Can Bill Clinton be defeated? At first, in the wake of 1994, many Republicans assumed it would be easy. More recently, as Clinton has rebounded in the polls, Republicans have become more pessimistic. But, they say, it really doesn’t matter that much; the future course of American politics and public policy is safely set in a conservative direction.
The time for such wishful thinking is over. The fact is that Clinton must lose if the Republican realignment is to advance. And to defeat Clinton, Republicans have to put aside, for now, most of their elevated dreams of conservative governance. They need to realize they won’t be able to run on the claim of “promises made, promises kept” — because the Democratic president is likely to block the implementation of many of those promises. Republicans need to make the 1996 election a referendum on Clinton and liberalism. If they do, Clinton can be beaten.
How important is that? Very. If Clinton wins a second term, efforts to continue advancing a conservative reform agenda from the Hill are likely to fail. Clinton has already succeeded in stalling progress on issues ranging from affirmative action to entitlements, from deregulation to SDI. And Clinton will be far stronger in 1997, as a reelected president, than he was in 1995 after his massive repudiation by the voters. In addition, four more years of Clinton court appointments and administrative actions would do real damage. And a failed Republican presidential campaign would exacerbate the fissures in the Republican coalition, and would foster increased dissension within the disappointed ranks of conservatives.
Now, some Republicans do acknowledge that 1997 and 1998 would be difficult years if Clinton were reelected; but they lick their chops in anticipation of huge congressional gains in 1998, given the historical record of sixth-year electoral disasters for the party in the White House. But this is simply a more sophisticated form of wishful thinking. It misses the extent to which a Clinton reelection in 1996 would radically diminish the meaning of 1994. The victory of 1994 needs to be followed by victory in 1996. That’s the way realignments work. The Republican congressional sweep of 1894 was followed by McKinley’s win two years later, launching an era of Republican dominance. Democratic pick-ups in 1930 (remarkably similar to those of the GOP in 1994) were followed by Roosevelt’s election and the New Deal. The defeat of the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 would not bring New Deal-Great Society liberalism back to life; but it would mean the 1994 election was not the prelude to a fundamental conservative realignment. It would imply instead a future of chaotic political “de-alignment.”
All of this, incidentally, still presumes that a Clinton victory would leave Republicans in control of Congress. But that’s by no means certain. It’s true that trends large and small, from long-term shifts in public opinion to the number of Democratic retirements in 1996, give the GOP a good chance to hold Congress. But what if Clinton wins by a comfortable margin, as current surveys suggest? What if the national congressional vote tracks the presidential vote – – as has been the case in polls this year? What if Michael Barone is correct in suggesting that we may be returning to an era of partisan straight-ticket voting? Right now, as Clinton has moved to about a nine-point edge over Bob Dole, Democrats lead Republicans in most “generic” ballot tests for the House of Representatives by about five points. If those numbers hold, they would constitute a swing of about 10 points from 1994, and Democrats would recapture control of the House. And there are more vulnerable Republican senators, and fewer promising GOP prospects in the open Senate seats, than is commonly realized. A Speaker Gephardt in 1997 is a real possibility. And a Majority Leader Daschle is not out of the question — if Clinton runs well at the top of the ticket.
Will he? The bad news for “Republicans is not only that Clinton’s comeback in the last few months has been real, but that Americans have turned in a fairly s ignificant way against the Republican Congress. In a poll last March, Americans said by 45 to 33 percent that the country was better off with a Republican rath er than a Democratic Congress; today, in that same poll, Democrats have drawn e ven. Another survey last month found only 35 percent of Americans trusting Repu blicans to lead the country for the next four years; 42 percent trusted the Dem ocrats. The erosion among senior citizens is particularly dramatic — Republica ns have in the last year lost 26 points among Americans 50 and over, according to one Republican pollster, and those losses will be hard to recoup. The evidence suggests that if the 1996 presidential election turns on the personalities of Dole and Clinton, or on voters’ judgment of the new Republican Congress, Clinton may well win. And the cause of Republican realignment and conservative reformation might not recover.
The good news, though, is that Clinton is deeply vulnerable. Despite leading Dole in polls, Clinton has not convinced most Americans he deserves reelection: Only about 43 percent of the voters want to see Bill Clinton returned to office. This is not a good number for an incumbent. Nor are the underlying public opinion numbers good for Clinton. As many voters call themselves conservative today as ever before (twice as many as call themselves liberal); and most Americans agree with the basic conservative propositions that our government is too big, our morality too lax — and that liberalism is, at least in part, to blame.
The key to this year’s presidential election is simple. Republicans can win if they make this clear: If the country is on the wrong track — and polls suggest voters continue to believe this to be true — it’s because of four years of a Democratic administration and four decades of Democratic control of Congress. Alter all, despite the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, almost no Republican policies have yet gone into effect.
Of course the Republican presidential candidate will lay out his positive agenda. But his main duty will be to do what every challenger must do: Make the incumbent’s performance the primary issue.
Clinton needs to be forced onto defense. He needs to be made to defend: to defend his administration’s tax increases and unbalanced budgets, his own ethical problems and character flaws, his party’s captivity to the abortion- rights lobby and the trial lawyers. The Democrats of 1932 offer an example: FDR spent more time explaining why Hoover had to go than laying out a detailed agenda for the country. And he spent relatively little time boasting about the achievements of the Democratic Congress of 1931-32 (even though it did, in fact, pass some proto-New Deal legislation).
This means the Republican presidential candidate must not lear the accusation that he is running a “negative” campaign. He must be willing to make Clinton the issue, rather than primarily defending the Republican Congress. And he must make the election an ideological one. He will, for example, want to remind the nation of the horror of the Clinton health care plan — rather than use Hillary Clinton as a witness in support of the Republican Medicare reform, as a recent Republican National Committee commercial foolishly does. The Congress could help with “show trials” highlighting particularly egregious Clinton administration policy and regulatory excesses. But if the Republican Congress is likely to be as unpopular as the Democratic president, the Republican presidential nominee will have to make the election primarily a negative referendum on the president.
Respectable opinion will denounce such a Republican campaign, just as it denounced Newt Gingrich a few weeks ago for citing the terrible murders in Illinois as evidence of the devastation of the welfare state. But when Gingrich zeroed in on “the moral decay of the world the left is defending,” he hit a nerve. His insight — if mmore carefully expressed — should constitute the core message of the Republican presidential campaign.
The moral decay of the world the Clinton administration is defending is what the 1996 election should be about. The American people want that world changed. Bill Clinton stands in the way. The Republican candidate must make this clear. If he does, we will have a Republican president and a Republican Congress in 1997. Conservatives will then be able to worry less about criticizing the world the left has made. They will, at last, be able to get to work building a better one.
By William Kristol
