The 1996 Campaign
Tocquevillian America
The Political Government
The House of Representatives
The Senate
The Presidency
Looking Ahead to 2000

The elections of 1996, expected to settle political arguments, instead left them unsettled, to be carried on in different terms, in less focused and frank language -- as the country itself continued to change. The Republicans, after their smashing victory in the congressional elections of 1994, hoped to use the same issues to win the presidential contest and to pass their ambitious programs to reform and reduce the size and scope of government. Speaker Newt Gingrich compared 1996 to 1896, when an uncharismatic Republican nominee, William McKinley, built on sweeping Republican congressional gains two years before and established the Republicans as the majority party for the next 34 years. Congressional Democrats, absorbing the shock of unexpected defeat, hoped that the Republican program would be so unpopular that they would sweep back to majorities in the House and Senate, whatever happened in the congressional elections. They compared 1996 to 1948, when after two years of a Republican Congress that cut taxes, restricted labor unions and endorsed an assertive foreign policy, voters swept congressional Democrats back in with large majorities and gave a smaller margin to President Harry Truman as well. President Bill Clinton, reduced in March 1995 to insisting that he was still relevant, hoped to repair the impression voters got from his first two years that his policies would unacceptably increase the size and power of government and that he was a weak and irresolute leader. He may have compared himself to Harry Truman, who after a difficult two years projected an image of steadiness and produced a program that was popular and won a full term despite trailing in the polls for many months.

But 1996 did not turn out to be either 1896 or 1948. Congressional Republicans and President Clinton both won, but not on the terms they hoped. Second-term presidents of both parties in time of perceived peace and prosperity have won between 59% and 61% of the vote -- Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972, Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Bill Clinton won reelection with 49%, comfortably ahead of Bob Dole's 41%, but still less than a majority of the vote. Nor did he help his party win majorities in Congress; instead he was the first Democratic president in history elected with a Senate and House controlled by the opposition. But neither did the Republicans continue to make the extraordinary gains they had from the first special election of the first Clinton term to the last, and of course especially in 1994. They did gain two seats in the Senate, but were still five seats short of their goal of 60, enough to defeat a Democratic filibuster. And in the House they lost seats, though not enough to lose control. Republicans went into the 1996 election with 235 House seats, more than the 230 they won in 1994 because of party switches and special election victories; they came out with 227, to 208 for the Democrats and the Vermont Socialist who regularly votes with them. They won more votes than the Democrats, for the first two elections in a row since 1928 and 1930, but not many more: 49.0% to 48.5%.

So in 1996 American voters made essentially the same decisions in presidential and congressional elections as they had the last time they voted for each. They elected Bill Clinton 49%-41% in 1996 just as they elected him 43%-37% in 1992. The results from the two elections resemble each other more closely than any pair of elections since Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956. And they elected a Republican House by 49.0% to 48.5% in 1996 pretty much as they had elected a Republican House by 52%-45% in 1994. Indeed, in popular votes for the House 1996 stood almost precisely midway between 1994 and 1992, when Democrats led 51%-46%.

So what was the mandate? Clinton and congressional Republican leaders talked after the election about how the voters were demanding bipartisan cooperation. But cooperation for what? It is important here to understand one more thing about the election. The Democratic president's victory looked large, but it was contingent. It depended on decisions that could very easily have gone the other way, on a high order of rhetorical and political skills, on the establishment of a distance from his party, not only its historical stands on issues but the stands of most of its current candidates. The Republican Congress's victory looked narrow, but it was fundamental. It was based on a wider than generally appreciated acceptance of its policy thrusts. Congressional Republicans had almost everything working against them: the $35 million AFL-CIO ad campaign, the attack on their Medicare "cuts," hostile and often inaccurate media, polls that may well have been misleading, the great unpopularity of their most visible leader Newt Gingrich and a president of the other party running ahead in times of peace and prosperity. They could have said, as the head of Italy's right Polo coalition Silvio Berlusconi said after his party won the popular vote but lost in legislative seats because of internal splits, "Avevamo tutti contro noi" -- we have had everyone against us. If not too many votes had been cast differently, Republicans would have lost the House. Yet their level of support -- whether 49% or 48% or 50% -- in these circumstances is a sign that the policies they stand for have a large and stubborn base of support in the country.

