Jumping ship.

### LOWRY, RICH

AT FIRST only members of the House Ways and Means Committee wanted to send President Clinton a stand-alone welfare-reform bill. For months, the Republican strategy had been to combine welfare reforms with changes to the Medicaid system that President Clinton couldn't stomach, guaranteeing a Clinton veto of the welfare -Medicaid package (in what could be his third veto of welfare legislation). But Ways and Means members, after more than a year of labor, were anxious to see their handiwork become law. Committee members John Ensign (R., Nev.) and David Camp (R., Minn.) circulated a letter to the leadership in June asking that the House pass a welfare bill stripped of the Medicaid veto-bait. It got about fifty signatures. Speaker Newt Gingrich opposed the idea, hoping to give the Dole campaign an opportunity to attack Clinton over a third welfare veto. But, soon, it would be a lost cause.

Rep. Jimmy Hayes (R., La.), one of last year's party-switchers, convinced Majority Leader Dick Armey at a June meeting in the Ways and Means room of the Capitol that Clinton would have to veto even a stand-alone bill or risk infuriating his base. Meanwhile, it seemed increasingly senseless for the House to try to protect the interests of a floundering Dole campaign. If Congress passed a bill the President could sign, Members would get credit back home for a major accomplishment. "The campaign wasn't scoring points on welfare anyway," explains one party official. When Ensign and Camp wrote another letter, they got more than a hundred signatures just by walking onto the House floor. House leaders weren't sure they could pass even the procedural "rule" -- typically a party-line vote -- for a bill keeping welfare and Medicaid together. The two would have to be split -- and the Dole campaign would have to fend for itself.

The decision to send Clinton a welfare bill he might sign is emblematic, not only of a potential major rift between congressional Republicans and the Dole campaign, but of the way the weakness of the campaign feeds further weakness; it prompts the GOP to throw good politics after bad. No Republican wins from the welfare decision. If the President signs a bill, Dole loses irrevocably one of the GOP's traditional top three issues (taxes, crime, welfare). Getting anything other than a watered-down bill through Senate moderates, meanwhile, is always a dicey proposition (some Ways and Means members, privately banking on a second Clinton term, argue that any bill passed this year is the best chance at reform this century). Finally, House Republicans may well find that disarming Dole on a major issue would ultimately hurt more than their "accomplishment" helps. "Any guy who is in a marginal district who thinks he needs welfare to boost him," argues a top Senate staffer, "doesn't realize that . . . if Bob Dole is not doing well, it doesn't matter -- he sinks without a trace."

But Capitol Hill Republicans, understandably, aren't in the mood for being team players. The feeling, according to one long-time congressional aide, is reminiscent of 1992, "when we were getting bashed on the fairness issue, [and] Republicans kept waiting for the Bush campaign to rescue them. Finally we realized the cavalry wasn't going to come over the hill." This year no one is expecting a charge of the Dole brigade. "People have given up," says a senior House leadership staffer. "They're looking at Dole and he's awful. He's a nothing. He's a zero." It is only July, with the public more focused on Dan O'Brien's long jumps than Bob Dole's flip-flops. But if the Dole campaign continues to drift, congressional Republicans will resort to more free-lancing like the welfare - Medicaid split. Another House aide gives Dole a few more weeks to find his voice, but "if he doesn't, it's going to be CYA, baby."

IF House Republicans abandon Dole, it will be a sort of rough justice -- since Dole left them first. In a June interview with the Washington Times, Dole gave House freshmen the back of his hand: "Those people who voted for you [freshmen] want you to do, but they don't want you to do it so fast" (sic). His bumbling reversal on the assault-weapons ban cut the legs out from under House members who had made a tough vote to repeal the ban in order to keep the gun-rights portion of the GOP base happy. Dole, of course, was working at cross-purposes, trying to distance himself from that same base (and succeeding -- only 62 per cent of Republicans support him, according to recent polls). The strategy is the mirror image of Clinton's "triangulation," which works for the President because what his core supporters represent is unpopular with the rest of the country. Dole, on the other hand, dampens his own party's enthusiasm by eschewing the very issues with which Republicans win swing voters (abortion, affirmative action, etc.).

