Posted on 11/09/2002 4:40:12 PM PST by knighthawk
JFK had it wrong: Defeat has a thousand fathers. Two days later, and already the Democrats' miserable performance in Tuesday's mid-term elections has produced a sheaf of political paternity suits. It was the fault of the Democratic leadership. No, it was President Bush and his bully pulpit. Unless it was the failure of the Dems to present a coherent alternative. Or maybe it's just the war.
These explanations all have one thing in common: They treat the results a matter of tactics, the election as a singular event. Certainly campaigns matter. And certainly the results are striking, measured against a number of historic benchmarks: The first time the party that controlled the White House has increased its seat count in both houses at mid-term since 1934, the first time the Republicans have managed it ever. But what is more striking is not how anomalous these results are, but how consistent they are with recent electoral trends.
This is not the first time the Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress. Indeed, they have done so through five straight elections, since the 1994 mid-terms. This is not even the first time a Republican president has governed with the help of a Republican House and Senate. That happened in 2000, for the first time in nearly a century, though it was overlooked in all the Florida madness. This election has merely confirmed a growing Republic stranglehold, one that has been in the works for two decades, and one that the Democrats seem helpless to break.
The best way to show this is to contrast it with what went before. Through nearly five decades, from FDR in 1932 to the end of the 1970s, the Democrats dominated national politics in the United States. For all but four of those years, they controlled both houses. Even when there was a Republican in the White House, he usually faced an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.
The first crack in this regime came in 1980. Not only did Ronald Reagan win the presidency, but the Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1954. Though Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 seemed to signal a swing back to the Democrats, in fact the opposite happened. Just two years later, the GOP took both the Senate and the House, on the strength of the famous "Contract With America." And though conventional wisdom holds that the Republicans overplayed their hand after that, mistaking a protest vote for a mandate, it should be clear by now that 1994 was no fluke. It used to be a bad election for the Democrats if they won fewer than 240 seats in the House. In the last five elections, they have never won more than 211.
The last two have been the worst. The Dems couldn't win in 2000, with a Democrat in the White House and the strongest economy in many years. And they couldn't win in 2002, with a Republican in the White House and the weakest economy in many years. Something fundamental is at work here, beyond the particular tactics adopted in any one election. The Democrats are caught in the vortex of history, on the wrong side of an intellectual debate that was decided long ago, marooned by the slowly retreating tide of welfare-statism.
The Clinton presidency -- perhaps "interregnum" is better -- was itself a tacit acknowledgement of that: Indeed, though personally successful he may well have accelerated the Democrats' long-term decline. Mr. Clinton won as a New Democrat, a centrist who had borrowed much of the Republicans' clothes. After the 1994 debacle, he tilted further toward the GOP, often pushing through legislation over the objections of his own party -- a strategy that became known as "triangulation." It made him a difficult target, and seemed to flummox the Republicans, long enough to win him re-election.
But triangulation has its perils. One, it makes you look shifty and opportunistic, without principled foundations. Two, it amounts to conceding that your opponents are right. And three, eventually you run out of policies to steal. It helped that the Republicans, in the face of this cleverness, kept their nerve: Rather than try a reverse-Clinton, they moved the yardsticks still further, and dared the Democrats to follow them. Agree with them or not, they set the agenda, as they have been doing since Reagan. The Democrats have been reduced to one of two responses: "Don't," or "Oh all right, but let us do it."
It is in this context that the incoherence of the Democratic campaign in this election should be understood. What do you do when you are on the wrong side of history? Agree with Mr. Bush's tax cuts, for example, and you give voters little reason to choose you. Oppose them, and you risk being marginalized.
This is about much more than Mr. Bush's likeability, in short, or the immediate issues of war and homeland security. The building of the welfare state took many decades, in which the left won many important -- and permanent -- victories: It is accepted on all sides that the state has certain social responsibilities, even by those who would prefer these were addressed by less statist means. The unwinding of the Leviathan state is likewise a decades-long process, which has barely begun. Until it is completed, the Democrats will be on the defensive.
GWB garnered a LARGE campaign war-chest. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKED HIM AND THEY GAVE HIM MONEY.