It is ordinary practice in political discourse to speak of politicians and officeholders as shaping the future, making decisions and setting a course, doing things to or for the country. But in the America of the 1990s, when government does not demand things of us as it does in war or when we do not demand of government great change as we do in depression, politics has been more a matter of the country doing things to or for politicians. To understand what Americans voted for in 1996, we need to see how the people shaped the politicians in 1995 and 1996, and then to step back and take a look at the country that is doing the shaping, and at its increasingly different regions and faiths.

THE 1996 CAMPAIGN
The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 resulted in a restoration of the constitutional order -- in the literal sense of the word. For Article I of the Constitution is about the Congress, not the president, and the House of Representatives comes first, not the Senate. Article I is much longer than Article II, about the president, and the powers reserved to Congress are more numerous; it was the expectation of the Founders that in the ordinary course of things, the Congress and in particular the House would set the course of public policy. But for most of the 60 years before 1994 things were not ordinary; the country was on a warlike footing and the president, the commander-in-chief, was in a commanding position in the political arena. Now, with peace and when the president had displayed little sense of command, Congress and the House -- or its 230 Republicans -- took the lead. Newt Gingrich's September 1994 Contract with America, which almost all Republican House candidates signed, set the agenda. Within weeks the House passed nine of the ten items in the Contract, failing only to muster two-thirds of a congressional term limits constitutional amendment; the Senate moved more slowly and cautiously, rejecting the balanced budget constitutional amendment by one vote. House Republicans worked to produce a budget that they promised would be balanced by 2002 and in fall 1995 announced a plan to cut the projected increase in Medicare spending. Gingrich and other Republicans expected that Clinton would back down and sign these bills.

But Clinton did not behave as they expected. After the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, Clinton delivered a moving eulogy, implicitly critical of those who raised angry voices against government programs. In June he abandoned his own budget proposal and agreed to accept the goal of balancing the budget by 2005. But in August 1995 he started running political ads against the Republicans' Medicare plan. All this was part of a strategy pollster Dick Morris called "triangulation," taking positions between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans so as to elevate the president's stature above both. Clinton was in effect campaigning, not as a backer of liberal congressional Democrats, but as a check and balance on conservative House Republicans. In November and December he negotiated on the budget with Speaker Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, promising them agreement at times, but he ultimately vetoed most of their appropriations bills. That technically shut down non-emergency functions of the federal government, a step which many Republicans initially welcomed and thought would be popular. This was a stunning miscalculation, as was their lack of a strategy to deal with Clinton's vetoes. They could have argued that it was the president who shut down the government, since Congress passed, though tardily, appropriations bills and Clinton vetoed them. Indeed the press in the 1980s portrayed Ronald Reagan as the one who risked shutting down the government when he vetoed appropriations passed by the Democratic Congress: an example of the media being inconsistent intellectually but consistently anti-Republican. But of course the Republicans seemed to exult in the shutdown, and naturally were blamed by the voters. By the time Republicans backtracked and agreed to Clinton's terms, their ratings were down and they were running behind Democrats in the polls. Beginning in late 1995 Clinton began leading Bob Dole and other Republicans in polls, and when voters were asked which party's candidate they would support for the House -- pollsters called this the generic vote -- Democrats started coming out ahead of Republicans -- results which held up through October 1996. But Republicans had produced a 1996 budget that actually cut domestic discretionary spending, for the first time since 1971.

