Changing Places in the Capital

...Near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue there are only surface adjustments in daily routines...

...Two liberal mailing firms—one in Washington and the other in San Francisco—report that they are geared up for a land-office business now that this year's results at the polls have handed them the direct mail expert's greatest weapon: fear...

...Salary: $18,000...

...The Willie Nelson poster is still up, but it has been joined by an old Chesterfield ad, showing a smiling Reagan with a cigarette photomontaged between his teeth (Reagan didn't smoke...

...Commitments to ideas, programs, constituencies, and dreams run deep and strong in the legislature...

...But nobody knows yet which way it will trot...

...On a recent evening at a table there with three White House workers, I learned that one will teach political science, the second was leaving the next day for Florida to being selling home lots for a developer near Disney World, and the third, in her early 30s, has decided to have her first child...

...As was shown by votes in the lame-duck session, some Democrats seem resigned to following the GOP...

...I hope it will be more interested than it has apparently been in participation in and contributions by people on the Hill...

...said a surviving Democrat over a Rob Roy on the rocks...

...In January, Chairman Thurmond expects to have around 70 people on his majority staff, which would force a reduction in Kennedy's minority staff to 35...

...A women's rights organization placed a single want ad for an attorney with a background in sports and journalism...

...More than 50 resumes were received in reply...

...Too little help was given to Democrats up for House and Senate seats...

...You should've heard those people during our campaign...

...On days when Reagan is in town, the crowd of reporters in the wind and rain outside his government-supplied townhouse on Jackson Place is larger than the covey huddled in the warmth of the White House press warren...

...He was talking about the Administration's record, not its unsuccessful re-election campaign .Thetheoryisthatthe Democratic constituencies of the poor and the exploited were so shrunken by the success of the New Deal and the Great Society that the party's base disappeared, and Carter's inability to offer conspicuously superior management or fiscal stability—factors appreciated by the middle class voters who now outnumber the economically downtrodden— sealed his fate...

...Gallows humor (literally, in the sense of reaction to Republican Senator-elect Jeremiah Denton's suggestion of capital punishment for adultery on Federal property) sustains some in their moment of travail .There is even a flurry of activity by workaholics who have decided to find out how Senate liberals can conduct filibusters against Medicaid cuts and a two-tier minimum wage despite the antifilibuster rules that they invented themselves in recent years...

...Indeed, when party leaders from around the country choose a permanent Democratic national chairman in early 1981, they might surprise Washington insiders...

...On a more mundane level, thousands of displaced Democratic staff members are having a hard time finding employment . In contrast to Administration officials, many of whom came from other jobs just four years ago, some Hill workers have spent their entire professional lives in politics...

...Four blocks north, about 200 lesser lights carry out mechanical tasks for Reagan in an 11-story rented building on M Street that used to house obscure offices of the Department of Energy and the General Services Administration...

...The leadership in the House and Senate should have a voice in the decision-making," hegrumped...

...The carnage on the Senate side is, if anything, proportionately greater than in the Executive Branch, since Senate Republicans hope to cut the chamber's budget by 20 per cent...

...Few Democrats (exceptions being New York's Senator Daniel P. Moynihan and Representative Donald W. Riegle Jr...

...Around the corner on 18th Street, business has been booming at three establishments...

...Further, because they are more ideological and less management-oriented than their Executive counterparts, many ousted Democrats on Capitol Hill don't want to transfer their skills to nonpolitical endeavors...

...The worst thing that could happen [to the Democrats] would be for the Republicans to actually lower inflation and unemployment," the Hill worker told me as he gestured for his third Rob Roy...

...On the Judiciary Committee, for instance, outgoing Chairman Edward M. Kennedy has 107 employees and ranking minority member Strom Thurmond has 51...

...Unlike Democratic officeholders who sneered at the conservatives as screwballs, many of those leaders at the grass roots have a different perspective...