Repeatedly, the Bush campaign released information that showed that Bush wasn't getting $1,000 contributions from corporate PACs; he was getting $50-$250 dollar donations from individuals.
But people here, as you just did, continued to put out this lie because they just plain didn't like George W. Bush. To those of us who DID like and appreciate him--and I was originally a supporter of Alan Keyes--the venom was pointless.
Anyway, my real point is that there are now fewer folks like YOU among the ranks of conservatives, and more like ME.
That doesn't mean you can't continue to be blind on the subject. You have that right. But you'll still be wrong.
He was my governor; I KNEW what a fine man he was, and what a wonderful wife he had.
The garbage that was thrown his way here on FR, though, did not easily abate. It was really only after 9/11 that that began to happen.
By this past Tuesday, many of the "fence-sitters" had become converts. Add to them, the people in general that had come to recognize what a fantastic leader we had, and when Mr. Bush asked for help from the voters, he got it.
That, IMO, is the story of November 5, 2002.
I think it just might be a long term shift. I admit to being a JFK Dem in the 60's, and I held onto that (Nixon was scum, and not a reason to switch). I was a Reagan Dem after '80, and didn't switch because clintoon is scum - I thought that was an aberration. I switched to GOP when W was nominated. His political ideas are very similar to both JFK's and Reagan's, and he's an honest and moral guy. And the clintoons still had control of the Dems.
Who's the opposition leader? clintoon? hillary? gore? or gary hart, whose name has come up often lately?
On the other hand, the GOP has waiting in the wings Jeb, Condi, Powell, and a long list of pols with the same ideas and high moral standards.
The Dems have a long way to climb out of the muck, and not a clear leader to help them do it. They either need that, or a real scoundrel at the head of the GOP, and it doesn't look like they'll get that.
Absolutely. While I am convinced that the swing to more conservative values is permanent (due to the failure of the liberal "ideas" already tried), converting that into party dominance is not a slam-dunk. IF we can achieve the landslide victory in '04, I believe it will be smooth sailing from then on; if not, it will still come, will take a bit longer, but will happen in my lifetime (I'm 51). All of us with conservative beliefs must work like the dickens and do the best we can for '04.
On the other hand, the GOP has waiting in the wings Jeb, Condi, Powell, and a long list of pols with the same ideas and high moral standards.
It is spectacular how long the list of absolutely incredible Republican candidates (leaders) is, and I'm not going to start adding to your list since if I did there would be scores, and many others would be left out. However, those you mention are only some of the more visible "political" figures, but there are so many in the media arena who could just as credibly be mentioned as presidential timber (Keyes, Hannity, etc.) as well as many others in the arena of business (see Dubya minus 10 years), and other arenas, who could be listed as well
INTEGRITY - HONESTY - BELIEVERS - RATIONAL - COURAGEOUS
what a contrast to the demodogs and their lightweights.
The essence of post-Reagan America. Thank God.
A landslide is possible, but the Democrats must cooperate. They appear to be doing just that, pushing one of their flaming extreme feminazi-liberals, Pelosi, to a top leadership position.
10 posted on 11/09/2002 5:03 PM PST by fatguy
OK, it's 3+ hours later and we're waiting. Long dinner...
I think you are right. Take Massachusetts for example. The socialist Dems ran a candidate (Shannon O'Brien) that should have been a shoo-in. She is a well connected hack (lifetime politician) that had the whole Democratic machine behind her. But she lost by a comfortable margin to a Republican (Mitt Romney) that ran on a conservative platform.
How did this happen in Massachusetts? Talk radio here is dominated by conservatives. For weeks leading up to the election, we had local talk show hosts such as Howie Carr and Jay Severin pounding away at Shannon O'Brien and urging listeners to vote for Mitt Romney. I think it worked.
The worm has certainly turnd so far as the conventional liberal media. More people are getting their news from talk radio or the internet and less people are tuning in Dan Rather or reading the Boston Globe (The conservative Boston Herald continues to gain ground on the Boston Globe in circulation).
Add Rush Limbaugh to the mix. With millions of people listening to Rush Limbaugh, you have to think that he is making a big difference out there.
Very true.
Something the Republicans did not realize and why they lost seats in the following years.
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