On the budget battle, and when he dispatched U.S. troops to Bosnia in fall 1995, Clinton showed the decisiveness and sense of command he had seemed to lack in 1993 and 1994. At the same time the stature of his potential Republican opponents was shrinking. Clinton conducted a brilliant behind the scenes campaign in 1995. He started running campaign ads in the spring, to which the media paid little attention partly because early ads had not worked before in presidential races and partly because they were not run in the Washington or New York media markets (most of whose audiences are in states safe for one party or the other anyway). To pay for these he raised very large sums of money early -- and in ways, it turned out, which hurt him a little in late October 1996 and then very much more in 1997. Clinton also prevented a challenge in the Democratic primaries. Since 1993 he had courted Senator Edward Kennedy, appearing often at Kennedy events in Massachusetts, subcontracting out Northern Ireland policy to his sister, Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith and former Kennedy aide Nancy Soderberg at the National Security Council. He assigned his deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, a Jesse Jackson campaign staffer in 1988, to mollify Jackson, who after his son started running in a special election for the House in October 1995 decided not to run. And the Clinton fundraising drive banished any thoughts of running from other Democrats' minds.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidates were campaigning furiously, spending much time seeking the support of the religious right who formed as large a part of the Republican base as the feminist left formed of the Democratic base. Seven Republicans ran, of whom the best-known by far was Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. But his was not the only well-organized campaign; Texas Senator Phil Gramm and former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander raised millions of dollars and built organizations aimed at the Iowa caucuses February 12 and the New Hampshire primary February 20. Magazine publisher Steve Forbes spent liberally of his own money on ads touting his flat tax and attacking Dole and others as Washington insider. Columnist and former White House speechwriter Pat Buchanan articulated vividly his opposition to abortion and support of trade restrictions to preserve American jobs -- a shift from Reagan Republicans' free market policies which he called "the conservatism of the heart." Senator Richard Lugar ran on his foreign policy expertise and his support of a flat tax. Two other candidates attracted some attention -- and proved offputting to many marginal voters -- with bombastic speeches, Alan Keyes denouncing America's moral decline and Congressman Robert Dornan denouncing Bill Clinton's morals.

Most of the Republican delegates would be selected quickly, in a process designed mostly by Democrats in party commissions and legislatures. Bob Dole won the nomination not by projecting an attractive persona or presenting a popular program, but by attacking each of his rivals as he was about to make headway: a campaign that did nothing to increase his political capital for the fall campaign. The nomination was decided even between the Louisiana caucus February 6 and the South Carolina primary March 2. Louisiana was a contest concocted by Phil Gramm, in the hopes that an early win could make him a contender regardless of how he did in Iowa or New Hampshire. But Pat Buchanan came into Louisiana and beat Gramm, whose campaign foundered in Iowa and was over before New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Forbes's heavy advertising in many states made him a threat to Dole, and in Iowa and New Hampshire Dole ran attacks against him. These, plus Forbes's criticism of Christian conservatives just days before the Iowa contests and his weak precinct organization there, left him weak in Iowa and New Hampshire. After Pat Buchanan finished a close second in Iowa, Dole's strategists identified him as their main target. But in New Hampshire they were running ads against Forbes and, starting five days before the primary, against Lamar Alexander, who had a fine campaign organization there. Buchanan, with the militant support of the Manchester Union Leader, won in New Hampshire, but Dole finished a close second, edging Alexander by 7,000 votes; without those negative ads, Alexander's organization and walk across New Hampshire might have put him ahead and forced Dole out.

Buchanan hoped to win next in Arizona, but his military metaphors and his campaign costume (black cowboy hat and rifle in Tombstone) put off many voters, and Forbes won there, with Dole second. Buchanan continued his campaign in other states, to dwindling crowds of true believers, hoping to reshape Republican conservatism in his image, but Dole had clinched the nomination in South Carolina five months before the national convention August 12.

