American Politics since 1988: Part II (1993-1998)

The second part of this four-part series (here’s Part I and the Overview) begins in the aftermath of the 1993 elections (and ends with the 1998 mid-term elections five years hence).  For anyone who paid close attention to the 1993 vote, it would have been clear that limited-government voters (a.k.a. economic conservatives or libertarians) were in flux, but moving toward the Republicans again, due to their refusal to support President Clinton’s tax hike.  However, as only two states were involved – and neither seemed as dramatic as Rudy Giuliani’s upset win for Mayor of New York City – the message voters in New Jersey and Virginia sent was largely lost.

More problematic for the Democrats was the fact that Clinton had proposed his government-heavy health care plan over a month before the 1993 election.  Thus, even if the Democrats had notice their vulnerability, they were in no position to pivot away.  By the summer of 1994, pollsters were seeing the shocking upshot of this: Republicans were leading the generic Congressional ballot for the first time in 40 years.

While most Republican politicians and activists remember 1994 as the year of the Contract With America, the party did its best when it simply ran against Clinton.  What is important to remember (and is usually forgotten) is why that was so successful.  Republicans in 1994 were all over the map on social issues (something northeast and Midwest Republicans saw all too well), but they were as one on economic ones: cut taxes, cut spending, and then repeat both.  The fact that no Republican supported Clinton’s tax increase (and that each house of Congress passed them by one vote) gave every American the opportunity to send a message to the Democrats.

Economic conservatives delivered it with gusto: the GOP picked up 8 Senate seats and over 50 House seats.  More telling, not a single Republican incumbent Congressman was denied re-election.  In another New York District, Republican Sue Kelly defeated Democrat Hamilton Fish, Jr., despite the latter being endorsed by retiring Republican incumbent Hamilton Fish, Sr.

Once again, however, the decisive message sent by economic conservatives was diluted by conventional wisdom.  Because so many dramatic GOP victories were in the South, it was assumed that social conservatism had driven the 1994 triumph.  Ironically, the lead force for social conservatives at the time (Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition) had managed to expand its power base with the GOP by branching out to other issues – which allowed them to tap into the economic conservative wave.  Even Governor Pete Wilson of California – who dramatically made illegal immigration the national issue it would be to this day – couched it in limited-government, economic conservative terms (he championed an initiative that would only deny public services to illegal aliens), but Wilson’s victory (and that of the initiative, known as Proposition 187) crowded out the economic conservative message in Washington.

The water became further muddied in 1995, when one of the more dramatic versions of welfare reform (a maximum limit for single mothers regardless of how many children they had) was spiked by the National Right to Life Committee, the competing balanced budget plans of Congressional Republicans and the President, and the GOP 1996 presidential campaign.  The last of these had the largest impact.  With no challenger arising to deny the Democratic nomination to Clinton, the GOP race took center stage, and for all of 1995, social issues predominated.  Bob Dole, Pat Buchanan, and Phil Gramm argued about affirmative action, gun rights, illegal immigration, and foreign policy; economic issues were largely in the background.

Even worse was the government shutdown of 1995.  For weeks, Clinton and Congressional leaders blamed the other for the shutdown, framing the debate as who was more obstinate, rather than why the two sides were arguing (a rather illuminating poll, which has long since been been forgotten, showed that while a majority of voters “blamed” Republicans for the shutdown; 74% – if memory serves – approved of it).  Republicans ended up caving, in no small part because Dole – who was Senate Majority Leader at the time – didn’t want this anywhere near his presidential campaign.

As 1996 dawned, and the GOP had just thrown limited-government supporters under the bus on the budget battle, Steve Forbes began getting traction with his flat-tax proposal.  Forbes had only entered the race in September of 1995, but economic conservatives quickly rallied to him.  The other candidates responded by assaulting him relentlessly (with a heap of class-envy rhetoric thrown in for good measure).  It was as if the GOP had once again taking economic conservatives for granted.

One man, however, was aware that economic conservatives were no longer a lock for the Republicans.  He quickly tailored his entire campaign toward making them feel comfortable with him.  No one believed he could do it except him (and perhaps Dick Morris), but that didn’t stop him from trying.

Thus it was not Dole, nor Gingrich, nor even Buchanan, but Bill Clinton who became famous for declaring in January 1996 (during his State of the Union address), “The era of big government is over.”  From the moment that speech was concluded, Clinton was ahead of every potential Republican nominee in the polls, and he would never trail.

The most obvious signals about how 1996 would go come in the summer.  In June, Dole resigned from the Senate, and in his valedictory, he heaped the most praise on left or center-left Democrats whom economic conservatives had been fighting and cursing for decades.  Two months later, Clinton, despite a double-digit lead in the polls and loud carping from his left, signed welfare reform into law.

This, combined with Dole’s long record as a Republican comfortable with tax hikes, made the actual election a foregone conclusion.  Clinton managed to be re-elected even as the Republicans gained Senate seats and held their House losses to single digits.  More tellingly, not only did Clinton build on his 1992 victory margins in the northeast (where economic conservatives were dominant on the political right), but even managed to win in Florida (the most “northeastern” of southern states at the time) and Arizona.  Once again, the economic conservative vote (especially its social liberal component) was “in play.”

It didn’t seem to stay there.  In 1997, both Republican incumbents in New Jersey and New York City were re-elected.  More dramatic, however, was Virginia, where Jim Gilmore set ablaze the first (and only) tax revolt in the state’s history, and not coincidentally, engineered the only GOP sweep of all three statewide offices that year.  As in 1993 and 1994, it seemed economic conservatives were back in the GOP fold.

Then came 1998.

Most remember 1998 as the year of Monica Lewinsky.  The narrative goes something like this: Clinton is caught (sort of) with Monica; Republicans are determined to remove him from office over it; angry American voters punish the GOP in a stunning mid-term election result.  The first two parts are right, but from there it gets more complicated.

The Republicans were seeing that the Monica scandal was turning away moderate voters in droves (in fact, the GOP scored record vote levels in several key swing constituencies that year).  However, by the fall, the Republicans were so determined to make the race about Lewinsky and nothing else that they caved into the President’s spending demands while sending him a “transportation bill” so loaded down with pork that House Budget Committee Chair John Kasich (R-Ohio) openly begged Clinton to veto it (“I think we fell down” was, if I remember correctly, his exact words).

The double whammy was too much for limited-government groups and pundits, who sent the signals that the GOP was not what it once was.  Now, folks like Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist can’t directly move millions of voters, but they can send signals to folks like Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, and thousands of activists across the nation.  In 1994, those signals led the aforementioned to rally voters to the GOP.  In 1998, while Limbaugh focused on Lewinsky, the rest deprioritized the November election.

Said election was a stunner.  For the first time in over 60 years, the party in the White House did not lose seats in either house of Congress (the Dems held steady in the Senate – albeit at 45 - and gained six seats in the House to cut the GOP majority in half).  The shock result led Newt Gingrich to resign, and Bill Clinton to think he was invincible.  In fact, as exit polling showed, what sank the election for the GOP was a sharp drop in their “base” voters.  Economic conservatives largely stayed away (except for those on the social left, who once again went with the Democrats).

Yet once again, that powerful message was missed.  Over the next decade, the 1998 GOP base problems led to a method of campaigning that reshaped American politics right up to the present day, while a supposedly lightweight Texas Governor managed to transform himself from a moderate politician who had earned suspicion from economic conservatives into the supposed conservative archetype.  I’ll explain how in the next chapter.