Why the party of the people has a grassroots problem.

"A telephone blitz like this nation has never seen," Tip O'Neill grumbled. He wasn't a happy man. In the last week of July, 1981, as the House inched toward a vote on President Reagan's first budget - the one with tax cuts and a huge defense increase - the Speaker thought he had the votes to head Reagan off. But the damnedest thing kept happening: The phones were ringing in the offices of wavering Democrats - and ringing, and ringing. People were demanding that their congressmen pass the Reagan package.

"We had matched Reagan maneuver for maneuver until the phones started ringing off the wall," another House Democratic leader told the old Washington Star. "The deals we could withstand, but not that damn Alexander Graham Bell."

Twelve years later, in the spring and summer of 1993, the same phones were ringing about Bill Clinton's economic plan. But this time, the calls were demanding that Congress reject a new president's package. Conventional wisdom explains the Clinton problem these ways: It's of course more popular to cut taxes than to raise them; Clinton was elected with just 43 percent of the vote; Reagan was better at television; Clinton got sidetracked by Sharon Stone, the attorney general follies, and gays in the military; Reagan was more popular because he had been shot; and so forth.

All of these explanations have merit. But the enduring problem is that Clinton has no network approaching what Reagan could call on. The conservative grassroots booms in the eighties were products of Reagan's speeches, years of conservative direct mail, and networking meetings with activists in the White House. "Calls and letters don't just happen," says Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's first director of political affairs. "You've got to generate them, and anybody who doesn't know that now is out of it." The callers in '93 were calling for the same thing they called for in '81: less government and lower taxes. Then, it was a call for Reagan; now, it's a call to cream Clinton.

Grassroots lobbying has exploded in recent years because lawmakers watch their fax machines, mail bags, and telephone logs more than they worry about the White House. On most bills you can think of - the sale of AWACs planes to Saudi Arabia, aid to the contras, tax reform, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas - there were tight votes whose outcome seemed anything but inevitable at the time and which had lawmakers nervously taking the public pulse. In 1974, only 17 percent of Americans said they had recently contacted their representatives in Congress; today, 39 percent have. This year's Western Union Opiniongram message traffic to the Hill is up 66 percent over 1992. And the Capitol Hill switchboard logged 22.5 million calls in all of 1992 - a mark passed this year on August 6, when the total hit 22.8 million. Add congressional hypersensitivity to grassroots sentiment to the humming grassroots machines - with models ranging from Citizen Action to United We Stand to the Christian Coalition - and the real political fight is convincing enough people on your side to get on the horn to Washington.

How are the Democrats faring at this? Badly, and that's puzzling given the party's old image as the party of the people. Take Clinton's chief initiative so far: his original economic plan. "Well, a budget is not necessarily the kind of thing that everybody goes to the barricades on," offers David Wilhelm, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who might want to call Nofziger about whether that's the case. Clinton's original package raised taxes on the top 1 percent, invested in road, job training, and child immunization, and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. Given the public's deep skepticism toward government, the budget also hung on the promise of Al Gore's reinvention. Not very concrete, of course, but Reagan was never Mr. Specific, either. Yet the people who had to balance out the conservative callers - environmentalists on the Btu tax, for example - stayed out the fray, and Congress ate the young president's lunch. The plan's overall public approval rating fell from 71 percent in February to 43 percent in July.

Supposedly, the explanation for Reagan's success and Clinton's failure is all money (Republicans have more of it). Although it's true that the right uses expensive mail to keep its base intact, Democrats and progressives aren't poor - there are 12 million liberal donors in the country, giving $1 billion a year on 600,000,000 pieces of mail. Corporate philanthropy alone is worth about $25 million a year, and groups like the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, the Urban League, and the NAACP got 16.5 million, or 65 percent, of corporate grants in 1990, according to the conservative Capital Research Center.

Yet as a rule, liberals are reluctant to acknowledge that phone calls and letters - as opposed to grassroots work in the March on Washington tradition - are much more than the work of hysterical right wingers. "Liberals are more interested in principle than in victory," says Roger Craver, whose direct-mail company represents the 40 largest progressive groups, including Common Cause and Planned Parenthoold. "On our side, people don't want a left wing Rush Limbaugh. It seems to offend their sense of decorum." But there are ways to rally public opinion short of conservative-baiting. By framing the issue in To-Limbaugh-Or-Not-To-Limbaugh terms, Democrats miss the real point.