The Clinton campaign used that time far more effectively than the Dole campaign. With no primary opponent, the Clintonites could spend millions in federal matching money on messages aimed at general election voters; the Dole campaign, its treasury exhausted, had to use accounting legerdemain to continue bare-bones operation. Dole attracted attention in May when he announced he was resigning from the Senate and in June when he left. But his poll numbers did not rise appreciably, and in July sagged after he told Katie Couric in a TV interview that he wasn't sure if tobacco was addictive.

Then came perhaps the most pivotal moment of the campaign. House Republicans, under withering attack from AFL-CIO ads in marginal seats and for Medicare "cuts" from Clinton and Democrats everywhere, were putting together a budget that increased domestic discretionary spending a bit, and were splitting over raising the minimum wage, a hoary issue that Democrats raised not for policy reasons -- they had not bothered with it in the two years they had control -- but because it tested well in polls. Now some Republicans wanted to raise the welfare issue again. In 1992 Clinton had campaigned to "end welfare as we know it"; when his poll numbers flagged, his campaign ran welfare spots. But in his first two years, despite pleading from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he did little on the issue, and in 1995 and 1996 he vetoed two bills which contained Republican-passed welfare reform plans. In July 1996 Congressman Dave Camp of Michigan and John Ensign of Nevada circulated a letter, signed by 100 Republican members, urging Republican leaders to revive the welfare issue, by separating it from their Medicaid plan (which Clinton had said was the reason for his vetoes) and passing it separately. Clinton could either veto it again and give Republicans a campaign issue or he could sign it and give them -- congressional Republicans, that is, not Bob Dole -- an accomplishment. After the usual angry argument, Congress passed welfare reform, eliminating the federal welfare entitlement after 61 years and giving great leeway to the states. Clinton, after some indecision, signed the bill in August 1996. This was a prime example of the country shaping politics and policy, moving the Republican Congress and the Democratic president to do things they had good tactical political reasons not to do: the political marketplace at work. "The era of big government is over," Clinton said in his January 1996 State of the Union speech, and in August 1996 this Democratic president, with some visible reluctance, hastened its end.

The passage and signing of welfare reform separated the cause of congressional Republicans from Dole and the cause of Clinton from congressional Democrats: it is as if the crews of the two ships were setting off on their own lifeboats, waving an embarrassed goodbye to the passengers as the ship was starting to founder. That was plainly visible at the two party conventions, both scheduled for August so as to avoid conflict with the Atlanta Olympics in July. Like NBC's coverage of the Olympics, the conventions were geared to feminine if not feminist sensibilities, with plenty of dramatic stories of individuals who faced hardship or overcame handicaps and little hard-edged conflict. The week before the Republican convention, Dole came out for a 15% across the board tax cut and named Jack Kemp as his vice presidential nominee; both moves were popular in San Diego, and Dole closed the gap coming out of the convention. Newt Gingrich spoke only briefly, about beach volleyball as an example of American genius; the congressional Republicans were saving their issue offensive for October. Bill Clinton chose to separate himself physically from the campaign, traveling by train through the Midwest in fine August weather, promising to build "a bridge to the 21st Century." On the way he announced many little government plans -- tax deductions for college tuition, restrictions on gun sales to spouse abusers, the V-chip to allow parents to restrict children's television viewing -- with the common Dick Morris-inspired motif of presenting him as helping parents raise their children. Little was said about electing a Democratic Congress. The well-orchestrated crowd chanted "Four more years!" as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt spoke, though no member of Congress except the nonvoting delegates from Puerto Rico and Guam has a term of four years. Bill Clinton and Al Gore devoted one sentence each in their acceptance speeches to the need to elect a Democratic Congress. But congressional Democrats saw Clinton as their only chance to victory and praised him with a fulsomeness that would have pleased Lyndon Johnson. The mood was upbeat in Chicago, and Clinton emerged with more than a 10% lead at the end of August.