Compounding the strategic divergence is the Dole campaign's organizational disarray. Speaker Gingrich convenes weekly Thursday-morning meetings with top staff from the campaign committees, Sens. Spence Abraham (Mich.) and Paul Coverdell (Ga.) and Reps. Bob Franks (N.J.) and Jennifer Dunn (Wash.) -- all former state party chairmen -- to talk about the shape of the national GOP campaign. At first a representative of the Dole campaign would attend the meeting. Lately, the campaign has been AWOL. For Hill offices, trying to reinforce the Dole message --assuming there is one -- is often a shot in the dark; it's easier to find out what the White House will be doing in days ahead than the Dole campaign. A schedule of coming events produced by the RNC for the Gingrich meetings has a column for the Dole campaign --sometimes left nearly blank.

There have been daily morning conference calls between communications offices on the Hill and Dole communications staff. But, explains one GOP press officer, it has become increasingly clear that staff-level co-ordination is a waste of time as long as the Dole campaign is "a rudderless ship." So the House has revamped its own communications apparatus around daily meetings involving Gingrich, other members of the leadership, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Bill Paxon, and Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich. In a kind of communications whip effort, the members will decide who among congressional Republicans can help deliver a daily message. Officially, the new structure has nothing to do with Dole, but privately some House aides describe it as a way of going alone -- until the campaign catches up.

Congressional Republicans share some of the blame for the GOP's funk. For one thing, over the last two years they have reinforced Dole's natural aversion to tax cuts. Jack Kemp, Sen. Trent Lott, Sen. Connie Mack, Dick Armey, and Newt Gingrich -- the so-called "amigos" -- have recently focused with more energy on how to get the party back on the growth track. One idea (which has already been carried out) was a Hill conference on the slow pace of the Clinton recovery. A useful by-product of the activity is preparing the ground for a Dole tax cut (both Donald Rumsfeld and Vin Weber, two tax-cutters in the Dole camp, have been involved).

The House GOP has also abetted Dole's punt on race preferences. The campaign's unwillingness to talk about the California Civil Rights Initiative approaches insanity; in recent polling by California assembly candidates, Dole was losing by about 10 points in two swing districts in Long Beach, while CCRI was winning by 30. But the House has followed Dole's affirmative-action retreat with alacrity.

The irony is that if Congress goes its own way it may become even more timid. Republicans do best when campaigns are nationalized around a few polarizing issues. But with the Dole campaign showing little interest in that kind of campaign, congressional Republicans will be forced back on traditional incumbent campaigns, emphasizing their bi-partisan accomplishments (a marked contrast to 1994, when confrontational Republicans defined Clinton as a liberal). Welfare is one example. The other is health care, with Republicans likely to jettison their attempt to get Medical Savings Accounts in a rush to pass a version of the Kassebaum -Kennedy regulation bill that the President can sign. If this strategy worked in the past for congressional Democrats -- natural deliverers of pork, from local water projects to the various benefits of the welfare state -- it's not so clear it will be a boon to Republicans, especially if a Dole campaign constitutes a huge drag from the top.

GOP congressmen are counting on a variety of buffers from a Dole campaign downdraft. One is money. The Republican campaign committees have huge money leads over their Democratic counterparts and so will many individual Republican incumbents (although union spending vitiates this advantage somewhat). Another is candidates. When the parties were recruiting congressional candidates the political environment still favored Republicans, and it shows. Third and last is geography. A Dole debacle could kill Republicans in tough Northeastern districts, but the big GOP gains last year were concentrated in the South, where Republicans stand to make more headway no matter what. Some on the Hill even talk of "reverse coattails," drumming up enough turn-out in their own districts to carry Dole. Would that it were possible. Says political analyst Stu Rothenberg: "That's not just wishful thinking, that comes from the Land of Oz."

The bad news is that straight-ticket voting is on the rise. "People aren't going to turn out and vote for Bill Clinton and [vulnerable Kentucky freshman] Ed Whitfield," says one party official. "That's just not going to happen." Columnist Robert Novak projects that, if the election were held today, there would be a 50 - 50 split in the Senate. If Dole loses by more than eight points, the GOP majority in the House could begin to fade too.

There is still time for the political environment to change. An over-confident Clinton could veto welfare reform. The Dole tax package could be bold enough to energize his party. But, whatever happens, there's no avoiding Bob Dole. A stampede to desert him, further demonstrating his weakness and contributing to a still larger loss, will ultimately hurt the deserters. For Republicans, the Dole campaign is like a bad dream, filled with hints of impending doom, but no opportunity for escape.