The Contract with America was exciting at the time, and welfare reform was a genuine accomplishment. But, with the subsequent GOPe control of the Executive, the House, and the Senate, it was undone, and GOPe couldn’t even bother to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. It had to build the Rove/DeLay “permanent Republican majority”. Toward that end, the GOPe collaborated with Democrats to undo welfare reform, to launch the largest expansion in entitlement programs since LBJ, to erect the apparatus of the surveillance state, to federalize education, to corrupt the banking industry, and all sorts of rottenness.
All of that doesn’t equate with Contract with America being a failure. It succeeded. It was the congress critters that came later that were failures.