Which is: It's all well and good to avoid the messiness of mobilizing mass opinion as long as you never want to win. Purists rightly argue that deliberately produced grassroots calls are a far cry from the civil disobedience of the civil rights or antiwar movements. Aren't Reaganesque grassroots productions, they say, sort of phony, more Astrodome than Wrigley Field? Yes and no. Yes, they're certainly manufactured. But no, you can't say constituents' calls and letters don't have an impact, no matter how people come to call or write.

And it's not as though liberals - the most vocal and affluent to whom are the most active Democrats - are above this when their passions are aroused - ask Judge Bork. Problem is, their passions are aroused by causes that don't arouse the vast working class. So how do you reconcile loggers with Washington's spotted owl protectors? Or God-fearing hardhats who think abortion is a sin with an elite Democratic leadership that thinks it's a "choice"?

Democrats need to recognize that for every one epic battle like Bork or abortion rights, there are thousands of street fights - taxes and spending among them - and these are the fights that engage the natural Democratic constituency: The 68 percent of Americans who make less than $50,000 a year. Right now, Democratic activists tend to be better off social liberals uninterested in populist economic issues, and the antidote for that is for the president and the party to appeal directly to the economically pressed at the grassroots. "The precinct captain in the 44th Ward of the city of Chicago need to think of organizing around issues like health care as part of his job," says Wilhelm, "and he doesn't necessarily think that now." The precinct captain equivalents on the right and in the center - Reagan's old loyalists, Perot's new loyalists - do think that now.

Fax populi

This is not rocket science, but there's clearly a market for political wares that the Democrats are skipping. According to the Times Mirror Center for the People & The Press, 38 percent of Americans have recently mailed in a card for interest group "opinion polls," which are then used to lobby Congress: 27 percent have joined an organization in support of a particular cause; 24 percent have attended a "town meeting" discussion; 22 percent have called an 800 or 900 number to register a political opinion; 19 percent have contributed money to a political action group or party. Minority voices, no doubt, but a minority voice is awfully loud when silence is the competition.

Consider the right's advantage over the left in all this. Sixty eight percent of callers to talk radio say they are conservative or lean that way; only 24 percent say they're liberal. More Republicans (39 percent) have recently contacted Capitol Hill than Democrats (27 percent) or independents (33 percent). And the people calling Congress are disproportionately down on Clinton: 43 percent disapproved of the President, compared to 31 percent of the general population.

"The trouble with us is we're always for something, you know?" complains James Carville, who helped elect Clinton on economic themes. "It's always easier to rally folks against something than for something." Still, there is the sentiment that gave Bush's challengers 62 percent in 1992 in an election where the percentage of registered voters voting was up over 1988. Clinton's package would have cost a family of four making $55,000 a year about $11 a month; a family of three making $25,000 would have gotten a $700 tax break. The heaviest burden - 80 percent of the plan's revenues - would have come from those making over $200,000. The raw materials for a progressive coalition are out there, and Democrats obviously have to bring along some businesses as well with promises not unlike what Clinton tried to pass this time: targeted tax incentives and other carrots.

The right may have more folks calling talk radio and ringing up Capitol Hill, but the ostensibly killer 4.3-cent gas tax splits the country 50-50, and taxing most Social Security benefits for couples making over $40,000 a year wins, 51 percent to 44 percent, according to a summer NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. This after six months of conservative destruction after the full plan was so brilliantly presented - so fleetingly - in the State of the Union address. Fifty percent does not a groundwell make, but it's a start.

Ironically for Clinton, what's helping fund his program's evisceration are donations from the little guys Democrats used to count on. In the 1992 cycle, individuals gave the GOP $141 million to the Democrats' $75 million. Sixty eight percent of GOP contributions came in sums under $200; the Democrats got just 38 percent that way. There's a reason for this: The Republicans, through the sixties, seventies, and eighties, developed shrewd mail, phone, advertising, and membership services. The investment - roughly $40 million from 1990 to 1992 alone - is vast, but success breeds success. That is, the more you mail, the more donors are likely to join up, and their continued giving is what makes money for the party. The Democrats, in the same period, spent just $13.1 million on outreach - a third of the Republican investment.

