The right medicine - Pennsylvania congressional race between Democrat Harris Wofford and Rick Santorum

PITTSBURGH

'THE PEOPLE of Pennsylvania have given me a mandate," declared Harris Wofford upon winning the 1991 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. The election, he believed, "sent a message all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" and served as "a wake-up call to the President."

Those words may well be used against Senator Wofford at the end of the 1994 race. His Republican challenger, Rick Santorum, is gaining popularity through a campaign focused on smart health-care reform, welfare reform, and Wofford's closeness to President Clinton.

The results of the 1991 race shocked Republicans. Wofford's opponent, Dick Thornburgh, a former two-term governor of Pennsylvania and an attorney general in the Bush Administration, started with a 40-point lead in the polls. The Democratic candidate was so unknown that the main post-election story in the Pittsburgh Press included a guide to pronouncing his name. Wofford, who had been filling the Senate seat vacated by the death of Republican Senator John Heinz, was boosted by the highest voter turnout in 24 years. He won 55 to 45 per cent.

In part, Thornburgh doomed himself. His campaign lacked a grass-roots touch. But Pennsylvania voters were tired of Bush and the recession, and turned off by Thornburgh's connections to Washington. A vote against Thornburgh was a vote against Bush. Furthermore, Wofford struck a chord with health-care reform.

"It is obvious ... that this election involved more than just a Senate campaign between Dick Thornburgh and Harris Wofford," said Thornburgh. "There's a message here for the Administration," said Bush, to "try to help people with health care." Even before the polls had closed, Bush presciently told reporters that Thornburgh was a victim of a campaign that tried to "blame him for problems for which he had no control. Maybe that's a harbinger of things to come." Wofford called it a victory for the cause of national health insurance. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell agreed: "I believe Harris Wofford's victory creates a tremendous momentum forward toward enactment of meaningful healthcare reform in Congress."

But now the pendulum has swung against the kind of health-care reform prescribed by Clinton and Wofford. And Rick Santorum, a two-term congressman from Pittsburgh, is capitalizing on that shift. Wofford, a conventional liberal and former president of Bryn Mawr College, co-sponsored Clinton's Health Security Act. The Santorum campaign has labeled him "a poster child for the Clinton Administration." The non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report calls him "the most endangered incumbent" senator this year.

Santorum, a 36-year-old conservative, offers a clear alternative to Wofford-style health-care reform. His proposal focuses on what he calls the "chronic uninsured." It includes insurance reform, vouchers, and medical savings accounts, and it aims to reduce costs through malpractice reform, voluntary purchasing pools, and administrative changes. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation rated Santorum's bill, co-sponsored by Senator Phil Gramm (R., Tex.), the most freedom-friendly of the nine health plans considered by Congress in the last session. The Clinton bill employed words like "ban," "criminal," "enforce," "fine," "limit," "obligation," "penalty," "prison," "prohibit," "require," "restrict," "sanction," and "violate" nearly 1,500 times, while Santorum--Gramm had only 86 such references. The foundation projected that the Santorum--Gramm bill would cut $26 billion in federal spending, as opposed to the $608 billion added by the Clinton bill. It also predicted that the Clinton plan would lead to price controls.

As in 1991, Wofford has tried to take advantage of the health-care issue, but with little success. In July he participated in a Clinton health-care rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, that featured a local dairy farmer who said she couldn't afford health insurance. A few weeks later the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran a front-page story reporting that a local insurance cooperative, upon hearing of the woman's plight, called her and immediately enrolled her in a plan. "One of my sales people said, "That is crazy that she's not insured,'" a representative of the cooperative told the paper. "'She's a farmer, she's self-employed, we can insure her.' So he sat down with her. Why didn't the White House or Wofford really help out?" Local talk shows blasted Wofford and Clinton for using the woman as a stage prop rather than trying to assist her.

The health-care issue is critical to Pennsylvania, particularly Pittsburgh, where a once-booming manufacturing base has been supplanted by a thriving health-care industry. The Bureau of Research and Statistics at Pennsylvania's Department of Labor and Industry identifies health services as "the single biggest engine driving the economy of Southwestern Pennsylvania." But the bureau foresees a "slow-down in the short-term" due to the impact of health-care reform. That's where the concern lies.