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.
I doubt you will see that type of dominance, but if the GOP can keep control of the House it can effectively whittle away at the Democrat coalitions which depend on getting 'paid' by the Party for their votes.
And even better, the allegedly more "mainstream" moderate Rats like Bayh of Indiana are threatening to continue the obstruction in the war on terror and on voting for judges. At least that's what I've been reading on the Sunday Show thread. The idiots will continue to lurch left and careen into oblivion.
Yes, and the contrast to the Dems couldn't be sharper. The Dems are scrambling to find any leader at all.
What is even better is that so many potential GOP leaders are able to come together, choose one, and then rally behind their choice. The Dems have a cat fight, and never support each other.
Yes, the GOP did have Smith, but he got put in his place!
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