OK, So Clinton Wins--Then What Happens? : Election: The last two Democrats to take office amid economic crises--Roosevelt and Carter--faced difficult times. Can Clinton handle it?

WASHINGTON —  Now that Bill Clinton is becoming the front-runner, albeit still a shaky one, that shifts the national spotlight to the next political step: the potentially far-reaching results of a Clinton Administration. There’s reason to worry that a Democratic victory would be slower to energize the economy than party rhetoric might suggest--and more likely to unleash major liberal policy initiatives.

There’s no mistaking history’s yellow caution lights. The last two Democrats to take over as President amid serious economic problems--Jimmy Carter and Franklin D. Roosevelt--either failed to find solutions or needed the tramp of soldiers’ feet to restore prosperity. Nobody had a fast solution. Moreover, should Clinton win by more than a few points, he’d be the first elected Democrat since Roosevelt to enter the White House with the momentum of broad popular endorsement, which could unleash powerful ideological--and spending--forces.

The practical caveats are just as obvious. The Democrats already have the House and Senate; give them the presidency as well and they’ll be institutionally unstoppable. Voters might find themselves getting legislative whiplash rather than watching legislative gridlock between George Bush and Congress. On the other hand, many people rumored for the top jobs in a Clinton Administration are the usual suspects. Fresh young ideas may turn out to be tired old routines. Moreover, established Democratic special interests--from organized labor and environmentalists to teachers and trial lawyers--are panting to get back in the Potomac candy store. If the Democrats are going to feed them and protect the middle class, too, they’ll be hard-pressed to reduce the federal deficit--and if they can’t, Wall Street and the financial markets will be far less forgiving than they were of Reagan-Bush era deficitry.

To get an idea of how far-reaching a Clinton victory could be, keep in mind that the last time voters elected both a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress was in 1976, partly as a reaction to Watergate and Richard M. Nixon’s 1974 resignation. Carter barely won, with a margin of just 2 points. Nobody assumed he had much of a mandate, and he was quickly buffeted by conservative as well as liberal tides.

Indeed, Carter’s weakness underscores just how much of a success Clinton could be headed for. Of the other three Democrats elected President after 1945, two--Harry S. Truman in 1948 and John F. Kennedy in 1960--had also been elected by narrow 1- to 4-point popular-vote majorities. Only Lyndon B. Johnson, elected in 1964 after succeeding to the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, won a big victory. In short, no new Democratic President since Roosevelt has taken office on the wave of a sweeping election success. If Clinton wins by even 6 or 8 points, he’ll be the first, and Congress will be ready to listen hard--and perhaps turn his proposals into marching orders.

There’s also a more sweeping possibility. Three times this century when one party controlled the White House for at least three terms, sentiment for change ballooned enough to produce an out-party landslide--in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson ended 16 years of GOP rule; in 1932, when Roosevelt cut short 12 years of Republicans, and in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower ended two decades of Democrats in the Oval Office. All three races yielded double-digit victory margins. If Clinton follows suit--quite possible, if you believe current polls--his ticket could be punched for the most far-reaching Democratic presidency since Johnson’s Great Society or maybe Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Lots of old Democratic warhorses and constituencies are already pawing the ground, smelling the brimming federal oat bag that’s been denied them for 12 long years--indeed, since 1968, because the four-year Carter Administration didn’t really deliver. This is a problem for both Clinton and the national interest, because the prospect of the various domestic-program and entitlement lobbies bellying up to the bar for a new bottle of Old Spendthrift won’t appeal to independent voters in the final weeks of the campaign. In addition, it will sour the financial markets in 1993 or 1994 if President Clinton is seen as letting the fiscal spigots be turned on again.

Let me stipulate: In some ways, any such perception would be unfair. Some domestic needs have been starved during the Reagan-Bush era--complaints on behalf of children and cities, in particular, have a case. Nonetheless, no new Democratic Administration can easily deny the larger group of long-frustrated would-be feeders--especially with congressional Democratic appropriations barons sure to push their case backstage. Clinton could wind up put between a fiscal rock--established party interest-group demands--and a hard place--his much-publicized, and hopefully sincere, promises to middle-class voters to protect their interests.

However, if the outcome is a bigger-than-ever budget deficit, you can bank on Wall Street economists and investors being a lot less forgiving of huge and growing Democratic deficits than they were of the Reagan-Bush red ink. For that red ink promoted conservative causes like defense spending, upper-bracket tax cuts and financial-system bailouts.

Fears of resurgent deficits and renewed inflation could, in turn, boost inflation rates and squeeze any recovery back into the sort of economic slowdown indistinguishable from recession. That would play havoc with Clinton’s political fortunes and promises to the electorate. Yet, Democrats who take office in economic crises do have a record of stumbling. Carter’s failure, from 1976 to 1980, was to let inflation and high interest rates resurge, and this combination beat him in the 1980 election.

Even Roosevelt’s record is chastening. For all his reassurance to Americans that they had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Roosevelt offered no broad solution to the Great Depression. When a second dip, in 1937, pushed the national unemployment rate back up to 15%, Democratic credibility plummeted. It took the arms buildup of 1938-39, and then the outbreak of World War II, to get the stagnant U.S. economy humming again.

There may be a lesson here, too. George Bush has presided over the weakest economic growth rate of any Administration since that of Herbert Hoover, the Depression President that Roosevelt defeated and replaced. Moreover, the financial and debt-bubble collapses of the early ‘90s somewhat resemble the financial and debt-bubble collapses of the early ‘30s. If Clinton wins, he could face an economic challenge as severe as Roosevelt’s--and tough enough, certainly, that economics-as-usual would not do the trick.

This raises still another Democratic remedy-cum-precedent: Is all the talk about Clinton’s being unwilling to get in uniform and go off to war in 1969 the sort of context that could increase the chance that, in the next few years, President Clinton could find a military conflict convenient? Some, no doubt, will raise their hands in horror at the thought--and the unfairness of raising it. Yet foreign wars do have a record of solving national economic problems. Optimists insist another war can’t happen. But human nature and history are not so reassuring--and nationalism is rearing its head all over the world.

In short, now that Clinton is maintaining a solid 10- to 20-point poll lead and starting to look like the next President, it’s well to go on to the logical follow-up: What can we expect for four years if he does win by 8 or 10 points on Nov. 3?

It’s not particularly reassuring.