...It's a challenge, right...

...None expects to re-enter national politics...

...Had Byrd or other Hill leaders entitled to automatic seats on the DNC attended its sessions in the last few years, that complaint might be taken more seriously...

...I keep saying to myself that I can work with Them...

...Today, of course, there are fewer new jobs than usual for Democrats in the House...

...The President, Democratic money problems and theconservativepoliticalactioncommit-tees are blamed by many for the November debacle...

...for the third Presidential election in a row...

...If their man lost, most of them simply found another place within the seemingly permanent majority...

...But They're awful...

...At the Class Reunion, a nostalgia bar on H Street, the night manager now wears dark, three-piece suits...

...The anger and fear on Capitol Hill extends far beyond the jobless, however...

...Consider, also, that only two Democrats in the new Senate, Russell Long of Louisiana and Henry Jackson of Washington, have ever been in the minority before...

...It was unexpected by victors and vanquished alike...

...The clerk in the government bookstore branch at the International Communications Agency said it took less than an hour to sell its copies of theofficial "plum book," listing top patronage jobs available for prospective Reagan rewardees...

...Along with nonparty leaders in labor, women's and minority organizations, they have for several years been fighting the conservatives, including the mail-order specialists who targeted and brought down several liberal senators...

...But the intellectual underpinning for responsible counterproposals to the fresh Republican ideas that are about to be tested is conspicuously absent at this point...

...To do that, they plan to have smaller majority staffs than the Democrats had, and this will leave fewer slots for the minority...

...Over coffee with reporters, he chided the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for being preoccupied with the Presidential race...

...Because few Democratic congressional workers anticipated this year's disaster, many are scrambling desperately for the few positions anywhere in town that might be open to them...

...I guess we blew it," a far-sighted Carter man who has had his next job lined up since August 1979 told me...

...Behind the townhouse, in the New Executive Office Building on 17th Street, a few desks are set aside for transition operatives from Reagan's team who are examining the budget...

...A resume preparation firm even had 60 job-losers walk up to its sixth-floor office on Veterans Day, when the elevator was turned off...

...But that would be good for the country, if not for us...

...of Michigan, a one-time Republican) are yet ready to think of the election results as a continuation, after the Watergate interruption, of the post-Great Society backlash against their party's programs and performance...

...Resigned fatalism is about as negative as anyone gets...

...The Democrats are being squeezed out...

...Reagan may like FDR...

...But the town's other transition, involving preparations for the Republican control of a Congressional chamber for only the third time in the last half century plus changeovers resulting from the heavy GOP gains in the second chamber, is rough and rowdy...

...The voters hit the donkey over the head...

...The Republican bunch at the north end of the bar now extends halfway down the room, almost to the reporters' traditional gathering place at the south end...

...So far, in fact, the rotating top layer of the Executive Branch and those thousands of appointees who work in, with or against it strike me as relatively cheerful...

...As for Carter's announcement that he had no interest in exercising the ex-President's privilege of serving as titular head of hisparty, it was superfluous...

...That got its attention...

...Meanwhile in Marigold's, where the permanent middle-level civil servants and lesser-known attorneys gather to enjoy big drinks, sports talk and husky lunches, the cheerful customers are boasting that they voted for the winner Andrew Moixison is chief political correspondent/or the Cox Newspapers...

...Twin liberal hopes are heard here frequently these days: that the increased fear will boost fundrais-ing on the Left, and that the Senate Republicans will swing to the Right and lose their mandate, as they did in 1954...

...On the Senate health subcommittee, all but two Democratic staffers will be victims of the November aftershock...

...And since two-thirds of the last two dozen White House occupants have been Republicans, the Federal city is having little trouble adjusting to the impending inauguration of Presidentelect Ronald Wilson Reagan...

...Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, soon to be the minority leader, is one of those blaming mechanical and personality problems, rather than policy failures, for the Democratic defeat...

...They don't...