No Experience Necessary

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Politicians, beware: voters are still inclined to hold experience against you. George Bush learned that lesson last year, when his failure to make a difference during his four years in the White House cost him his job. This year voters are increasingly asking whether politicians have improved American lives or prospects in some visible, tangible way; if the pols can't prove they have done so -- well, look out. And Bill Clinton, who profited at Bush's expense, had better be taking notes.

The President was not on any ballot last Tuesday, of course. But two Democrats he campaigned hard for, New York City Mayor David Dinkins and New Jersey Governor James Florio, were turned out of office. Their defeats were the more galling because of the identity of their Republican conquerors. Former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani had lost to Dinkins four years earlier; Christine Todd Whitman was a relative novice who had held only one minor elective office in New Jersey and proposed pie-in-the-sky tax cuts.

Incumbency became a burden even for some candidates who were not in office but seemed like political insiders. In the third nationally spotlighted race, for Governor of Virginia, former state attorney general Mary Sue Terry at one point held a 29-point lead in some polls over Republican George Allen. But by Election Day, Allen had convinced many voters that Terry's Democrats were treating the Governor's mansion as a virtual hereditary monarchy; he won by a lopsided 17 points to complete one of the most amazing turnarounds ever. In a less noticed but important contest, Coleman Young, mayor of Detroit for 20 years, sought to anoint Sharon McPhail as his successor; she was buried under a 12-point landslide by Dennis Archer. Further underlining their anti- incumbent mood, voters in Maine, New York City and nearby Suffolk County enacted term limits for officeholders, including Mayor-elect Giuliani, while New Jerseyites passed a referendum that will give them the authority to remove any elected official, including Governor-elect Whitman, even before his or her term is up.

Since most of the outs who beat the ins or their would-be heirs were Republicans, it was tempting for G.O.P. partisans to read the results as constituting a tide for their party. Republicans have in fact won all eight of the most important races decided since Clinton's election a year ago (the earlier ones were for Senate seats in Georgia and Texas and for mayor of Los Angeles). Moreover, there were signs -- though ambiguous and inconclusive ones -- of a conservative, anti-tax, tough-on-crime, no-to-gay-rights mood that, to the extent it takes on a partisan coloration, should benefit Republicans more than Democrats.

Generally, though, political cognoscenti agreed the results were less pro than anti, not so much for Republicans as against almost anyone in office. And even that reading has to be qualified. The New York City and New Jersey elections were so close that shifts of a very few votes would have reelected both Dinkins and Florio and no doubt led pundits to interpret the results very differently (although most American elections are decided by relatively small margins). Moreover, it is still possible for incumbents to win big. In Houston Mayor Bob Lanier promised to put more cops on the streets and did; the crime rate dropped significantly. In the election last week no one of any stature dared challenge him, and he won a second term with 91% of the vote.

Increasingly skeptical voters, however, demand results just about that measurable and turn surly because they rarely get them. The message of the election returns last week "is a kind of distemper on the part of the public and a dislike of insiders of all stripes," says Scott Keeter, who runs the Commonwealth Poll at Virginia Commonwealth University. Comments Jay Severin, a New York-based political consultant who often advises Republican candidates: "I don't think it's a Republican message. It's more a Perot message. People are angry."

Clinton sought to put the best face he could on the election results. Far from being a repudiation of him, he said, they indicated a continuation of the very desire for change that had carried him into the White House. Perhaps, but as Dinkins, Florio and others have discovered, the desire for change that can sweep a candidate into office in one election can sweep him right out again four years later.

At barest minimum, the results last week will fail to help Clinton win congressional support not only for NAFTA but for his health-care reform bill as well. Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut, a deputy Democratic whip in the House, fears that Clinton's health-care bill will become more vulnerable to attack -- wrongly, in her view -- as too expensive and too likely to promote a growth of government bureaucracy. On state and local levels at least, charges of excessive spending and too much bureaucracy have been proving lethal.

Those legislative difficulties could pale in comparison to the ones Clinton may face after the 1994 elections. Losses of even two or three seats in the Senate and 20 or so in the House, regarded as normal for the President's party at midterm, would shave the Democrats' margins so thin as to perhaps bring back legislative gridlock. Greater losses could virtually end Clinton's chances for getting any important legislation passed, and the elections last week indicate that is a distinct possibility. Very far from a certainty, of course: a recent quickening in the economic recovery, if it continues and brings an upsurge in employment, could convince many alienated voters that the status quo is not so awful after all. But a continuation of the present anti- incumbent mood could hurt the Democrats badly, if only because they will have many more Senate and House seats and governorships to defend next year than the Republicans will.

Apart from the anti-incumbent trend, the results last week showed the contrasts and contradictions usual for a clutch of local contests. One exception: gay rights lost heavily in all three places they were put to a vote -- Cincinnati; Lewiston, Maine; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. These are not exactly trend-setting cosmopolises, but the defeats extend an unbroken string of losses over several years that has gay activists worried. In most other areas, however, the results showed patterns were meant to be broken:

RACE

The New York City results were ominously polarized. Dinkins won 95% of blacks' ballots, while Giuliani took 76% of the white vote. When Dinkins steps down on New Year's Day, it will mark the first time in 20 years that none of the nation's four largest cities have a black mayor. But Minneapolis, which is 78% white, elected its first black (and first woman) mayor, Sharon Sayles Belton. In Seattle, 75% white, Norman Rice bore the double burden of incumbency and race but nonetheless swept to re-election by a 2-to-1 vote; he has convinced many residents that he is a problem-solving pragmatist whose race is irrelevant. Mayor Michael White, a self-described "pragmatic idealist," won a second term in Cleveland. Detroit's overwhelmingly black electorate chose Archer despite McPhail's charges that he is too friendly to white suburbanites.

TAXES

They are obviously, and intensely, unpopular. Yet voters in Washington State approved a $1 billion increase to pay for a new state health-care plan, and in California, the motherland of tax protest, voters made permanent a half-cent increase in the sales tax for hiring more fire fighters and police. Even in New Jersey, anger at the $2.8 billion increase Florio pushed through in 1990 would not by itself have been enough to beat him, in the view of Whitman's campaign manager, Ed Rollins. His attack against Florio focused on the idea that the state's economy is still sluggish and schools are still poor, "so you got taxed a lot more, and you didn't get anything for it." The upshot, in the view of many analysts: voters will grudgingly approve tax increases they can be persuaded are needed for specific purposes -- but woe to the officeholder who raises taxes and has nothing to show for it.

CRIME

The crack-down-hard approach is usually a big vote getter. It helped mightily to elect Giuliani and Allen, and Washington State voters approved a "three strikes and you're out" law that mandates life imprisonment without parole for anyone convicted of a third violent felony. Yet would-be tough guys can lose too. John Derus based his campaign for mayor of Minneapolis entirely on a law-and-order appeal but was swamped by Sayles Belton, who pledged an increase in social services.

Such mixed results may mean only that the U.S. now qualifies for an observation often made about Russia: it is so big and diverse that two flatly contradictory statements about it will both be true. On the votes could also signify a heartening sophistication among the electorate, an ability to appreciate that not all tax-increase proposals or tough-on-crime candidates -- or even all incumbents -- are the same and to make discriminating judgments. Which is not necessarily consoling to most officeholders or most Democrats, especially the more liberal variety. But it does indicate that a variety of ideas and politicians have a fighting chance.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, Janice C. Simpson/New York, Jack E. White/Trenton and Michael Riley/Atlanta