Contract on America.

Republicans are poised to recapture the U.S. Senate and statehouses in a handful of the most populous states in next month's midterm elections. They have a long-shot chance at regaining control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Even if they fail, the signs are unambiguous: a great many voters are restive and/or angry and/or turned off (see, Wilson Carey McWilliams, page 11). A vote against an incumbent has been elevated to the status of a personal declaration of independence, as if to say: Give us a new beginning with any new wagon master - wherever he or she might be headed.

So disenchanted is the electorate that voters seem ready not only to jump party but to jump ship. A recent Times-Mirror study reports that 53 percent of those surveyed said there should be a major new third party; and 20 percent said they are actually ready to join it. The Perot factor not only endures but intensifies. Voters are deeply dissatisfied. But are they willing to grapple with the problems that are the source of their alienation? Since 1972 there has been a steady decline in real family income. For too many Americans, the American Dream is more elusive than ever. It is nearly axiomatic today among the middle class that it will be harder for the next generation to repeat today's achievements; and among the poorest, the possibility of escaping their maddening plight grows fainter as the familial, social, and political structures that once promised some support and remedy have been battered on all sides (see, David R. Carlin, Jr., October 7).

Conservative Republicans have hit upon this palpable discontent, and among the middle class have fanned it mercilessly. There is a spirit abroad, rightly scored by President Bill Clinton, that is trumpeted by whining talk-radio hosts and politicians like Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who blame all problems on someone else (government, liberals, welfare cheats, homosexuals, illegal aliens). These naysayers hope to intensify the whirlwind of discontent - impervious to the damage they are inflicting on the deeper sense of community. As for offering solutions, they are content to propose the same nostrums that landed us in the present fix. The recent "Contract with America," orchestrated by Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and signed on the steps of the Capitol last month by over 300 Republican congressional candidates, is a case in point. A party platform of sorts, it blithely pledges that a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives would remake Congress within a hundred days: by cutting congressional funding and staffs by a third; opening up congressional procedures to public scrutiny; and forcing Congress to live by the same laws it imposes on all Americans. The compact calls for term limits, a balanced budget amendment, tort reform, higher defense spending, and lower taxes.

Useful arguments can be made in support of most of these positions, but real political discourse doesn't seem to be the Republican party's point. The mantra for downsizing contained in the contract is not the solution to most of our economic or political problems, nor are tax breaks for the better-off and a promised balanced budget somewhere down the yellow brick road. According to David Broder (Washington Post, September 28), the Republican plan is predicated on the catastrophic fairy-tale economics of the 1980s: It calls for a balanced budget in five years but accounts for only $148 billion of the $743 billion needed to achieve it.

The real purpose of the "contract" is to diminish federal government services overall and shift as many as possible to the states. After that, Republican governors, such as Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, will pass them on to the locales in the aftermath of cutting state taxes. Municipalities obviously will not be able to handle them. What Gingrich and his cohorts have in mind is the end of the welfare state as we now know it.

Certainly the welfare state can be reformed. But must its critics disdain those in need of help? The gap between the rich and the poor has grown conspicuously in the last decade for a variety of reasons, some of them being cuts in social programs that simultaneously took money out of the hands of the poor and diminished their hope of economic advancement. In fact, a more practical solution to helping the poor has already begun to function. Thanks to President Clinton, 14 million working Americans who earn below $20,000 a year got a tax cut. Known as the Earned Income Tax Credit, it has been called the most important income transfer in a generation. It works as an incentive to keep poor people working, without in any way adding to government programs. Furthermore, when it comes to cutting the fat in government, the Clinton administration has so far sliced more than 70,000 federal jobs, part of the 252,000 it plans to eliminate by 1997. Yet according to a recent poll, 78 percent of voters still think that the administration has made little or no progress in this area. As on many issues, the administration and the press need to let voters know about these modest but important steps.

The conservative Republican strategy has been to obstruct the governing process across the board. In a July article in the American Spectator, Fred Barnes reports that last March William Kristol, the Republican strategist, urged Republican senators to oppose the Clinton health plan vigorously. When Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) objected that his constituents had sent him to Washington to help solve such problems, Kristol replied: "If voters want their senators to help Clinton govern, they'll send Democratic senators."

The Republican strategy for gridlock - significant not only in the demise of health-care but more recently of campaign - financing reform - now joined with Gingrich's illusory contract for a "new morning in America," may prove irresistible to fed-up voters. But it is a policy tainted with exclusion and bitterness that in the long run will only increase cynicism and make governing the country all the more difficult. It should be rejected, for at bottom it is driven by the delusion that a democratic people can somehow function without government.