Relatively little changed in the presidential race during the fall campaign. Dole struggled to find issues that would move voters -- the tax cut, teenage drug use, racial quotas and preferences -- but none really did. In the two presidential debates, Dole vastly improved on his performances in primary season debates; but he was still far less articulate and empathic than Clinton. In the vice presidential debate Kemp declined, as Dole had, invitations to attack Bill Clinton's character or alleged involvement in scandal. Both candidates kept themselves insulated from the press. During October Clinton started funneling money to Democratic congressional candidates, but said little publicly in their behalf. In the last two weeks a new scandal surfaced, when it was revealed that DNC fundraiser and former Commerce Department appointee John Huang funneled at least one illegal campaign contribution and quite possibly others to the DNC; Huang refused to appear in court as ordered and the DNC initially refused to produce him; then it refused to disclose its contributors to the Federal Election Commission on deadline. It was also revealed that Al Gore attended a fundraiser in a Buddhist temple in California, where monks donated $5,000 each; one monk reported that $5,000 cash was pressed into her hand, but changed her story after the temple hired as her lawyer a former California Democratic chairman. Ross Perot, who had been idling in the polls between 4 and 8 percent, denounced the scandals pithily, and his support increased a bit.

More was happening in congressional races. Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour and Newt Gingrich and his strategists planned to hold up their major spending bills until October. This was resented by many congressional Republicans, who had been under attack from the AFL-CIO and Democratic Party ads going back as far as April 1995. And while Republican candidates had more money to spend than their opponents, Democrats did a fine job of funneling PAC money to endangered incumbents and promising challengers -- helped by the fact that even most business PACs are run by former Democratic staffers and operatives. But there were good reasons for waiting, if not for quite so long as Republicans did. Parties of the right, not just in the United States but around the world, have been winning elections by late surges of campaigning: this was true in the 1990 Michigan and 1993 New Jersey governor races, which Republican strategists had very much in mind, and in 1996 in Italy (where the right won more votes but not most seats because of a split vote). There is something fundamental at work here: the free media is staunchly anti-right and so for long months the left has the advantage in the public dialogue; but in the last weeks the right can use money to get its message through with less attention and criticism from the free media.

That is what happened in congressional elections in the United States in 1996. Where the AFL-CIO had been running ads, the Republicans ran ads attacking labor bosses in Washington and criticizing Democrats for taking money from the Laborers Union which the Clinton Justice Department found to be corrupt (while leaving its big contributor Democrat president in office). Where Democrats had been attacking Republican Medicare "cuts" -- which is to say just about everywhere -- Republicans responded with ads and mail arguing that Clinton's own Medicare trustees said the system was going broke, that the Republican plan would just increase spending more slowly and that the Republican "lockbox" provision would guarantee that savings were devoted to Medicare (not, as Democrats charged, for a tax cut for the rich). The Republicans touted their record of cutting spending, enacting welfare reform, backing the balanced budget and term limits. All of which worked. Republicans' disadvantage among the elderly vanished, and Republicans' standings improved in the polls. The Medicare issue, as Democratic pollster Peter Hart has said, stopped working for Democrats in mid-October. The issue of less government started working again for Republicans, as it had in the congressional elections of 1994 and the presidential elections of 1980, 1984 and 1988. Very few of the AFL-CIO targets lost their seats.

And so in November 1996 Bill Clinton and Al Gore won 49%-41% and congressional Republicans won 49.0%-48.5%. These results leave open many possibilities for the future. The 1992 and 1996 Clinton presidential victories stand for the proposition that a New Democrat beats an Old Republican. The 1994 and 1996 Republican congressional victories stand for the proposition that New Republicans beat Old Democrats. The three decades after the New Deal tell us that Old Democrats beat Old Republicans. But no one can be sure now if New Democrats beat New Republicans, or vice versa. But the basic trends of opinion are clear, and not changed from what they seemed right after 1994. We are moving away from, not toward, an ever-larger government; we are at the least uneasy about our renunciation of traditional moral values, and possibly ready to embrace them again; we cherish an inchoate, mostly unarticulated American nationalism that guides our unfocused, seemingly contradictory impulses on foreign and defense and trade policy.

