RSS Feed Menu42, according to Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. 42 has a less happy meaning for Republicans: it’s the number of years, from 1952 to 1994, that the party went without winning a majority in the House of Representatives.
The GOP is about three years into its current stint as the minority party. The present Republican strategy for retaking the House is to hunker down in a conservative bunker and wait – for the bad memories of the Bush era to fade and for Obama and the Democrats to overreach themselves. That way, when the public turns back to the only alternative provided them in a two-party system, the GOP will regain its majority without having had to reach out to moderates or adjust its hard-right ideology.
This strategy will be vindicated if the GOP retakes the House in the 2010 or 2012 elections. But what if it doesn’t? What if the price of stasis is another forty-year trek through the political wilderness? Is it worth sticking to litmus-test conservative Republicanism if it means Democratic domination until 2048?
The current number of Republicans in the House (178) is pretty close to the average number (174) of Republicans in that chamber during the party’s four-decade rump status. In its recent history, the party has only twice managed the forty-seat jump it would need to regain the majority in 2010. The 47-seat gain of 1966 was something of a statistical correction, coming after the GOP had been dragged down to Depression-era lows by the Goldwater election debacle of 1964. The 54-seat leap of 1994, however, was more like a genuine political realignment. It is surely that election’s success that Republican strategists are hoping to replicate in the contests of the next few years.
Optimists can point to a number of GOP-leaning factors from 1994 that seem to be repeating themselves: a first-term Democratic president stumbling over the issue of health care, an unpopular Democratic Congress, a public worried over mounting deficits, and excellent early candidate recruitment by the National Republican Congressional Committee. There are even more dissimilarities, however, of which the most important may be that the current Republican leadership does not have anyone remotely like Newt Gingrich, who as House Republican Whip was the chief agent of the Republican resurgence of 1994.
Gingrich is generally conceded to have made a hash of his career as Speaker from 1995 to 1999, and he’s in some danger of following Harold Stassen’s example as a perennial, hopeless presidential candidate. But in bringing the GOP back to a majority in the House, he succeeded where even Ronald Reagan had failed, and his historic success in the ’94 elections puts him among the 20th century’s most significant Republicans.
Analysts who have tried to explain Gingrich’s strategy typically overlook the fact that although he led what was considered to be a conservative “revolution” in 1994, he himself was anything but a conventional conservative. In fact, when he became involved with politics in the late 1960s, as a Ph.D. student in history at Tulane University, he was a moderate or even liberal Republican.
At the 1968 Republican presidential convention, Gingrich was one of liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s strongest Southern supporters. After becoming a history professor at West Georgia State University, he narrowly missed election to Congress in 1974 and 1976, running as a moderate against a segregationist Democrat. Most of Gingrich’s biographers have assumed that he gained election to Congress in 1978 by abandoning his former positions and converting to Southern-fried conservatism, but there’s considerable evidence that Gingrich himself does not share that view. As he told an interviewer in 1989, his goal was to build the GOP as “a caring, humanitarian reform party.” He believed that “one of the gravest mistakes the Reagan administration made was its failure to lead aggressively in civil rights.” He identified with “the classic moderate wing of the party, where, as a former Rockefeller state chairman, I’ve spent most of my life.”
Gingrich also spent a good deal of time with the conservative wing of the GOP, of course, helping to found the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) in the House in 1983 and mobilizing the shock troops of the Moral Majority. But he consistently proclaimed himself a “big tent” Republican who served as a bridge between conservatives in the COS and moderates in the counterpart 92 Group. His view of himself as a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican” described his preference for progressive, pragmatic reform and a more active role for government than many of his erstwhile right-wing allies were willing to contemplate. His enthusiasm for greater government involvement in technological innovation and space exploration, including much higher spending on NASA as well as the “Star Wars” antimissile program, earned him the nickname “Newt Skywalker.” Gingrich’s idea-driven, eclectic, heterodox conservatism was attractive to many moderates, as were many of the specific programs he advocated such as tax cuts, welfare reform, spending reductions, decentralization, urban renewal, improved government accountability, and so forth.
Stylistically, Gingrich’s scorched-earth attacks on Democrats, and on Congress as an institution, stunned moderates and some conservatives too. (Steven Gillon’s 2008 study The Pact, about the relationship between Gingrich and Bill Clinton, refers on page 106 to the Republican as a “firebrand rebel who had an instinct for the juggler.” The typo suggests a snarling Gingrich leaping at the throat of a terrified circus performer, which actually conveys rather accurately how many members of Congress viewed him in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.) However, the House Democrats’ worsening abuse of their majority power – in matters including denying adequate staff to the minority party, excluding Republicans from committee deliberations, and even stealing elections – convinced many moderates that Gingrich’s strategy of ruthless confrontation was the only way to overturn the entrenched and corrupt Democratic majority. Gingrich alone had “the vision to build a majority party,” according to Connecticut moderate Congresswoman Nancy Johnson, as well as “the strength and charisma to do it.”
