Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (20 page)

Kristol drew on the work of Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, whose views were a mirror image of Kristol’s. Greenberg wanted the health care plan
to succeed for the same reasons Kristol wanted it to fail. As Greenberg put it later, “this initiative offered the prospect of renewed confidence in this political community’s capacity to promote both the individual welfare and the nation’s growth.” Its passage would be a victory progressives could build on, demonstrating simultaneously the possibility of collective action and the benefits that could flow from it. This is precisely why Kristol insisted that the only logical goal for Republicans was “the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal.” Such an outcome would be a thoroughly cheerful prospect for conservatism. “Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president,” he predicted, “and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.”

Kristol was right about the monumental nature of the setback. The bill died in the fall of 1994 as the midterm election campaign was being joined in earnest. This gave the Republicans new momentum, fostering an impression that Clinton and the Democrats couldn’t govern. True, Clinton and the Democrats could brag about their budget, but Republicans largely succeeded in encouraging the public to ignore everything about it except its tax increases. In 1994, the economy enjoyed its greatest growth in a decade, but it didn’t
feel
like growth.
As the
Los Angeles Times
reported, the year “begot the worst stock market since 1990 and the worst bond market in more than 60 years.” The core Democratic constituencies at the middle and bottom of the economy were still not feeling the full effects of what was in the process of becoming one of the great boom times in American history.

Clinton had won approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but he did so only because a large majority of Republicans had voted for it; a majority of his own party voted no. It was not, in any event, an issue that would mobilize either Democrats, particularly its usually reliable labor constituencies, or Perot’s voters. On the contrary, many Democrats held his battle for the agreement against Clinton. Perot was highly visible in opposing the treaty and debated it on CNN’s
Larry King Live
with Vice President Al Gore. Gore was generally seen as the much crisper debater and the encounter helped his personal standing. But pitting the No. 2 administration figure against the leader of 19 million swing voters was not a wise tactical choice for Democrats.
They would need Perot voters in the 2014 midterm elections. They wouldn’t get them.

The final big congressional confrontation before the election was over a crime bill that Democrats hoped would shore up their reputation for toughness against lawlessness, a matter still on their mind from Dukakis’s defeat. The crime bill contained draconian penalties that made many Democrats uneasy—and would come under sharp attack two decades later for leading to massive over-incarceration, particularly of African-American men. At a critical moment, enough Democrats defected to to derail the bill temporarily. This was taken, correctly, as a major defeat for Clinton. The bill eventually passed but Republicans shrewdly went after it on two fronts. They charged that it was laden with social service pork, and their emblematic attack on a small appropriation for “midnight basketball” programs in inner cities carried unmistakable racial connotations. And they assailed the gun control measures in the bill, which included an assault weapons ban. This mobilized the National Rifle Association for the fall campaign. Thus, even when Clinton and his party followed the New Democrat playbook to defuse those Buchanan “gut” issues, they managed to divide themselves even as Republicans found ways to undercut them. For conservatives, it was another new dawn.

The 1994 Republican takeover of the House is the stuff of conservative legend, and deservedly so. The Republicans gained 54 seats for a 230–204 seat majority on the basis of a 52–45 percent lead in the popular vote. This represented a 6.8 percent swing to the GOP. Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate for a 52–48 majority—and, adding insult to defeat, two Democratic senators, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado and Richard Shelby of Alabama, padded this advantage by switching to the GOP.

Perot’s voters played an important role in the Republican sweep. Two years earlier they had split their votes almost evenly between Republican and Democratic House candidates. In 1994 the Perot voters who went to the polls backed the Republicans by a 2–1 margin. There was talk that it had been the year of “angry white men” for a reason: white men were central to the Republican victory. They had long been somewhat more Republican than other groups. In 1992, 51 percent of them had voted Republican for the House; in 1990, 52 percent of them had. But in 1994, 63 percent of white men voted for the GOP.

Especially alarming for Democrats were their losses in the white working class and middle class. Among white male high school dropouts, the Democratic share of the House vote dropped 10 points between 1992 and 1994; for white male high school graduates who did not go on to college—a classic pollster’s definition of who constituted the “working class”—the Democrats dropped an astonishing 20 points, from 57 percent to 37 percent. The lunch-bucket vote that had been the linchpin of Democratic majorities in the New Deal era was now part of the conservative coalition.

The 1994 election was not simply a major Republican victory. It also changed American politics in ways that help explain much of what would happen later—in elections, in government, and in the conservative movement. Key to the Republican triumph was the completion of their southern realignment. The Republicans had already picked up some southern seats when Clinton was elected in 1992, partly because of reapportionment plans that packed predominantly Democratic African-American voters into a limited number of southern seats. This increased black representation but also created new, overwhelmingly white and conservative districts. The 1992 tremors were a harbinger of the 1994 earthquake, and the election was the final answer to Charles Wallace Collins’s 1947 question:
Whither Solid South?
The white South was now solidly Republican.

Thus: In 1990, Democrats had controlled 83 House seats in the South (the 11 states of the Old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky) to 46 for the Republicans. After 1994, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the South for the first time since Reconstruction: 73 southern House members were Republican, only 64 were Democrats. Republicans also came out of 1994 with a majority of southern U.S. Senate seats and governorships. The overall Democratic vote among southern whites collapsed, too. In 1990, 50 percent of white southerners had voted for Democratic candidates for the House; in 1994, only 36 percent did.

