MAKING TRACKS TOWARD ’92 : Old assumptions die as Republicans and Democrats analyze Tuesday’s results.

WASHINGTON —  During the 1988 primaries, when George Bush was trying to shed the wimp tag, his handlers got him to take a big tractor-trailer for a spin around a New Hampshire parking lot.

Three years later, Sen. Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania climbed into the cab of a metaphorical 18-wheeler of his own. It had “national health insurance” emblazoned on one mud flap and “anti-Washington” on the other. By the time he was through barreling down the road to victory, the road kill included not only former U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh’s senatorial hopes but also a number of cherished political assumptions of the Reagan-Bush era.

Here are three such assumptions: (1) Democrats won’t fight. (2) Liberals can’t win. (3) Even if, in theory, there might be occasional exceptions to assumptions (1) and (2), no-name liberal Democrats who are also dreamy, intellectual, soft-spoken, 65-year-old disciples of Gandhi, who have never run for office before and who advocate huge new government programs can’t beat nationally known, locally established conservative Republicans who are also tough-talking advocates of low taxes, the death penalty and Operation Desert Storm.

There are upsets in politics, and then there are stunning upsets. And then, every once in a while, there is the rarest variety of all--the landslide upset.

Wofford’s was that kind of upset. His rise to victory as Pennsylvania’s first elected Democratic senator since 1962 was notable for its sheer velocity. In May, when Wofford was appointed interim senator, few Pennsylvania voters had ever heard of him. In August, with the campaign revving up, polls showed Wofford running a seemingly insurmountable 45 points behind Thornburgh, a popular former two-term governor. Yet on Tuesday, Wofford won by 55% to 45% of the vote--a 90-day, 55-point swing.

What happened? In the wake of Wofford’s assumption-shattering November surprise, Republicans are looking for lessons, silver linings and scapegoats--not necessarily in that order. GOP National Chairman Clayton K. Yeutter dismisses the Pennsylvania result as “an aberration,” pointing to Republican gains in New Jersey legislative races and to the defeat of Ray Mabus, Mississippi’s New South Democratic governor.

Roger Ailes, Thornburgh’s media adviser--and Bush’s--is putting out the word that his advice to “go negative” harder and sooner was ignored. And in the Washington Times, which often serves as a bulletin board for conservatives, a post-election analysis on Thursday labeled Thornburgh a “liberal” and faulted Bush for caving in to the Democrats on taxes, unemployment insurance and the civil-rights bill. An editorial in the same edition concluded blithely that the message of Tuesday’s results is, “Americans want a government that is more conservative, not more liberal.

Behind the bickering, the Republican anxiety is real. Thornburgh, after all, is the very model of a state-of-the-art George Bush Republican. Thornburgh’s team of political advisers, led by Ailes and the pollster Robert S. Teeter, is slated to run the Bush reelection campaign. Like Bush, Thornburgh is a onetime moderate whose timely adoption of conservative positions greased his path to the upper reaches of the Reagan Administration. Like Bush, he is notable more for the positions he has held than for the ones he has espoused. And like Bush, he seems more comfortable in the “corridors of power” (a phrase he foolishly used in some of his TV commercials) than in the rec rooms of the hard-pressed middle class. If Thornburgh can be beaten, Republicans fear and Democrats hope, then so can Bush.

The theory that Thornburgh’s problem was a deficit of negative campaigning does not stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, Thornburgh took negativity to self-destructive extremes. The most notorious example was a TV ad that began with grainy pictures of a villianous-looking Arab. “Adnan Khashoggi,” went the voice-over. “Notorious big arms dealer. Key figure in Iran-Contra. What kind of man would solicit money from him?” Grainy picture of the Democratic candidate. Voice-over: “Harris Wofford!”