Minnesota moderate Republican Bill Frenzel nominated Gingrich for House Republican whip in 1989, and Maine’s Olympia Snowe seconded the nomination. Moderates supported Gingrich over the more conciliatory candidate of the older conservatives, Illinois’ Ed Madigan, and Gingrich carried the New England delegation by a 7-3 vote. “There’s no question that I would not be House Republican whip if activists in the moderate wing had not supported me,” Gingrich recalled. “I regard my election as a coalition victory for activists of all the ideological views of the Republican Party.”
Gingrich led Republicans to victory in 1994 by nationalizing the election, making each local contest a referendum on Bill Clinton and the perceived leftish Democratic excesses of his first two years in office. However, Gingrich was careful to keep divisive social issues out of the “Contract with America,” and he supplied money, guidance, and logistical assistance to moderate and conservative candidates alike. Despite later claims, the “Contract” did not much influence the election; 71 percent of voters polled during election week had never even heard of it. But it was a brilliant move on Gingrich’s part, because it symbolized the public’s desire for action-oriented, accountable government, allowed him to keep Republican candidates on-message, and would give him an unusual degree of discipline over his party (at least for a while) when he became Speaker.
The “freshman class” of 73 Republican representatives who swept into office famously included a core of deep-dyed conservatives, many of whom would go on to have long political careers, such as current Senators Tom Coburn and John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. “You won’t believe what a bunch of ideologues you are going to have to deal with,” Gingrich’s advisor told him on the ’94 election night. “They are going to kill you.” That prediction would prove substantially correct, as the two dozen or so “True Believers” in the freshman class proved to be much more conservative than Gingrich. They harassed him constantly on his right flank, pressured him into some his worst errors (such as the government shutdowns of 1995), and eventually led to his undoing as Speaker.
But the Class of ‘94 also included more than a dozen moderates. The Republican Party that took over the House in 1995 was a much more geographically and ideologically balanced party than the GOP today. Republicans had exactly the same percentage of Southern House seats (53%) as they do now, but a far greater share of Northeastern seats (almost 46% in 1995-96 versus a mere 18% today). Because the party was bigger and more nationally representative, the South accounted for only one-third of the total Republican delegation versus almost half today.
The present GOP leadership will happily follow Gingrich’s perceived lesson that obstruction, polarization, and controversy is the path for a minority party to become the majority party someday. But it seems less willing to follow the other component of his historic example, which is that moderates are a necessary part of a conservative-led Republican coalition, that the party cannot succeed by writing off any region or group of Americans, and that the party needs at least some level of moderate understanding and approval in order to achieve majority status. If conservatives would rather go it alone, they might want to keep the number 42 in mind.
ottovbvs // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:28 pm
greg_barton // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:25 pm
…….I don’t know whether they are dim or selfish or some combo…….it’s irrational but we’re all irrational to some extent they just have it bad.
nels96 // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:42 pm
There is only one infallible, unstoppable way to get Term Limits: NEVER REELECT ANY INCUMBENT!
Most folks think I am too unreasonable in asking everyone to NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS. They think it’s an extremist position. But that’s the whole point! Congress will never listen to us UNLESS we scare the bejesus out of them! To drive the point home, NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS.
The closer we get to a “Voter’s One-Term Congress”, the closer we’ll get to real term limits on Congress, and thus a “Citizen’s Congress.
There is only one way to make term limits happen : The American voter can IMPOSE term limits on Congress by NEVER REELECTING anyone in Congress. In other words, don’t let anyone serve more than one term. That’s the only way to teach them that the voter is boss! The “one term limit” can be eased AFTER we citizens get control of Congress.
Congress will never allow us to constitutionally term limit them. Our only choice is to NEVER REELECT them.
Remember too, it makes no difference who you vote for, as long as it is NEVER any incumbent.
Backup for this reasoning follows:
NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS
I believe that even a little success in a campaign to NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS would move us a long way toward a revolutionary change in American politics, much like 1776. Some of the reasons in favor of this approach:
• Gives us a one-term, term limited Congress without using amendments
• It would be supported by 70% of the country who want term limits Congress
• It is completely non-partisan
• If repeated, it ends career politicians dominating Congress
• It opens the way to a “citizen Congress”
• It ends the seniority system that keeps freshmen powerless
• It doesn’t cost you any money. Just don’t vote for any incumbent
• It is the only infallible, unstoppable way to “Throw All the Bums Out”
• It takes effect immediately on Election Day
NEVER REELECT ANYONE IN CONGRESS.
