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John Podhoretz (Older & Wiser? A Weekly Standard 10th anniversary symposium)
The Weekly Standard ^ | September 26, 2005 | John Podhoretz

Posted on 09/12/2005 7:24:04 PM PDT by RWR8189

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question:

 

"On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.

 


OH, LORD, the government shutdown of 1995. How I craved it. How utterly sure I was that it would reveal the naked political perfidy of the Clinton administration, which was resisting important entitlement reforms and spending restrictions that the nation surely wanted and certainly needed. And, like so many conservatives in Washington, how I had waited for the moment when, at last, there would be a true confrontation between the Big Spenders and the Rugged Individualists that would finally lift the veil of Beltway secrecy on the rottenness of the federal budget.

Oh, Lord, how wrong I was.

The political and social impact of the government shutdown was completely the reverse of what I had expected. For it was not Bill Clinton and the Democrats who were blamed for the shuttering of the government, but Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. Americans wanted the federal government up and running, and they didn't like the image (admittedly fed to them by the liberal media) of a petulant GOP having a temper tantrum because it couldn't get its way.

I learned one key political lesson from the calamitous confrontation in the fall of 1995, which is this: There is a huge divide in this country between people who follow politics closely, either as an avocation or a career, and the vast majority of Americans who don't. Following the seismic 1994 elections in which Republicans won 52 new seats and control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades--and in which the Senate went Republican as well--political people were sure that the balance of power in Washington had shifted decisively to Capitol Hill. The leading political figure in Washington was no longer the president, Bill Clinton. It was the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich was one of those political people, as were all the people around him and all the people in the Washington press corps. But what he and I and everybody but Bill Clinton seemed to realize was this: In 1992, Bill Clinton had received 45 million votes across America. In 1994, Newt Gingrich had received 119,000 votes in a single district in Georgia. Though Clinton had taken only 43 percent of the vote in that election, and was not a particularly strong president, in direct person-to-person combat against Newt Gingrich he had an incomparably stronger hand to play.

Presidents always do, because that's how the Constitution was structured. Just as the Founders intended, representatives in the House speak for local interests in Washington, while senators speak for state interests. The idea that executive power could be exercised from Capitol Hill was the great delusion that gripped Washington following the 1994 elections. It was hubristic and immodest, and Republican politicians had their hats handed to them in ways that reverberate still. (Seen government spending numbers lately?)

It is the president, and the president alone, who serves as the representative of all the people in the nation. At a time of political crisis, nonpolitical people will gravitate toward the president and invest their faith in the presidency. Republicans learned this lesson again, to their sorrow, in the impeachment drama a few years later.

John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is a columnist for the New York Post and author, most recently, of Bush Country.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 104thcongress; 1994; 1995; anniversary; billclinton; classof94; clinton; gingrich; governmentshutdown; johnpodhoretz; newtgingrich; podhoretz; weeklystandard; x42

1 posted on 09/12/2005 7:24:06 PM PDT by RWR8189
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To: RWR8189

Perhaps those NRO people should pay atention to this article, and get a clue. They have been bashing Bush about the phony "he was slow to react" accusation since Tuesday of last week, without really looking at what happened. They are cowards and opportnists.


2 posted on 09/12/2005 7:28:33 PM PDT by Miss Marple (Lord, please look after Mozart Lover's son and keep him strong.)
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To: RWR8189

When people hear the name John Podhoretz, they think "intellectual firepower".


3 posted on 09/12/2005 7:53:12 PM PDT by XpandTheEkonomy
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To: RWR8189
I know the Govt. shutdown made a lot of us mad, and Clinton was perceived as the winner, but the GOP has continued to gain seats almost everywhere, while the democrats spent last week watching many of their voters wading through water trying to escape a city that the democrat party has controlled my entire life.

That mid 90's time frame galvanized a lot of us, and look how far we have come.

4 posted on 09/12/2005 7:54:21 PM PDT by lawnguy (It works Napoleon, you don't even know.)
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To: Miss Marple
They have been bashing Bush about the phony "he was slow to react" accusation since Tuesday of last week, without really looking at what happened. They are cowards and opportnists.

I agree and just said the same on a Dick Morris thread. In step with that, Podhoretz underestimates the influence of the media on public opinion. His surprise that Newt was blamed for shutting down the government indicates that. They (MSM) flog an issue hard for weeks, then do a phony poll to get the results they want, and trumpet that the "American People" believe what they have been flogging. The Dems and MSM did the same to Reagan when he would veto a spending bill.

5 posted on 09/12/2005 8:12:05 PM PDT by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all that needs to be done needs to be done by the government.)
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To: RWR8189

Yes there is space between them on this one, but please understand that NRO and the weak-ly standard are wayyyyyyy tooooo smart for the rest of us simple conservatives. The weak-ly standard has never gotten over the fact that George Bush was the nominee in 2000 and not their boy nutzy from Az.
I have decided to let my current subscription of NR run out. Everything it is is so yesterday.


6 posted on 09/13/2005 4:52:12 AM PDT by jmaroneps37 (The quisling ratmedia: always eager to remind us of why we hate them.)
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