The factual basis of the ad, which clearly implied that the Wofford campaign was being financed by sinister forces, was tenuous even by the debased standards of hit-and-run politics. During the late 1970s, when Wofford was president of Bryn Mawr College, Khashoggi offered to finance a Middle East studies center for a consortium of Philadelphia-area colleges. Wofford turned down the offer and suggested that Khashoggi endow a couple of scholarships instead. Khashoggi said no. End of story.

The fallout of this TV spot was not helpful to Thornburgh. Several major Pennsylvania newspapers ran indignant editorials accusing him of lying, which enabled the Wofford campaign to work up a quick spot questioning the Republican’s honesty. Katharine Hepburn, a loyal Bryn Mawr alumna, issued a statement endorsing Wofford. “I knew Spencer Tracy,” the star of “The Philadelphia Story” seemed to be saying, “and Mr. Thornburgh, you’re no Spencer Tracy.”

Nor does insufficient conservatism explain Thornburgh’s defeat. In his concession speech, the chastened loser offered a likelier hypothesis. “The uncertainty and anxiety about the cost and coverage of health care,” Thornburgh said, “obviously went further than we anticipated.”

That’s putting it mildly. But Democrats have tried running on health care before and it hasn’t worked. The difference now is that people are ready to hear it. In 1980, 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and then Bush could argue that their program of tax cuts and economic deregulation would make everybody prosper, solving the health-care problem as a side effect. That argument no longer flies. Few voters believe that the current conservative “growth” nostrum, a capital-gains tax cut, would do anything more than fatten the purses of the already wealthy.

Moreover, after a decade of laissez-faire propaganda from the White House, voters are beginning to doubt that the government, no matter who controls it, can do much to rescue the underlying economy. But they do believe government is capable of providing universal health care. Every other government in the industrial world manages it, and the experience of Social Security suggests broad-based social programs can work--even in America. People may be resigned to the fear of losing their jobs, but they’d at least like the comfort of knowing they won’t lose their health benefits.

But Democrats should not be too quick about assuming that health care will be their magic ticket to victory next year. Thanks to Wofford, the Republicans are now scrambling to put together a proposal of their own.

Nor has the “social issue”--quotas, pornography, abortion, crime--entirely lost its potency, as the Mississippi result shows. It’s just that Wofford happened to be relatively immune to its effects. He voted for the death penalty in the Senate. He is a Catholic convert whose moderate position on abortion--he favors both choice and parental notification--was enough to win him pro-choice votes but not enough to provoke distracting noise from either side of this contentious issue. And his identification with the civil-rights movement did not hurt him. It dates from the era of Martin Luther King Jr., who nowadays is about as controversial as George Washington. (King, whom Wofford introduced to John F. Kennedy, once affectionately teased Wofford by calling him “a legitimate Negro.”)

Besides, Wofford turned out to be a brilliant candidate. He adopted the health-care issue out of conviction, not on the basis of market research, and voters were entranced with his obvious sincerity. He, not his advisers, came up with what is surely the single best sound bite of the year: “If criminals have the right to a lawyer,” he said again and again, “I think working Americans should have a right to a doctor.” With this one pithy line, he appropriated (without approving) the popular anger at “liberal” judges and marshaled its energy behind the ultimate “liberal” program.

In his televised debate with Thornburgh, Wofford was implacable without being rude, while Thornburgh came across as arrogant, testy and imbued with a sense of entitlement to office. Early in the campaign, when Thornburgh’s campaign manager boasted that “Dick Thornburgh is the salvation of this sorry-assed state,” Thornburgh naturally disavowed the remark. But it stuck, because it resonated with the candidate’s nose-in-the-air persona.

To many white voters, “liberalism” means dithering weakness, a concern with the black poor at the expense of individual responsibility and the middle class, and an excessive solicitude for exotic “lifestyles.” Wofford’s practical, middle-class, relentlessly focused appeal was so remote from this pattern that voters didn’t even identify it as liberal.

But whether this appeal can work in the hands of a candidate more closely tied to social liberalism, or more burdened with baggage of senatorial or gubernatorial incumbency, remains to be tested.