Nelson Lee Walker of tenurecorrupts.com
ottovbvs // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:50 pm
nels96 // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:42 pm
…….I’m in favor of term limits but it doesn’t seem a good idea to elect a completely new bunch of hicks in the house every two years and ditto in the senate. Probably four terms as a congressman and two as a senator would be reasonable but it’s never going to happen
barker13 // Aug 9, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Re: Nels96 // Aug 9, 2009 at 2:42 pm (#27) –
Yep. Agreed. I’ve felt the same way for years.
I actually tried (and succeeded – if you wanna call it that) back in ‘06 when I voted FOR Democrat John Hall and AGAINST my RINO incumbent Sue Kelly.
Thing is… as I’ve indicated on other threads… while libertarian-leaning true conservatives are often capable of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, the Democrat Party’s more “pragmatic” liberal base is unlikely to echo folks like me.
Do you think there’s a chance in hell of getting even mildly partisan Dems to consider voting against Dem incumbents knowing that this means an automatic loss of the House? (I’m not sure what the numbers are in the Senate…)
And if Rush Limbaugh and every single major conservative/traditionalist/libertarian “name voice” in the nation were to engage in a unified call for conservative/traditionalist/libertarian voters to simply vote AGAINST the incombent NO MATTER WHAT – no matter who he or she is or whether they like him or not – even assuming broad sympathy and a DESIRE to follow though… how many Republicans would so distrust Democratic voters doing the same that they’d simply refuse to “unilaterally disarm?”
Hey… maybe if you had Bill and Hillary Clinton… Ralph Nader… Newt Gingrich… George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush… Colin Powell…
(You get the idea!)
…ALL begging the American People to simply “throw ALL the bums out,” how many folks would “trust” in the integrity of “the other side” enough to risk “unilateral disarmament?”
Me? Out of “pragmatism” I still see a military coup (not gonna happen!) as our only potential salvation.
(*SNORT*) (And what does THAT say about my level of pessimism and disgust…???) (*SHRUG*)
BILL
sinz54 // Aug 9, 2009 at 8:46 pm
ireign sez: “The biggest issue is not the number of people without health care, it is that health care sucks. Krauthammer had a number of suggestions (some good and some bad) but this bill doesn’t address any of them.”
That’s absolutely right!
Health insurance “reform” can knock a fixed percentage off of health care costs. But the rate of increase of health care costs won’t be reduced at all. Not even if you completely zeroed out all the insurance companies’ profits.
In America, the rate of increase of health care costs is about 1.6% above the rate of increase of GDP. That’s in line with the situations in all the developed nations, including those with single-payer. That accurately reflects the truly increasing real cost of medical care itself, not who pays for it. To reduce that rate of increase, we have to change how health care is delivered–without sacrificing the effectiveness of treatment.
In fairness, the ObamaCare bill does spend some money to automate medical record keeping. At my hospital, my doctors have told me that 55% (at least) of their workday goes into manual record keeping. Yes,they still work by writing handwritten notes into loose-leaf volumes. With all the inefficiency and potential for human error that involves. Automating all that would improve productivity dramatically.
So would eliminating unnecessary tests. Whenever I’m referred to another doctor, he insists on doing the exact same tests all over again for himself. Yet our parathyroid hormone, phosphorus, and other levels don’t change significantly from one week to the next. Obama mentioned this problem in his presser; but I don’t know if there’s anything about it in the bill.
The problem YOU mentioned, has to do with whether a doctor is needed for routine ear infections and other routine problems. I say that we should train lots more Nurse Practitioners (NPs). Their first-hand experience gives them hard-won knowledge comparable to many doctors. And they’re legally allowed to make diagnoses and prescribe drugs. Yet they’re paid much less than doctors. (On the other hand, America can live with fewer boob jobs–what a waste of money that is.)
BTW: Another reason the economy may pick up, is the massive injection of liquidity (far exceeding the stimulus bill) by the Fed. Including, you’ll notice, interest rates that were bouncing around zero for a while.
balconesfault // Aug 9, 2009 at 11:05 pm
“A stimulus actually injects money quickly into the economy. All we did was add additional gov spending into the future. Hardly a great idea. ”
Not necessarily. If there is capital in private hands that’s not being invested, for fear there will be no potential for profits in the future – then additional government spending into the future demonstrates a demand for certain services, and thus stimulates investment into those sectors.
In some ways, this was far more responsible than just pumping money quickly into the economy this instant … because that would have likely have already created significant inflationary pressures, and because it would have been difficult to ensure that the money would have been spent in responsible ways. It could, very likely, have created one more short term “bubble” that would have burst leaving us nothing to show except some short-term inflated assets.