The failure to win small donors is less a function of not having money to invest than it is a consequence of the party's choosing a different route in the past. Because Republicans were outpacing them and bringing in more money to reinvest in more and better appeals, the Democrats took the easy way out and peddled the party to wealthy individuals and corporations. "For a long time, the Democratic party has been a rich man's sandbox," says Tom Mathews, a veteran liberal fundraiser. "That gives the big donors an enormous amount of clout, but it doesn't help with keeping people down below in the fold." So while party leaders in the Robert Strauss/Ron Brown tradition convince corporations like Beneficial Management Corp. to pay $265,000 for a single dinner, Clinton's DNC chairman, Wilhelm, couldn't find a list of Democratic county chairmen on file when he came into office. And Republicans and their conservative allies are able to tar Democrats as the real Washington insiders, taxing and spending and social engineering.

This spring and summer, for example, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a conservative business coalition with 250,000 members, used direct mail to raise over $1 million to spend on television, newspaper, and radio ads in key states to fight Clinton's budget. Very early on, when Clinton proposed a broad tax on energy, CSE and the American Energy Alliance, another pro-business coalition, targeted 28 marginal House districts and four Senate Democrats from Montana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Louisiana. To pressure David Boren, CSE ran full page ads in 19 Oklahoma newspapers three days in a row. It advertised a number to call (1-800-NO-TAXES) to be patched through to the Capitol switchboard. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee, delighted with the assist from private industry and conservative groups, merrily raised $19 million in the first six months of the year - 70 percent of it from small donors. The money helped pay for radio ads targeting 30 House and Senate Democrats in 20 states. With background music from "Jaws," the announcer warned, "It's Bill Clinton and the tax-and-pretend Democrats in Congress at it again...."

But where, for example, was the $500 million environmental movement on the pro-green energy tax? "He frankly lost his base for an organized effort by caving on mining and grazing fees," says Pamela Gilbert of Ralph Nader's Congress Watch. "That lost him the environmentalists completely. And scaling back to the stimulus package lost him a lot of the rest of us. "Alas, what is good about interest groups' ability to gin up calls and letters is also what is sometimes bad. Passion allows little room for nuance or compromise. "A lot of Clinton's priorities - especially the Earned Income Tax Credit for poor people - were fabulous," says Jennifer Vasiloff, head of the Coalition on Human Needs, an umbrella group that includes the Children's Defense Fund and the League of Women Voters. "But while Clinton reached out to us, he was also reaching out to real estate groups and corporate America, and some of the people in my coalition didn't like or didn't care about that."

If progressive seem like kids squabbling over ice cream, that's because progressives are, well, sometimes, like kids squabbling over ice cream. Unfortunately, the Democratic party can't play parent. The right has its intramural problems, too, but the New Right and the Republicans sort of grew up together - Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the Moral Majority were very much at home with the GOP, for instance - while the groups on the left were largely founded to oppose the established Democratic party. Beginning in 1968, feminists, consumer advocates, and early environmentalist groups were of the Democratic party but not really in the Democratic party: Their agendas came first, the party a distant second.

Think about the kinds of people who, by and large, are progressive donors and activists. They are the people who broke with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and who value principle and precision above the give-and-take of politics. They are largely well-off and well-educated (75 percent are college graduates or better, according to a Peter Hart survey of liberal activists, compared to 20 percent of the general population) and tend to work in government or the academy. While such people in the thirties, forties, fifties, and early sixties were sources of great liberal reform, as they have entered the professional and upper middle classes, their ardor for economic justice has waned. When liberal activists were recently asked by Hart what their primary area of concern was, a plurality of men said the environment (38 percent) and of women said abortion rights (30 percent). Taxes and economic issues don't show up on the radar screen (even animal rights, with a 5 percent rating, beat the economy). Conservatives and moderates, on the other hand, tend to be more broadly concerned with, say, taxes and government (they want less of both) and they know how to reach people with symbols to sell that agenda, even when the result is contrary to the working class' economic interest. Democrats have to fight back, as distasteful as that might be to their sensitibilities.

