Giddy with thoughts of the November midterm elections, visiting Republicans strolled around a Paramount studio lot, listening to a garrulous movie producer recount Ronald Reagan’s days and nights in Hollywood.
Members of the Republican National Committee, weary of recent internal ideological battles in their home states, basked in the California dusk last week.
Sipping cocktails and noshing on vegetarian pizza, they were dreaming of the electoral pasting they expect to give President Clinton and the Democrats.
The unpleasantness with George Bush and Ross Perot seemed far away, as did more recent pitched battles between traditional Republicans and evangelical Christians in a host of states.
“I only wish the election were next week,” said Ohio Republican chairman Bob Bennett.
Clinton carried Bennett’s state in 1992, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate took Ohio since Jimmy Carter in 1976. But the polls suggest that nearly half of Ohio voters are unhappy with Clinton’s job performance.
More importantly, six of 10 Ohioans say they like the job Republican Gov. George Voinovich is doing, and the governor is at the top of the GOP ticket this fall.
“It’s locked in pretty early for us, with Voinovich running,” Bennett said. “The Senate race, some House seats, eight or nine state legislative seats look good for us.”
Many Democrats agree that Voinovich may help GOP Senate candidate Michael DeWine defeat Democrat Joel Hyatt and send at least a trio of freshmen Democratic congressmen home to Ohio.
What is transpiring in Ohio, Republicans believe, is part of a national pattern of voter discontent that will result in sweeping GOP victories this fall.
Even the most partisan Democrats acknowledge the GOP is likely to better the historical average for off-year congressional victories by the party outside the White House. That means at least three Senate wins and as many as two dozen House seats could pass into GOP hands.
Republicans and Democrats alike understand those numbers would mean a virtual shutdown of Clinton’s domestic agenda.
“I believe we can start taking America back in 1994,” Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) told GOP insiders Friday. “We have to tell people how America is going to be better off having a Republican majority in Congress.”
Gramm, an unannounced candidate for president in ’96, casts the debate in stark ideological terms, but his rhetoric reflects the prevailing mood.
The Los Angeles gathering offers a curious contrast between Republican confidence-even euphoria-over the November elections and the coming intraparty civil war over social and cultural issues.
Republican consultants talk of GOP dominance on Capitol Hill even as they bemoan the controversial Senate candidacy of Iran-contra figure Oliver North in Virginia.
“We’ll give some races away,” said a Washington-based GOP consultant, “but the trend lines are all moving our way.
“Every place we get a straight-up contest without a lot of infighting we feel pretty confident about beating Democrats.”
An element of the Republican equation is the unproven but firmly held belief that Perot voters are moving back to the GOP fold out of sheer disgust with Clinton.
“I wish I could take credit for the attitudes we see in my state, but I have to give the credit to Bill Clinton,” said Nebraska state GOP chairman Jerry Schenken.
The Nebraska party leader sees a regional disaffection with Clinton, from the Dakotas through the Farm Belt and into Southern border states, all places where the Texas billionaire ran strongly in 1992.
At the center of this delicate balancing act between pending electoral success and intraparty warfare sits Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour.
Since taking control of the party apparatus after Bush’s defeat, Barbour, an affable Mississippi native, has talked ceaselessly of party unity.
He scrupulously avoids serious talk of such incendiary matters as abortion, and dismisses headline-grabbing fights between traditional Republicans and the well-organized fundamentalist Christian activists.
“We are the conservative party in this country and the Democrats are the liberal party,” Barbour said Friday. ” . . . In a party big enough to elect a president of the United States, not everyone will agree with each other. Not everyone will look alike or talk alike or pray alike . . . or pray at all.”
To that end, Barbour urged his troops to focus on this election season rather than 1996. “The best thing we can do to elect a Republican preisident in 1996 is to have a big Republican victory in 1994,” he told them.
The former Reagan political aide is also deft at downplaying expectations that Republicans can seize control of the Senate for the first time since 1980.
At present, Democrats hold a 56-44 advantage in the Senate and an 80-plus majority in the House.
“I think it’s reasonable to expect we may be able to put together working majorities in the House on many issues,” Barbour said. The Senate, he said, remains “an uphill battle, but it’s not nearly as uphill as it was in the beginning of the year.”
Republicans are buoyed by the 21 Democratic seats at risk in the Senate, and by the pending retirements of Sens. George Mitchell of Maine, David Boren of Oklahoma and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, all Democratic mainstays.
After 1992, when Bush drew the support of just 37 percent of the electorate-a poorer showing than Herbert Hoover in 1932-many Republicans felt they would spend long years in the political wilderness.
Despite their internal wrangling, Republicans no longer feel sense of despair. And, rightly or wrongly, they believe Bill Clinton is the source of their salvation.
