Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 4, 1993 TAG: 9311040152
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Republicans saw their victories Tuesday as a negative vote on President Clinton's performance. But Stephen Hess, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research institute in Washington, disagrees.
"Any election in which an incumbent is running is a retroactive sanctioning. It's not a looking forward but a looking back," said Hess. "People in New Jersey looked back, people in New York City looked back and didn't much like what they saw.
"We had exactly the same proposition [last year] - it worked in Clinton's favor," Hess added.
It was clear that taxes and crime were the biggest policy issues of this year's campaigns and that both helped the Republican candidates, analysts said.
"Crime is the issue of the '90s," said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio.
Clinton argued Wednesday that Republican victories in governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia and in the race for mayor of New York don't amount to a repudiation of him or other Democrats.
"We also won a lot of mayors' races last night, including a lot of people who were early supporters or mine and very instrumental in the [1992] campaign," he said. "I don't think you can draw too many conclusions from this."
But that's just what Barbour; Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan.; and other Republicans were doing with glee.
"`The Democrats want to say all politics is local," said Barbour. "Well, if all politics is local, locally Bill Clinton's very unpopular, whatever the locale."
Democratic National Committee Chairman David Wilhelm said: "It would be absolutely wrong for Democrats to say, `I better keep my distance from the president.'
"I think that one can easily make too much of the tax issue. . . . I think if the Republicans conclude from this election that trickle-down economics and cozying up to the NRA [National Rifle Association] is the way to go, that is a dramatically wrong conclusion."
Barbour conceded it will be an uphill battle to gain seven seats to take over the Senate.
"But, look, it is uphill for Republicans to elect a mayor of Los Angeles, a governor of Virginia, a mayor of New York City, a Republican lieutenant governor of Arkansas," he said, referring to Republican successes on Tuesday, as well as earlier this year. "So I think the prospects for us are very good because the political environment nationally is good for us."
Dole said the wins by Rudolph Giuliani in New York, George Allen in Virginia and Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey will make it easier for Republicans to recruit strong candidates.
"It's going to help us enlist a lot of candidates who may have been holding back to see what happened," Dole said.
More and more of those new candidates are likely to hit on crime as a core issue, said Green of the Bliss Institute.
"I think we're going to see congressmen and senators and state officials running on the crime platform. Law and order has been resurrected," he said.
Voters generally trust Republicans more than Democrats on crime, but candidates who campaign on law and order will have trouble carrying out campaign pledges, he said.
by CNB