Posted on 11/06/2002 8:19:14 AM PST by Pokey78
THE ERA WHEN THE PARTY that doesn't hold the White House automatically gains seats in the House and sometimes seats in the Senate as well--is over. Democrats bucked that century-old habit in 1998, winning 5 House seats while Bill Clinton was president. And Republicans, led by President Bush, did it even more decisively in yesterday's congressional election. For the first time ever, the presidential party captured control of the Senate in a midterm election.
There's one particular reason for the death of the off-year trend: House incumbents have safer seats than ever now. When new districts are drawn every 10 years, they're done, first and foremost, with incumbent protection in mind. If an incumbent isn't popular, his new district will be gerrymandered to be especially safe. Should the other party think about reapportioning an incumbent out of a seat, he will join in a back room deal that protects incumbents of both his party and the opposition's. As for senators, they've only occasionally been subject to the midterm election rule. They certainly weren't this year.
So much for history. Let's get to the winners and losers in the 2002 midterm election. The top winner, of course, was President Bush, whose furious campaigning for Senate and House Republicans was a gamble that paid off handsomely. No president has spent so much time stumping for so many candidates of his party in so short a time. Bush emerged as the dominant figure in the campaign, creating a GOP tilt that affected races all over the country. Democrats who won, like Jennifer Granholm in the Michigan governor's race, did so by smaller margins than expected. And vulnerable Republicans such as Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida won by surprisingly large margins.
Another winner: Bush's White House adviser Karl Rove. He guided the president in handpicking Senate candidates in Minnesota and South Dakota and in clearing the field in Texas for John Cornyn to be the Republican Senate candidate. Rove also figured correctly that the best way to keep the House in GOP hands was to forge state-by-state agreements with Democrats to protect their incumbents along with Republican incumbents. He advised Republican leaders accordingly and, since Rove is the president's political guru, they obeyed. It worked.
Winner: Ralph Reed, the Republican chairman of Georgia. He promised not to be outdone by Democrats in turning out his party's voters--and he wasn't outdone. Georgia produced two huge upsets against popular Democratic incumbents, ousting Sen. Max Cleland and Gov. Roy Barnes. You may remember Reed from his former life as the brains behind the Christian Coalition when it was important political group, which it no longer is.
Winner: Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who chairs the Senate GOP campaign committee. He's a hands-on chairman who took a few risks. One risky decision was to pump money into Louisiana to back Suze Terrell and attack Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. The goal was to hold Landrieu below 50 percent and force a runoff. It was achieved. Terrell will now face Landrieu in a runoff on December 7. Frist decided where every dime of GOP money would go and even reviewed the scripts of all TV ads.
Winner: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, Frist's counterpart in the House. Davis is a political junkie who knows more about every House seat than anyone on the planet. And it showed. He recruited an impressive group of Republican candidates, intervening in internal GOP fights when necessary. He also got the president to make appearances for Republican candidates in competitive districts. That's mere House candidates, not Senate. Davis did so well that Republicans won two House seats in Georgia that have been carved out for Democrats.
Loser: The biggest one is Tom Daschle, who loses his post as Senate Majority Leader. Daschle approved the strategy of having Democratic candidates avoid fights with Bush, stay fuzzy on controversial issues, and emphasize attacks on their Republican opponents. The best example of a Democratic candidate who followed this advice was Gov. Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire, seen by columnist Bob Novak as having run a perfect campaign. She lost anyway in her Senate contest against Republican representative John Sununu.
Loser: Bill Clinton. He engineered the nomination of Democrat Carl McCall for governor of New York. McCall ran a disastrous campaign and lost ignominiously to GOP governor George Pataki. Clinton campaigned in Florida for Democrat Bill McBride, but his appearance probably hurt more than it helped. And his mission in Arkansas to put Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jimmie Lou Fisher over the top failed miserably.
Loser: Steve Largent. He was a Republican golden boy, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who was expected to win the governorship of Oklahoma easily after resigning his House seat. And after that, national office beckoned. No more. His campaign fizzled in the home stretch and he lost to Brad Henry, an obscure Democratic state senator.
Loser: The Democratic party. It will now face a period of bitter internecine struggle, liberals versus moderates. Liberals were critical of the strategy of going soft on Bush in the campaign. They preferred to fight on taxes and war with Iraq. Since the strategy of not fighting Bush failed, liberals will now demand the party veer to the left, and moderates will try to block that trend. Meanwhile, Republicans are likely to be even more united behind Bush.
Many other winners could be cited: new senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia; Mitt Romney, the victorious Republican in the Massachusetts governor's race; Mike Murphy, the GOP media consultant whose winning clients included Romney and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida; and the man who beat the Kennedy clan, new governor Bob Ehrlich of Maryland. Other losers? Let's not overlook Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe, who was responsible for producing a strong turnout, particularly by minorities. He didn't deliver and now will surely lose his job.
I have been telling everybody how WRONG Novak is about almost EVERYTHING!
...that Liberal member of DU is actually a FReeper in disguise.
That is a maneuver I really respect.
Keep an eye on this guy. He was the genious behind the one time potency of the Christian Coalition. When he left that organization, it faded into obscurity. Now he's doing for Georgia what he did for the CC. He is very smart. Carvellian in his political astuteness (I loath Carville, but you've got to admit his political instincts are very good). The Republican party needs more folks like Reed.
Add Michigan to the list of losers.
We went even more demonrat last night.
*sigh*
Agreed. We definately got the shaft. Things are going to really suck here for a long time...
HeHeHe
Big bump for Rudy. He is so real, no plastic there.
You may be right, but I think that the Dems have a constituency problem they don't know how to solve. They can't win without mobilizing their base (which didn't happen yesterday), but in order to mobilize it, they have to tack hard to the left, which puts off centrist swing voters.
They tried to avoid that trap this time by going wholly negative - having no platform but abusing the Republicans. They figured their base would like that, and that the economy would make it palatable to the swing voters.
Woops. Didn't work. The base wants in-your-face socialism and the swing voters want moderation and civility.
The only Democratic politician since LBJ who has been able to stand on these two stools is Clinton (Carter turned out to be fool's gold), and he did nothing whatsoever about changing the basic situation. He just greased both sides of the problem with whatever mojo it was the evil fairies gave him at birth and slithered on past it. But Elections 2000 and 2002 have shown that Clinton left his party exactly nothing. They are still in the trap they have been in since McGovern. Pulling Mondale out of mothballs and letting him get smacked on the head again was the gorgeously perfect symbol of their problem.
Any coalition that can gain a long-term lead in American politics now is going to be center-something. I think that Bush has a better shot at putting together a center-right coalition (in which the "right" means something) than the Dems do of reproducing Roosevelt and putting together a long-lasting center-left coalition. It helps that Bush's base, unlike the Dems', is not actually insane.
As far as I can see, they have two options for '04: go hard left, Gore 2000 style, or else go center and offer the electorate Bush Lite. If Bush doesn't fumble badly over the next two years, I don't see either as a winning strategy.
It's kind of nice that now we have "Rockefeller Democrats" who, like the Rockefeller Republicans of old, promise to do the same thing the other party will do, only do it more "moderately." Big change in my lifetime.
Wow! That's a shocker. Steve can come here to WI and run anytime he wants. Who did he play for; Colts, Oilers? Anyone know? I remember when he use to play.
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