Take 1988. Bush is pummeling Dukakis with these stump lines" "I can't understand the type of thinking that lets first degree murderes who haven't even served enough time to be eligible for parole out on parole so they can rape and plunder again and then isn't willing to let teachers lead the kids in the Pledge or Allegiance."

In his 1992 book Speaking American, David Kusnet, a progressive organizer who is now Clinton's chief speechwriter, makes a revealing point about the sort of people who were in charge of Dukakis' campaign. According to Kusnet, these Democrats insisted that "the only legitimate issues are those where the candidates can spell out exactly what they'd do if elected. . . [So] these experts were honestly bewildered that George Bush could discuss state and local concerns - like furloughs, saying the Pledge of Allegiance in public school classrooms, and pollution in Boston Harbor - and get away with it." Everybody knows, the liberal thinkers muttered, that these aren't federal concerns. But viscera won out over nuance, as it usually does in politics. To be sure, Democrats should not want their campaigns to feature progressive Willie Hortons, but emotional economic images are perfectly fair. Reagan notwithstanding, much of the most effective twentieth-century political imagery comes not from Republicans - quick, quote a line from Dwight Eisenhower - but from progressive Democrats like FDR, Truman, and the Kennedys, all of whom rhetorically elevated the common man's interests above those of the corporate and social elites. ("We have nothing to fear..."; "We can do better...")

Kusnet knew that; for a long time, Dukakis didn't. He told Kusnet, who was writing for him in 1988, to stop using the phrase "country club Republicans" in stump speech drafts. "Some of his friends in the suburbs belonged to country clubs now, Dukakis said, "Kusnet recalls.

Clinton and Wilhelm understand the imperative for populist language. That's why Clinton talked about "the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids, and play by the rules" in 1992. Too late this spring, the DNC began airing ads urging voters to call to "stand up to the special interests." (In fact, when the DNC ads ran, people were so saturated with anti-Clinton feeling that the ads produced more negative calls than positive.) If Clinton can deploy those images again, that's half the battle. The other half could be won if Democrats followed the example of two of Clinton's 1992 rivals: Perot and Jerry Brown. Their 800-numbers circumvented old political institutions - national committees, think tanks, foundations - to build lists of donors and volunteers. Wilhelm is beginning to test the power of the $15 contribution, combined with regular newsletters, in a "Democratic Action Network" to build machinery from the ground up.

But given Clinton's romance with insiders like the people who surrounded Dukakis, wholesale populism is unlikely. While Clinton drew his strongest support from low income voters - his biggest margins came among the 68 percent of voters who make less than $50,000 a year - he has surrounded himself not with Carvilles but with a crew on loan from Wall Street. "What we've got in the White House is way too much Brooks Brothers and way too little Sears, Roebuck," laments Jim Hightower, the populist Texas Democrat. According to a survey by Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 80 percent of the President's first 518 appointees were from the Washington-Boston corridor or the West Coast; one third attended Harvard or Yale or both.

The tensions between Democratic populists and elites are underscored by the season's top political draw: health care. The administration's approach is suggested by this recent Los Angeles Times headline: "Health Reform Backers Need to Enlist the Haves." Uniting haves and have-nots would of course be ideal, but Democrats most need to convince then mobilize the have-nots - the under-$50,000 households that are either uninsured or are terrified of losing coverage in the current system and have no wealth to fall back on if they lose their job.

This is Clinton's great test: A majority of Americans would benefit from reform, and the president needs a grassroots boom to pass the plan. Yet managed competition is complicated and difficult for anybody to understand and support. Why is the plan so complicated? Because the Clintons and the Democratic elites insisted on preserving private insurance at the center of American health care instead of pressing for single payer to control costs and cover everyone in a straight-forward, explicable way. But single payer would mean abolishing the powerful insurance industry, and the Clintons have declined to fight that fight, remaining bound to economic elites who make up a minority of the country but a majority of the governing class.