Those trends have all been strengthened, not weakened, since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. It has become a firmly established principle, in Washington and in almost every state capital, that taxes must not be increased. Many Democratic and a few Republican politicians believe the country would be better off with higher taxes and more government spending, but few if any dare say so publicly. Welfare policy has been devolved from the federal government to the states, and a decision has been made that healthcare reform will not be federalized but will remain devolved. Telecommunications has been deregulated and electric utilities are in the process of deregulation, with states leading the way. Public schools are escaping centralized control and subjected to more competition and accountability. Most farm subsidies are scheduled to be eliminated over the next seven years. Government spending is no longer expanding faster than the private economy. There are exceptions and qualifications to all these trends, but the basic thrust is unmistakable and unidirectional. Power is flying out of Washington, not because of arbitrary decisions by policymakers or because Democrats had one bad Tuesday in 1994 and another mixed one in 1996, but because it is in accord with the basic character of our society -- a character that has changed vastly in the last long generation.

TOCQUEVILLIAN AMERICA
Start with this proposition: that America today more closely resembles the pre-industrial America that Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America in the 1830s than the industrial America in which most of us grew up. Tocqueville's America was egalitarian, individualistic, decentralized, religious, property-loving, lightly governed. Egalitarian, not in economic terms but in the sense that Americans are comfortable with the presumption of the moral equality of every citizen: we are not a servile people, in awe of any elite, respectful of hierarchy, though we are quick to recognize and honor talent. Individualistic, not rejecting common enterprise, but insisting on making personal decisions without interference from others. Decentralized, as the big units that dominated America in World War II and for three decades afterwards -- big government, big business, big labor -- have lost their hold on the economy and on people's imaginations. Religious, because the United States remains the one economically advanced country in which most people are religious. Property-loving, since ordinary people in the course of a lifetime expect to -- and do -- accumulate significant wealth, in residential real estate, investments and pensions. Lightly governed, because government leaves to voluntary associations of many kinds social functions which elsewhere and at other times have been performed by the state.

Centralization and hierarchy, which Robert Wiebe in Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy identifies as the dominant characteristics of American life for most of the 20th Century, seem to be yielding to decentralization and equality, as Wiebe shows they were, even more suddenly, in the early 19th Century. Then, when they were released from the threat of Napoleonic wars, Americans liberated religion and medicine from central authorities, stopped working for big employers and surged west in great numbers to become independent farmers and merchants. That America developed a national two-party politics, but as Wiebe puts it, "Politics diffused government power and united a sprawling nation." In the 1990s, Americans once again have been released from the threat of world war. They are rejecting the authority of hierarchies in religion (compare the declining mainline denominations with the surging fundamentalist faiths or the New Age mentality) and medicine (look at the popularity of alternative healing and fads even in a time of great scientific progress).

Geographically, ordinary Americans have been spreading out to edge cities and beyond, in computer-equipped houses in low-priced subdivisions, living comfortably on credit extended in free if seemingly disorderly markets. Economically, they increasingly work for small businesses or hop from one job to another with dexterity and optimism and without generating political demands for economic redistribution or government guarantees. Americans are not a people yearning for security, although the G.I. generation who grew up in the Depression, served in World War II and helped build prosperous postwar America do have a more than economic attachment to Social Security; but there are fewer G.I. generation members in the electorate every day, and more members of Generation X, born after 1965.

Intellectually, Americans take direction not from a cultural and educational elite that seeks to make the country obey abstract rules learned in prestigious universities, but from self-help advisers, television evangelists and radio talk show hosts. The Ivy League elite that Christopher Lasch described in his posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy no longer captures Americans' imaginations: compare the fascination with the Kennedys in the early 1960s to the now vitriolic dislike by some Americans and mild positive feelings of others toward Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This 21st Century Tocquevillian America is not necessarily Republican, any more than Tocqueville's 1830s America inevitably voted for the Jacksonian Democrats. The Whigs, when they escaped the thrall of their New England elites, won elections too, and in the 1990s Bill Clinton has shown that Democrats can win by convincing margins. They win when they develop a New Democratic coalition politics that is an acceptable variant of the Republican faith, a set of policies with a more communitarian thrust but not one that attempts to impose centralized, hierarchical solutions on a country that resists centralization and hierarchy. This Clinton did convincingly in 1991 and 1992 and once again in 1995 and 1996; his problem now is whether he can follow that course in 1997 and 1998 as he did not in 1993 and 1994.

