The election results can be described and explained. Their practical effect can be logically predicted. But beyond that, it’s difficult to make much of what happened last week. All year long, the two parties struggled mightily for control of the best-polling buzzwords. Somehow, along the way, no one managed clearly to ask American voters for a direct and important decision about anything. So they didn’t make one. This year will melt seamlessly into next, most of the major players still in place — and in almost exactly the same relative positions. All talk of “mandates” rings hollow.
It rings most hollow, and comes predictably loudest, from President Clinton. No one is more responsible than he for our current politics of unmeaning. For two years now, Clinton has offered to beat any ideological price on whatever the nation might desire, and having so devalued himself — and his party’s creed — to make the sale, he now fulsomely praises his customers’ wisdom. “I was born in a summer storm to a widowed mother in a small town,” the president said in his ridiculously self-dramatizing victory speech, and there is “no person in America tonight who feels more humble in the face of this victory than I do.” Every child in America, he oozed, “deserves the main chance that I was given.”
Indisputably, Bill Clinton is a man with an eye for the main chance. But he is in no way humble. The president believes himself to be a quality historical personality. Introducing him Election Eve, Vice President Gore mentioned Clinton, absent apparent embarrassment, in the same breath with Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Wilson, and FDR. Clinton, Gore said, carries “burdens of unimaginable weight.” The president stays up “well after midnight” in the People’s cause, “however difficult the challenge, however towering the obstacles, however long the odds.” And for Clinton’s reelection win, Gore announced with astonishing and unseemly cheek, “America is not just better off, it’s better.”
So the very goodness of the nation is certified by this election, the Clintonistas believe, and had Bob Dole become president, by logical corollary, our goodness would have been impeached. How, then, to explain the reelection, at the very same moment, by the very same voters, of what just yesterday Democrats called Bob Dole’s brothers in darkness? Newt Gingrich, the antipode foil of the Clinton campaign, will return as speaker of a Republican House. Next year’s Republican Senate majority will be larger.
The Republican party has had a remarkably bad year in 1996, half or more of its wounds self-inflicted. Speaker Gingrich is the most unpopular politician in America. His brave “revolution” is now associated in the public imagination with an obstinate and frightening attempt at Medicare reform. Credit for the 104th Congress’s most notable achievements — welfare reform and domestic-spending reductions, for example — has been partly stolen, infuriatingly enough, by the president. And the entire Republican enterprise has suffered for months under the public-relations weight of the Dole campaign, which managed to win just 41 percent of the popular vote.
Under such circumstances, it is a tribute to the inexorable tidal pattern of partisan realignment that the Republican party in 1996 should have consolidated — and in some cases expanded — its historic 1994 mid-term gains. The GOP’s House and Senate finishes were better than average for a year in which an opposing party’s president is reelected. Its House freshmen, overcoming the targeted demagoguery of an AFL-CIO advertising campaign, were returned to office at a better than average rate. Republicans retain 32 of the 50 governorships. They remain near parity in the state legislatures. And all things being equal, if nothing much changes, the normal electoral pattern, six years into a presidency, will produce a still more Republican America in 1998.
But should nothing much change these next two years? Should the GOP, having more than survived the near-death experience of 1996, now bank its advances and sit quietly still while American politics flies a slow, semi- conscious path to conservatism?
A tempting prospect, no doubt. After four years in office, the Clinton administration has produced what is arguably the most conservative domestic politics since the age of Eisenhower. And the gaseous, souffle mandate Clinton claims for himself (“It is time to put politics aside, join together, and get the job done for America’s future”) is a barely disguised prescription for more of the same. The “vital center” of American politics (his phrase) remains, by bipartisan understanding, a few degrees to the right of current federal reality. Any significant near-term move to the left, no matter what, seems scarcely imaginable.
Bill Clinton cannot afford explicitly to acknowledge this truth, even as he is taking career-burnishing advantage of it. And the Republican party, chastened by recent experience, unsure how to manage its ideological base, and thinly populated with attractive national spokesmen, now seems similarly inclined to lower its voice. “We don’t have to live in a world of confrontation,” Speaker Gingrich observed, rather spiritlessly, after the election. “Let’s see what [the president] has to say and see what he proposes,” Majority Leader Trent Lott proposed, on behalf of an incoming Senate that appears even more conservative in makeup than the House.
As a revenge fantasy, this is undeniably delicious. Bill Clinton is ostentatiously reshuffling his administration. His new staff will be learning difficult jobs from scratch. They will have no substantive agenda to guide them. They will have precious little in the way of policy announcements to feed an irritable White House press corps. They will have burgeoning scandals and criminal investigations to worry about. Why not also let them stew a while in their own partisan juices? By the way, Mr. President, what about Medicare?
The rope-a-dope is a smart and appropriate tactical posture for the GOP the next six months or so. And an unsatisfactory one if it lasts much longer than that, in our view — unsatisfactory on more than aesthetic grounds. The products of self-government are supposed to be purposeful, not automatic. If America is to be conservative, it should become so by deliberate decision, not by endlessly delayed default. Such decisions require debate. Such debates require the articulate, organized leadership of national political parties. At some point soon, if their majority-party status is to be secured, congressional Republicans will have to recover their post-1994 confidence and go back to fullscale work. Just as noisily. Only this time, better.
David Tell, for the Editors