For Clinton to reach the breadth of the country (the have-nots), he has to follow up on his powerful health care speech to Congress in a way he failed to do after the State of the Union. And he must consistently make clear that he intends real, ward-level change in people's lives - making government work better, making health care and college loans available for everyone, and making taxes work for the country as a whole. Members of Congress could be persuaded that it is not political suicide to raise taxes if that case is made. Even in the election after the 1990 federal budget deal raised the top marginal tax rate, Citizens for Tax Justice points out that 96 percent of House incumbents who ran were re-elected - the fourth lowest turnover in U.S. history. The Senate turnover was the lowest in three decades.

In the 40 states that have raised tax rates since 1978, the turnover rate for lawmakers in the next election is virtually identical to turnover in elections that followed no tax increase. In fact, in 45 percent of the cases, turnover was lower than usual. Here are three well-thought-out progressive campaigns which resulted in smart progressive economic reform - without a right wing backlash. Beltway Democrats, take note:

* In Connecticut in 1991, Governor Lowell Weicker persistently supported the state's first income tax, vetoing three budgets that failed to include one. As a reward, he was burned in effigy and spat on in person at a rally of 40,000 at the State Capitol in Hartford. Weicker, running as an independent in the 1990 gubernatorial race, had won - shades on Clinton - with 41 percent in a three-way campaign. Facing a $2.7 billion shortfall (or 35 percent of the state's $7.5 billion budget), Weicker supported and won a 4.5 percent income tax, with progressive exemptions, and a 2-point cut in sales and corporate taxes over two years. A grassroots coalition - Citizen Action, human service advocates, and unions, put aside old social differences, realizing a disastrous economy would hurt them all. Business slowly came round, too, looking forward to the offsetting sales and corporate cuts. "We used mainstream concerns," says John Marttila, a Boston political consultant who worked with the Connecticut coalition. "We punched middle class equity, used door to door and radio spots. Traditional handwringing about government wasn't going to work." At the ballot box, 90 percent of pro-tax candidates won.

* In Massachusetts in 1990, in the waning days of the Dukakis governorship, a progressive alliance defeated Question 3, a provision ostensibly tailor-made for the era of No New Taxes. The largest percentage tax rollback ever to appear on a state ballot, Question 3 would have cut the state's income tax rate and rebated $2 billion to taxpayers (or 15 percent of the $13 billion state budget). At the beginning of the campaign year, voters favored the rollback, 60 percent to 35 percent. But beginning in 1987, blue collar workers worried about state contracts and Birkenstocked lefties worried about social services had come together to work the precincts. A significant segment of the business community came to agree that pulling the plug on the state budget would mean economic chaos. Bumpersticker slogan? "It Goes Too Far." In the end. Question 3 lost, 60 percent to 40 percent.

* In California in 1980, an alliance led by Mickey Kantor defeated Proposition 9, the second anti-tax campaign led by Howard Jarvis, who was fresh from Proposition 13's victory in 1978. Dubbed Jarvis II, Prop 9 would have cut state graduated income taxes by $4.9 billion. Early polls showed a 2-to-1 majority in favor. But then Vic Fingerhut, a Democratic pollster, tested the line that the big windfall would go to the wealthy; according to economics journalist Robert Kuttner, 30 percent of the tax cuts would have gone to the richest 3 percent of Californians. Fingerhut devised radio and TV scripts emphasizing the rich's tax cut would be paid for out of "someone else's pockets" - "working and middle income people." It worked. Prop 9 collapsed on election day, 61 percent to 39 percent, after a six-month campaign.

Although these are not torchlit, Huey Long populist revolts, they are victories that could be replicated on the national level. Clinton was the first Democrat since Hubert Humphrey to carry Connecticut; in Massachusetts, Republican William Weld defeated Democrat John Siber on the same day Question 3 lost; California's victory over Prop 9 came the year Reagan was first elected president.

Most important, such coalitions make the best of old and politics by organizing around an issue that means something to people - jobs, services, schools, bread and butter - instead of distant things like the ozone. In the ward, the issue might have been a new traffic light or getting the trash picked up; now, in an interactive political age, it can be something as big as the federal budget. Why is it that only Republicans know that shouting at Washington gets its attention? Democrats have plenty to say, but they have to do more than clear their throats if they're to be heard.