It had happened before. The president of the United States, despite late October barnstorming, watched his party lose control of both houses of Congress. His party lacked a natural majority; before electing him, it had lost five of six presidential elections. So now the advice was coming in -- suggestions that he do what Harry Truman did, that he use his veto to pick fights with the opposition Congress and run against it two years later.
The president could be Bill Clinton today -- or Dwight Eisenhower 40 years ago, in 1954, when Republicans lost the congressional majorities they regained only last week. Eisenhower, aware that the views of his party's congressional leaders were unpopular, declined to follow Truman's example. Yet he remained more popular than Truman ever was, and he was re- elected by a wider margin. Clinton may want to ponder Ike's example.
Eisenhower shunned his party's leaders, on the campaign trail and in office. He worked more smoothly with Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn than with Republicans William Knowland and Joseph Martin. But he let no one set his priorities. He wanted to maintain a commitment to Europe while limiting defense spending and build the interstate highway system while curbing domestic spending. He achieved all four goals.
Clinton has zigged and zagged. In 1992, he denounced his party's leaders. But a year later, he allied himself to them even as they deep-sixed his campaign promises. On issue after issue, he fashioned bills to please the liberal Democratic leadership, then had to beg for majority support. While flattering top Democrats, he ignored the GOP's Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The result: budget and crime bills that were political minuses and a health care package that crashed and burned.
Clinton shows neither Eisenhower's austerity (Ike "was not the kind of man who appreciated undue familiarity," recalled Richard Nixon, who in eight years as vice president was never invited to the White House family quarters) nor his sense of command. Eisenhower relied on Southern Democrats to uphold vetoes, prevailed on ex-isolationists to back his internationalist foreign policy, depended on Rayburn and Johnson to suppress their party's liberals, persuaded them and liberal Republicans to reach passable compromises on civil rights. He showed none of the affection for the GOP's old guard that Clinton showered on Edward Kennedy and Mario Cuomo. Instead he coolly assessed the weaknesses of leaders of his day: Johnson was "the most tricky and unreliable politician in Congress," Knowland was simply "stupid." Eisenhower all the while, in Murray Kempton's keen assessment, was concealing his own "marvelous intelligence from admirer and critic alike." He knew where he wanted to go and usually got there. But Clinton, lacking Ike's steely self- discipline, moral authority and Machiavellian skills, may fall back on the Truman strategy -- and risk his presidency on the popularity of ideas that already have cost his party eight Senate and over 50 House seats.