In this new-old America the political rules are different from those most readers have grown up with and become accustomed to. Underlying much traditional political analysis is the assumption that the first things voters seek from government are economic -- a smooth upward business cycle and redistribution of economic income and wealth. But that is clearly wrong. The first thing voters seek from government is order -- not some arbitrary, authoritarian order, but a rational, predictable order in which ordinary people can raise their families, make their livings, participate in their communities and go about their daily lives without fear of physical disorder or economic disaster. Americans have had a happy history during most of which they took this basic order for granted. But they have reacted strongly when order is threatened. The economic disorder of the early 1930s deprived Republicans of the national majority and gave Democrats the chance to become the majority party. The cultural disorder of the late 1960s deprived Democrats of their national majority and gave Republicans the chance to become the majority party.

The fallacy that the first thing most voters seek from government are economic is an idea that grew out of New Deal politics and Keynesian economics -- specific responses to an episode of severe economic disorder. Yet even in the 1930s and the generation that followed that idea was never true except at the margins. In different elections 5% and sometimes even 10% of voters would change their minds because of the performance of the macroeconomy or in response to policies of economic redistribution. And in an electorate closely divided between adherents of the two major parties, those 5% and 10% could easily make the difference in election outcomes. But even at the height of what seemed to be class warfare politics -- from 1935 to 1963, approximately -- the very much larger blocs of the electorate adhered to party preferences based on cultural issues. Southern whites were Democrats because Democrats opposed the Civil War. African Americans, for three generations solidly Republican, became solidly Democratic, because Franklin Roosevelt seemed to back civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s as Abraham Lincoln and the radical Republicans had in the 1860s and 1870s. (Interestingly, the New Dealers who were most favorable to civil rights were former Republicans -- Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Henry Wallace.) Voters of New England Yankee stock were heavily Republican, as they had been since they founded the Republican Party in the 1850s; voters of immigrant stock were heavily Democratic, as they had been since they came to the great cities of the East and Midwest and found them run by unsympathetic Yankee Republicans. To these culturally defined blocs were added some defined by their stand on economic issues, most notably the militant members of the industrial CIO unions, which transformed the cities of the industrial Great Lakes -- Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit -- from Republican strongholds to Democratic bastions. But the politics of economic redistribution even at its height was a driving force to only a minority of voters.

Today it is a driving force to very few. For more than 20 years, since 1973, income distribution has been growing less egalitarian -- not only in the United States but in other advanced countries as well. From 1935 to 1963 the CIO unions' heartland in the industrial cities of the Great Lakes were a dependable constituency for the economic redistribution advocated by labor leaders from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther. But in 1994 these metropolitan areas voted Republican for governor or in some cases for senator -- and for Republicans committed to lower taxes and less government spending. In 1996 these areas voted for Bill Clinton, but not necessarily Democratic for Congress, and the Republican governors remain popular. And while the AFL-CIO made a visible splash in national politics, the $35 million spent on ads in House races defeated few targets and total union membership continues to fall. Raising the minimum wage, a favorite AFL-CIO issue, is not very redistributionist in a country where most minimum wage earners are not heads of households and in many booming areas where the market has raised wages well above the statutory minimum already.

So we are moving from what has been an exception in American political life back to what has been the rule: a Tocquevillian politics in a Tocquevillian country. This is a country in which order exists because basic rules are accepted by the people, or insisted upon by them: from a government in which political forces and governmental mechanisms tend to ratchet down the size of government, not ratchet it up as did the political forces and governmental mechanisms operating from the New Deal years up through the 1980s.

