BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

With President William Clinton's reelection virtually guaranteed, the Democratic administration is preparing to enter a second term by driving forward the bipartisan assault on the basic social gains of working people. The election campaigns of both major parties revealed that this stage is set whether the Democrats or Republicans hold the majority in Congress.

As election day approached, leaders of the National Republican Congressional Committee were encouraging their party's candidates to distance themselves from presidential candidate Robert Dole, in hopes of not losing Congress to the Democrats. Meanwhile, Clinton and his running mate, Albert Gore, have been campaigning for Democratic candidates in a low-key way.

The president added a new plank on October 19 to the series of undemocratic measures he has promoted in recent months. Seeking to embellish his "tough on drugs" credentials, Clinton said he will push for regulations requiring teenagers to be subjected to drug tests in order to get a driver's license.

"We should use the privilege of a driver's license to demand responsible behavior by young people," he declared. Beating drums of `law and order'
In a late October campaign swing through Birmingham, Alabama, Clinton continued to beat the "law and order" drums. He repeated his vow to put 100,000 more cops on U.S. streets and boasted of his support for youth curfews and school uniforms for young people.

Clinton has signed a number of other bills attacking democratic rights, such as so-called anticrime and antiterrorism laws, which expand the use of the death penalty and narrow the right of appeal of the convicted. Recent anti-immigrant measures double the number of border cops and speed up deportations of immigrants without due process.

"I ran for office in 1992," Clinton said at a campaign stop in Daytona Beach, Florida, "and I told you here in Daytona that I would work to end welfare as we know it." He added, "And that's exactly what we're doing." The new Welfare Reform Act eliminates the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program, a component of the Social Security Act of 1935.

In another attack on entitlements, the Defense of Marriage Act bars federal recognition of homosexual marriages, while denying equal benefits to gay spouses.

When Clinton announced this summer that he would sign the welfare bill, he voiced objections to provisions curtailing benefits to "legal" immigrants and cutting back food stamps - provisions introduced by Republicans in Congress. "But at the rally [in Daytona Beach] the President mentioned none of his reservations," the New York Times reported. The president spoke in front of a big colorful sign proclaiming, "Welfare to work, a new beginning."

These measures show that far from being pushed to the right by the Republican-led Congress, the Clinton White House has been leading the offensive against the social conquests the working class won through the labor battles of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

The two main capitalist parties are in the process of redefining their image, as the framework of capitalist politics - including the whole spectrum of liberalism, from Old Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy to the now-dominant New Democrats headed by Clinton - continues to shift to the right.

In August, Republican candidate Dole announced Jack Kemp as his running mate and began to raise the campaign theme of economic growth as an alternative to the "status quo" of job insecurity, falling real wages, and increased social inequality during Clinton's first term. As part of that theme, the Dole- Kemp campaign called for a 15 percent tax cut, while portraying their ticket as protectors of Social Security. Clinton doing good job for U.S. rulers
For a while this makeover gave a boost to the Republican campaign and generated an atmosphere of a real contest between the two big-business candidates - something the U.S. rulers need to help maintain the credibility of their two-party system. But the Dole campaign soon lost momentum.

Meanwhile, Clinton has campaigned on his record. Having done a good job so far on behalf of the wealthy U.S. ruling families, the Democratic incumbent has retained their overall support for four more years.

Many businessmen would have preferred Dole. A New York Times/CBS News poll in mid-October showed that 65 percent of business executives backed the Republican contender, compared with 25 percent who would vote for Clinton.

The capitalists generally consider the Republicans more reliable servants, as they are less associated with the image of the gains won by the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights movement and other struggles in later decades. But Clinton is someone they can work with perfectly well.

In recent weeks, as his campaign flagged, Dole has tried a last-ditch gambit by playing the "character" card against Clinton. Among other things, the Republican candidate raised charges, which appeared originally in the conservative American Spectator magazine, that "Asian money" - in particular from an Indonesian conglomerate, the Lippo Group - were being illegally funneled to the Democratic Party for use in the Clinton campaign.

The Dole campaign has been unable to use the Lippo affair to reverse its fortunes, however. Clinton aides replied to the charges by arguing that Dole and the Republicans had accepted large donations from "foreign interests" too, and proceeded to call for "campaign finance reform."

Nonetheless, controversies dogging the Democratic White House such as the Lippo affair and Whitewater real estate dealings, are likely to persist after the elections. Likewise, Republican Newton Gingrich continues to face an investigation by a bipartisan House ethics committee into charges that he improperly used tax-exempt funds for political purposes. Collapse of Republican Revolution
With the outcome of the presidential campaign a foregone conclusion, attention has focused on the Congressional races. The Democrats need a net gain of 19 seats to gain a majority in the House and four more seats in the Senate. The fact that this is a possibility reflects the collapse of the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994.

When the 104th Congress opened in 1995, House Speaker Gingrich became the point man in floating trial balloons for rapidly making deep cuts in Medicare and Social Security entitlements.

Although some portions of the Republican "Contract with America" have been signed into law by Clinton, the biggest proposed cuts probed by the Gingrich-led Congress proved to be going too far, too fast for the U.S. rulers' current needs. Some Republicans are even advertising themselves as independent of Gingrich. "If people tell you I'm Newt Gingrich, you tell them they got the wrong picture," says an ad for Wisconsin Republican Scott Klug.

Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, made the case for his party to hang onto Congress, even though the White House is out of reach. "If Clinton is reelected, heaven forbid, the last thing the American people want is for him to have a blank check in the form of a liberal Democrat Congress," he said at a Washington news conference.

Clinton for his part has been careful to avoid explicitly partisan appeals in campaign appearances with Democratic candidates, focusing mostly on calling for a big electoral turnout.

"Does Bill Clinton want a Democratic Congress?" Robert Kuttner asked in an October 21 column in the Washington Post. "White House support for the rest of the ticket has been underwhelming."

Kuttner noted that many of the Democratic committee chairmen in the House and Senate would be so-called Old Democrats who "would offer a formula for governance quite at odds with Clinton's own New Democrat approach." A Republican-led Congress could allow the Clinton White House to claim a more bipartisan foundation for pursuing its offensive against working people. Rulers call for deeper assault
The U.S. rulers, however, are running into the limits of their current economic and social policies in an imperialist world of depression conditions and sharpening competition among the capitalist ruling classes. The gutting of welfare aims to scapegoat certain layers of working people and undermine class solidarity, opening the way for more sweeping assaults. But such measures are not enough to reverse the long-term crisis of declining profit rates.

A growing chorus of big-business voices are arguing that the attacks on the social wage begun in Clinton's first term must substantially deepen in the next one.

In an October 23 editorial, the New York Times noted that while the Democratic and Republican candidates both posture as defenders of Medicare, the budgets proposed by both parties would cut funding for that social program.

"But the real issue, which neither side will come clean on, is that Medicare must be cut," the Times editors stated.

A week earlier, the Washington Post ran a similar editorial, complaining about a government announcement that Social Security benefits would increase 2.9 percent next year because of annual cost-of-living adjustments codified by law.

Pointing to the Welfare Reform Law, which ended annual "automatic" cost-of-living increases for food stamps, the editors of the Post suggested: "Why just food stamps? Why not also Social Security benefits?" They noted that such a cut in Social Security payments would affect much larger numbers of people and cut billions more in social spending.

The Post complained that while both Clinton and Dole have proposed naming a bipartisan commission to study ways to cut Social Security, they have not themselves made proposals for cuts. "Maybe that's the ultimate character issue in this election," the paper's editors said, voicing the priorities of the wealthy bondholders.  
 
 
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