Wednesday, Oct. 21, 1998 | 11:23 a.m.
SEATTLE -- Almost everything you need to know about winners and losers in the endgame in Congress is this: Rep. Linda Smith, the Republican challenger in the key Senate race taking place in Seattle, decided to vote against the spending deal her leaders had made with the White House, while her opponent, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, trumpeted it as a victory in a long fight.
Murray was a lead sponsor of the Clinton proposal for federal funds to hire and train thousands of new teachers. Last month, she put up an ad complaining that the plan had been defeated by the Republicans but vowing to "keep fighting" for its eventual passage.
Now, she can brag that the vanguard of a promised 100,000 new teachers will soon be on the way. Smith, who wants to get the federal government out of local schoolrooms, is left holding the bag.
This may be an unusually clear example, but there's little doubt the Republicans let themselves be snookered once again by Clinton in the end-of-the-session game. All you have to do is listen to the complaints of conservative congressmen and commentators and look at the broad grins on the Democrats' faces.
Those smiles may not be as broad on Election Day. Although not the case in the Washington state Senate race, Republican congressional candidates generally have much more money to spend and will dominate the airwaves in swing districts right up to Nov. 3. And it still seems likely the GOP will gain an edge if the voter turnout is as low as expected.
None of that diminishes the fact that for the third time in the four years since the GOP took control of the House and Senate, Clinton and the Democrats have made the Republican leadership look as inept as the Washington Redskins in the final minutes of the game.
In 1995, Clinton vetoed stopgap funding bills and forced the Republicans to take the blame for the Christmas shutdown of large parts of the federal government. In doing so, he demonized Speaker Newt Gingrich and helped set the stage for his own re-election.
In 1996, Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott turned accommodating and passed three major bills late in the session -- welfare reform, health-care portability and a minimum wage increase.
As a result, the week after the Republican National Convention -- a week when Bob Dole needed to build on the momentum of his successful San Diego conclave -- became instead a week of White House Rose Garden bill signings that stopped the Dole campaign dead in its tracks.
Now, in 1998, a session that might -- in more skillful hands -- have ended with headlines about the House voting to begin formal impeachment proceedings against the president was converted instead into a political victory for that selfsame president.
Why do the Republicans keep outsmarting themselves? Part of the answer is that when the fight over spending goes past the Oct. 1 start of the government's fiscal year, the more issues still unresolved, the more leverage the president gains. The prospect of closing down the government is abhorrent to people.
Not only does it inconvenience the millions who have business with federal agencies, but it symbolizes to everyone that partisanship has triumphed over common sense. And the great megaphone the president commands as "communicator in chief" almost guarantees the blame will fall on his political adversaries, not on him.
So why don't Republicans follow the once-normal procedure of sending appropriations bills to the president one at a time before Oct. 1? The answer is that their leadership -- especially in the House -- has not been strong enough to prevent the more radical elements within the GOP from loading those bills with policy "riders" that make the money measures harder to pass and subject to veto threats.
Year after year, these measures become the vehicles for the most conservative members of the Republican conference to attempt to achieve goals they know would fail if offered as separate bills.
And year after year, they try by means of the appropriations bills to gut some environmental regulations, or cut off arts and education programs, or restrict international family planning money, or do any of a hundred other things that warm the hearts of their constituencies.
In the final bargaining, Clinton almost always forces Republicans to drop most of these riders. But then he goes on and demands money for his own programs -- like the federally financed teachers -- which would not pass muster on their own. And like saps, the Republicans keep letting him get away with it.
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