American political parties hardly ever concede what’s “bad” in a given campaign result. The dark cloud is always a meteorological anomaly; what really matters is the silver lining. Sometimes — rarely — this is actually true. It is partly true where official Republican explanations for the 1998 midterm elections are concerned. And the part that’s true is . . . well, better than nothing.
GOP press releases urge that the party’s poor showing in this past Tuesday’s congressional canvass be interpreted in the context of Clinton-era partisan realignment. In 1992 there were 267 Democratic members of the House. In 1999, even after last week’s 5-seat pickup, there will be just 211. In the Senate, Democrats have sustained proportionally comparable net losses — 12 seats — over the same period. All told, roughly 20 percent of the Democrats’ Capitol Hill caucus has disappeared.
In state and local politics, the story is much the same. Democrats held more than half the nation’s governorships in 1992; today they hold barely a third of them. More than 500 state legislative seats across the country have switched hands to the GOP these past six years; here, Democrats appear close to aggregate minority status for the first time in almost half a century. The nation’s two largest cities have Republican mayors.
And so on. Viewed this way, at an Olympian remove, it is the picture of a Democratic party in decline: its regional and demographic New Deal coalition eroded; its once-crystalline agenda of liberalism grown mushy and indistinct; and its electoral appeal, every two years like clockwork, now primarily restricted to fear-mongering about the “mean-spirited” GOP.
This is not exactly a false account of current reality. Or an altogether unhappy one, in general terms, for the Republican party. The size and scope of recent history’s cumulative GOP victories remain genuinely impressive. And yet it is a dishonest Republican who tells you he is not — at best — profoundly disappointed by Tuesday’s election returns. And it is a foolish Republican who fails to see something positively ominous bubbling under the surface of those returns.
By the sixth year of any presidency, almost without fail in past experience, the White House is bruised and exhausted, voters are restless and impatient, and the opposition party makes significant gains in the House and Senate. Such a formula does not apply to this White House, GOP spin doctors point out. Bill Clinton suffered his mid-term election repudiation early, in the Year Two Republican landslide of 1994. So there was relatively little room left for Republicans to advance in 1998, and expectations should have been adjusted accordingly.
But there was another major abnormality in the just-concluded campaign, as well. It was conducted in a year when national political attention was entirely absorbed by a single controversy: a spectacular scandal, over the course of which it was established beyond question that a sitting (Democratic) president had brazenly lied to the country — and had perjured himself both in civil litigation and before a criminal grand jury. It surely means something that the Republican party, especially given its already secured structural advantages in the nationwide top-to-bottom partisan order, has been unable to leverage Bill Clinton’s unprecedented disgrace into larger GOP House and Senate majorities.
But it does not mean what Democrats and Republicans now say it means. They are weirdly agreed about “what went wrong” for the GOP. The Clinton White House and its various flunkies insist that Republicans made a critical mistake by focusing the election, with a late advertising campaign, on Monica Lewinsky and the pending impeachment inquiry. The GOP would have been much better off, this analysis goes, had it not gone silent on — and thus conceded to the Democrats — all those “real issues” that ordinary voters prefer their representatives to address. House Speaker Gingrich, for his part, disputes that his party did any such thing. Republicans, he contends, had a complete, non-Lewinsky “conservative reform” platform to offer the electorate. But Gingrich concurs that this message did not reach the voters, ignored as it was by a media “obsessed” with scandal, and that the GOP was wounded as a consequence.
Now, it is certainly the case that a great number of Americans, for reasons that do not flatter them, remain unprepared to reject a president who has committed multiple felonies right before their eyes. But it is not at all clear that they are eager to reject a Republican party that is still actively considering impeachment.
According to the exit polls, the Clinton scandal did not figure directly in most people’s voting on November 3. In fact, the small sector of the electorate that did file a conscious “Lewinsky ballot” on Tuesday appears to have cast a slight majority of its votes for the GOP — and against the president and his party.
What does seem fairly clear from these and other current national polls is what would have happened on Tuesday if Republicans had in fact done what so many now suggest they should have done — what Gingrich claims they tried to do. Had the GOP decided to make the race a plain partisan choice between comprehensive legislative agendas, Contract with America-style, its candidates would very likely have performed worse. Because, across a wide range of issues that purportedly “matter,” Republicans now find themselves at a serious disadvantage.
All the final pre-election surveys of national opinion are consistent on this score. On question after question, Democrats are preferred by gaping margins — by 20 percentage points or more on education, on Social Security, on Medicare, on health care, on “caring” about people, and on understanding “the needs and problems of families.” The GOP has even lost its traditional and treasured edge on taxes.
It’s not so much that American voters reject, in their practical details, the Republican policy prescriptions implied by such broad-brush issue labels. Quite the contrary: Voters more often than not enthusiastically embrace those same prescriptions when they are implemented by activist GOP governors and state legislatures. Even so, poll results this big — and this bad — cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. Nor can they be cured with the medicine best loved by political parties in a state of denial: a fresh set of focus-group-tested buzzwords and slogans.
Nationalized party-favorability numbers, collectively and issue-by-issue, generally reflect levels of voter confidence in each party’s stewardship abilities. They constitute a summary judgment on the public face each party presents the country from Washington. The Republican face, put bluntly, has been too ugly for too long.
Since 1994, Americans have watched the GOP indulge itself in a sequence of blunders: the government shutdown; the hapless Dole presidential candidacy; the clumsy House coup attempt against Gingrich; the botched 1998 budget endgame with Clinton. At the same time, and of far more fundamental importance, Americans have watched a Republican party in crude and constant philosophical oscillation. One week, the congressional GOP flees its own stated principles in fear. The next week, it pretends to promote those principles simply by barking and growling at everyone who disagrees. Winning politics obliges a party simultaneously to reassure its faithful and earn converts by persuasion. The Republican congressional leadership, by contrast, has too often failed to achieve either goal, by failing at the most elemental task of a political party: to make a clear and intelligent argument on its own behalf.
There is one bright spot for the GOP in the latest opinion data. On one constellation of issues, Republicans maintain a powerful advantage over Democrats. For protecting “strong moral values” and preserving “higher ethical standards,” Americans consider the Republicans a significantly better party. And this preference does have a real electoral effect. Morality and ethics were the second most commonly cited issue in Tuesday’s exit polls, and the vast majority of voters who responded that moral concerns were crucial to their vote cast Republican ballots. Call it the “hidden Lewinsky factor.”
Or call it social-issues conservatism — much derided as a Republican albatross, but still and always the core of the party’s appeal. Of the two major political philosophies, conservatism imposes the much more stringent and difficult discipline on its would-be leaders. They must defend verities so long accepted that they are no longer fully understood. They must routinely explain why certain ideas are right or wrong, and why the distinctions matter. They must sometimes pursue projects that are at once wholly right and widely unpopular — like the impeachment of a president. And they must do it all with grace and wit, and confidence-inspiring gravity and calm.
This, alas, the present congressional Republican party has manifestly failed to do. A year from now, when the presidential campaign of 2000 takes center stage in the country’s politics, new personalities will assume national GOP leadership. They will inherit what remains America’s majority party, a party whose bedrock strength is its willingness directly to confront troublesome questions of public and private morality. It is something to look forward to. But a year is a very long time to wait. Ideas do not speak for themselves. Someone must step forward who is capable of making the case for conservative principle as the animating force of a governing Republican party.
William Kristol is editor and publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and David Tell is its opinion editor.