This was the year when American politics was both nationalized and polarized. The process took three forms: congressional voting was brought into line with presidential voting; partisan allegiances were brought into a tighter relationship with how voters actually cast their ballots; and ideological sympathies and partisan sympathies came to overlap to a larger degree than ever.

Going into 1994, Democrats held 51 seats in districts that had voted for
George H. W. Bush in both 1988 and 1992, most of them in southern or border states; in Clinton’s first midterm election, they lost 27 of these. They also lost 21 of the 77 seats they held in swing districts that had voted for Bush in 1988 but Clinton in 1992. On the other hand, they lost only 8 of the 128 seats that had voted Democratic for president in both elections. Voters often said they were tired of partisan politics, but in 1994, they made choices that divided the country along the now-overlapping lines of partisanship and ideology more rigidly than ever.

This was true at the level of the individual voter as well. In the 1990 midterm elections, 23 percent of voters who called themselves Republican nonetheless voted for Democratic House candidates; in 1994, only 8 percent of Republicans voted for Democrats for the House. The same was true ideologically: 37 percent of self-described conservatives voted Democratic for the House in 1990; only 19 percent did in 1994. The sorting by party and ideology was nearly complete: In 1990, fully 22 percent of those who described themselves as conservative and Republican voted Democratic in House races; only 5 percent did in 1994. On the other side, liberal Democrats were one of the only groups in the country that gave
less
support to the Republicans in 1994 than they did in 1990: 16 percent of liberal Democrats voted for Republican House candidates in 1990; four years later, the figure was cut in half.

The sorting was virtually complete by 2010, when only 2 percent of conservative Republicans and 3 percent of liberal Democrats voted for candidates of the opposing party. And the white South continued to move away from the Democrats; by 2010, their share of the white southern vote in House races was down to 27 percent. But political developments that were later described as the product of the Obama years—particularly the polarization that was the topic of such obsessive conversation—were actually set in motion when Clinton was president.

The rise of a competitive House after years of Democratic dominance created strong new political incentives for confrontation. In keeping with Lubell’s theory of “sun” and “moon” parties, a minority party accepting the likelihood of a long period out of power is more likely to deal and compromise with a dominant majority than a party that sees defeat as only temporary and is constantly on the lookout for an edge to win a majority in the next election.

When Obama’s top political adviser David Axelrod would quip that “in Washington, every day is Election Day,” he intended it as a knock on the city’s (and particularly the media’s) lack of interest in governing. But in truth, the ongoing, closely fought nature of both House and Senate elections, a legacy of 1994, meant that for congressional leaders in both parties,
treating every day as Election Day was an entirely rational choice
. It was a form of rationality that would lead to gridlock, polarization, and even impeachment.

Newt Gingrich was always proud of the “Contract with America,” the program for action in the new Congress that almost all Republican candidates signed on to in the fall of 1994.

It’s not that the Contract was actually electorally decisive. “The notion that we won because of the Contract with America was never valid,” said Vin Weber two decades later. It was, rather, “a useful tactic.” Since “a candidate running for federal office for the first time doesn’t always know what to say,” Weber observed, “the contract gave them all something to talk about.”

And the existence of what was cast as a governing document helped soften the Republicans’ image. Having resisted every major component of Clinton’s program, Gingrich’s band wanted to insist that they were more than a party of the very loud “No!” They had ideas for where they would take the country.

In fact, the Contract was highly revealing about the nature of Republican and conservative priorities. It came in two parts. The first pledged to enact immediately a series of rules changes aimed at taking advantage of disaffection (particularly among Perot voters) with how Democrats had run the House. Democratic leaders were cast as tired, out of touch, high-handed, and suffering from an arrogant sense of entitlement. Most of the ideas were crowd-pleasers, among them: requiring that Congress be subjected to all laws applied “to the rest of the country,” reducing the number of House committees and applying term limits to all committee chairs, launching audits to discover “waste, fraud, or abuse” in Congress, and requiring all committee hearings to be made public. There was only one rules change that affected substantive legislation. It required a three-fifths majority to pass a tax increase—which meant empowering a conservative minority to override the
majority’s view on the one issue that, as George H. W. Bush learned, had developed a near-sacred standing for conservatives.

Next, it listed ten specific bills that House Republicans promised to enact during their first hundred days in power. Five of them involved tax cuts or tax limitations of one sort or another. There was a tough-on-crime bill, another to cut welfare, and a potpourri of socially conservative initiatives (“The Family Reinforcement Act”) that included child support enforcement, anti-pornography measures, and more tax benefits to promote adoption and care for elderly parents. The “National Security Restoration Act” included a classic right-wing attack on the United Nations (“No U.S. troops under U. N. command”) along with military spending increases. Another promised bill, aimed at securing the votes of senior citizens, repealed the tax increases on Social Security benefits passed as part of Clinton’s budget package. Two other bills, “The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act” and “The Common Sense Legal Reform Act,” were business wish lists. And for those who despised Congress as a general matter, there were term limits for House members.

The Contract was a politically clever (and carefully focus-grouped) document. The journalist Ronald Brownstein aptly saw the document as one part Reagan, one part Perot, and one part William Bennett, the last a reference to social conservatism’s informal culture czar. One might amend this to say that it was more like two or three parts Reagan, given its emphasis throughout on lower taxes and smaller government and its bows to the corporate sector with its talk of tort reform, deregulation, and various business tax breaks.