Think of it this way. You run a steel mill. Construction is rapidly dimishing, it looks like there is a glut of new office and shopping space thanks to the super-low interest rates over the last 8 years, growing unemployment, and falling retail sales. You have to decide if you’re going to keep producing steel at margins that barely justify keeping your factory open. You have no idea when the business cycle will reverse.
Government puts a lot of money up promising to spend it on bridges and transmission lines and other infrastructure that will create a new demand for your steel, paced out over the next 2-3 years.
Does that change your calculus?
Krugman’s criticism, meanwhile, is not the pacing of the stimulus, so much as it being about half as much as he thinks the economy needed.
ottovbvs // Aug 10, 2009 at 8:52 am
ireign // Aug 9, 2009 at 7:39 pm
‘Last time, I checked the stimulus plan did not work and most of the dollars haven’t even been spent.”
………..So why is the economy starting to turn around and why do most reputable economists reckon it has a) saved about a million jobs and b) added about 1% to growth in the second quarter.
……….The stimulus plan has been designed as a slow release agent feeding money into the economy over a 21 month period…..so far about $100-200 billion has been paid out in tax reductions, rebates and transfers to the states…..most of the balance much of it for infrastructure projects that are big jog creators will be spent between now and the end of next year
” Even liberals like Paul Krugman concede the stimulus was not a great bill”
………Krugman didn’t think it was big enough!!……he wasn’t arguing with the concept, no reputable economist did!
……….Thanks for the benefit of your economic expertise irreign
DFL // Aug 10, 2009 at 10:16 am
It is a given in American politics that parties who have political responsibility thrust upon it tend to lose seats in non-presidential elections. Your political enemies become galvanized, those in mushy middle become more skeptical, and even parts of your base become disillusioned. Bad events occur and you’re more likely to be damned for your failures than be lauded for your successes. The best scenario for the Republicans in restoring its congressional majorities is a two-term Obama presidency. The year 2014 ought to be a very bad year for Democrats if Obama is re-elected in 2012. President Obama’s failures will create the next Republican majority.
One cause of the 1994 Republican sweep Mr. Kabaservice does not acknowledge is that the formation of odd-looking majority-minority districts created a score and more Republican districts in the South. By packing minority Democratic voters in a small number of districts, many rural districts in the South transformed themselves from being represented by conservative or moderate Democrats to districts represented by conservative Republicans.
ottovbvs // Aug 10, 2009 at 3:18 pm
dfl // Aug 10, 2009 at 10:16 am
” One cause of the 1994 Republican sweep Mr. Kabaservice does not acknowledge is that the formation of odd-looking majority-minority districts created a score and more Republican districts in the South”
……Gerrymandering is a uniquely Democratic activity……..okaaaay…..actually it’s an equal opportunity activity(and usually mutually assisted btw)……which is what makes the Democrats wresting so many Republican house seats that have been gerrymandered to death so surprising…..While I can’t disagree with the comments on pendulum swings you ignore several factors like the power of incumbency so a major party has to really screw up in govt to lose a lot of seats…..it’s also depends enormously on demographics, the general mood of the country and its perception of the overall competence of the parties and their leaders……..I suppose Republicans could magically transform popular perceptions of their competency…..of course they also have five years in the wilderness in your scenario in which to continue behaving like idiots.
William_F_Tell // Aug 16, 2009 at 8:23 am
Hi Geoff,
I think you have hit the nail on the head here, and it’s already playing out even in the 2009 off year gubernatorial race in Virginia. The Washington Post has an article today on Robert F. McDonnell, doing much of his campaigning in Northern Virginia (Obama Country). It helps, of course, that he grew up in Fairfax County.
http://tinyurl.com/mfsa5j
I assume a similar approach is taking place in the NJ gubernatorial race as well by Christie. If those two candidates win, that will re-establish some important footholds for GOP fundraising and candidate recruitment in 2010.
Question: Are Democratic members of Congress bound by any rules to vote for Pelosi as Speaker? Let’s say for example next year the GOP pick up 30 seats in the House but not the majority. What if instead of nominating one of their own for Speaker, the GOP offer to vote en masse for one of the Blue Dogs as Speaker? If I were a Blue Dog, I would totally consider it. Pelosi is like an albatross around their necks.
Distant Thunder // Apr 14, 2010 at 11:08 pm
[...] in November. I’m beginning to doubt that. To actually win back the House and Senate ala 1994, you have to also win in “blue” areas with viable candidates. But when you see two big name Republicans who were popular in their respective states bow out for [...]