to Dole's message, Clinton's own rather anemic reponse - he hasn't had much to say beyond the minimum wage and job retraining - manages ages to sound relativelys strong and hopeful. Jack Kemp, to be sure, finds it easy to be lyrical about growth, but even Kemp presumes that, for a majority of voters, government is primarily a burden, an intruder, or a despoiler.

But it isn't the 1980s anymore. Abstractly, as a matter of rhetoric, Americans have been suspicious of government at least since the heyday of the New Deal, an attitude that has grown stronger in recent times. But by agreeing that the era of big government is over," Clinton helped move the game of politics from the field of symbols to the arena of practice, where Americans have consistently supported - and demanded - a high level of government programs and services.

Albeit ambivalently, it strengthens the disposition to look to government that more and more Americans find themselves in a "paranoid position," feeling baffled and kicked around by largely invisible forces, powers that it's only prudent to suspect even if they seem benign. In UFOs paranoia has taken a stride toward the mainstream: 48 percent of Americans, Newsweek told us, believe in UFOs and are convinced that government is covering up the evidence, while 29 percent believe the government has been in contact with aliens. The TV series "The X-Files" (like the film Independence Day), symbolizes that rather creepy dimension of the national mood. It also tells us something about our politics: The heroes are people who work for the government. Americans may suspect officials of being in league with malign powers, but they also know, at least dimly, that government is the best hope they've got. Compared with forces like the market - to say nothing of extraterrestrial empires - government is somewhat subject to our control. We need it desperately, which is why we rail against it so extravagantly when it lets us down, and why shutting down the government" - blamed on the Congress - was a disaster for the GOP.

Even the best Republican campaigners are finding themselves burdened by the error Gingrich and his followers made in interpreting the 1994 elections as a mandate for the radical demolition of government. As Clinton gave ground - probably too much, though it's hard to quarrel with the results - Republicans were tempted into what looked like rule-or-ruin zealotry. Democrats, by contrast, were chastened into a king of moderation: many have complained about Clinton's accommodations, especially his willingness to sign the Welfare Reform Bill, but virtually all of them have fallen into line, and no Democrat since F.D.R. has had so untroubled a march to nomination. At the Republican Convention, Dole tried to shake the image, but in the electorate's lingering memory, Republicans still seem at least a little scary.

The prominence of right-wing terrorism, exemplified by the Oklahoma City bombing, has given a special edge to these apprehensions. Most Americans have grown accustomed to associating disorder with international terrorists or with the Left, and Republicans have made it a habit to run against the 1960s. Events in 1996, however, have made it clear that the radical Right is at least as savage in its attacks on government, law-enforcement, and other supposed agents of the "New World Order" as the '60s Left ever was. For the most part, moreover, the New Left was insistently public and visible; the radical rightists are secretive and often covert, united by the codes and channels of the Internet - "strangers in our midst," Dirk Johnson called them. The evident rhetorical affinities between radical rightists and Republican militants in Congress like Helen Chenoweth of Idaho and Steven Stockman of Texas have helped make Middle American voters, still unhappy with liberalism, almost as uneasy about the direction of the GOP.

Sum it up: Bob Dole and his party seem unable to speak to our fears and too apt to add to our worries. Bill Clinton doesn't frighten us: His leadership style suggests the Pillsbury Doughboy, soft and eager to please, and we know he will be disinclined to ask us for much. In 1996, those qualities will be enough. But Americans also know that we face problems - the impending crisis in Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of our broader dilemmas - that cannot be smarmed away. Clinton and the new Congress will need a better statecraft to bridge those obstacles to a decent and democratic future.