One such force is voters' strong conviction that taxes should not be raised, that government already takes a large enough share of what people earn. Voters demonstrated that in the 1990s by doing three unnatural things: in 1990 by giving reduced percentages to House incumbents of both parties, for the first time in 50 years, after most incumbents of both parties voted to raise taxes; in 1992, by lowering George Bush's percentage from 53% to 37% after he broke his "Read my lips -- no new taxes" promise; in 1994, by ousting the Democrats' congressional majority at a time when economic indicators were good. Soon after their 1994 victory, House Republicans created another mechanism to hold down government spending, by getting rid of the "current services" budget procedure that gives every department an automatic increase for inflation and lets them argue for more. This system was based on the absurd premise that government, unlike all other large organizations, had achieved the maximum possible efficiency and could not figure out ways to deliver services more cheaply. The Republicans' balanced budget amendment failed to pass in 1995 and 1997, as Democrats encouraged senators who promised to vote for it but were not up for reelection in two years to break their word and vote against it. But politicians of both parties have acted as if it passed. There is considerable fiction in the Clinton plans and some in the Republicans' as well, but both feel obliged to promise a balanced budget, and there is heavy downward pressure on government spending. Another way that politicians used to expand government was by inflating the currency; this was how Richard Nixon pumped up the economy for 1972. But the stagflation of the 1970s made American voters inflationophobic, and the international marketplace now swiftly punishes any attempt to degrade the currency. Bill Clinton has had to go along; he made the most important economic appointment of his second term before it even began, when he renominated Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in February 1996, because he knew that an appointment of the kind many Democrats would favor would immediately raise interest rates and hurt his reelection chances. And because Greenspan critic Senator Tom Harkin delayed his confirmation until June 1996, Greenspan's term now extends to June 2000, which means that Republican senators can prevent the confirmation of any successor and leave the selection to the next president.

In any case, arguments about what sound like economic issues are often arguments over cultural issues. Consider welfare. For years the debate on the surface seemed to pit those who wanted to spend less of government's (and their own) money on poor people and those who wanted government to spend more. But the amounts of money involved, if not as trivial as some liberals suggested, were not as enormous as conservative rhetoric implied. The argument is better portrayed as a battle between one side whose cry is "personal responsibility" and another whose belief is "it's society's fault." The complaint of those who wanted to change the welfare system was not so much that it cost too much as that it degraded the morals of society by fostering irresponsibility and the growth of a criminal underclass. Subsidizing single mothers, it was argued, gives sanction to unmarried parenthood by women and irresponsibility by men and creates whole neighborhoods where adolescent boys are unsupervised and are readily drawn into association with the criminals who are the real rulers. Indeed, the same kind of arguments -- "personal responsibility" versus "it's society's fault" -- have been made on crime issues, and were on vivid display in the debate over the 1994 crime bill. The "personal responsibility" side called for harsher punishments; the "it's society's fault" called for, among other things, midnight basketball and more counseling. It is an argument over discipline versus therapy. Every society, like every family, needs some of both and every society, like every set of parents, will differ how much of each is appropriate.

The Tocquevillian America of the 1990s has opted clearly, on both crime and welfare, for more discipline and less therapy. These were not the decisions of Washington elites or academic experts, who almost uniformly favor therapy; they were forced by the people on their national leaders, or were the product of local officials and citizens acting in disregard of elite opinion. Since the 1960s, liberal elites used the federal government, and the leverage of federal dollars, to impose therapy-type approaches on social work and crime-fighting across the country, with success far greater than the amount of federal spending would suggest. Their secret was to shape the culture of the care-giving and law enforcement professions, through graduate schools, professional organizations and friendly mass media. This was not an invisible process to voters, many of whom understood that programs originally intended to encourage middle-class behavior instead tended to discourage the values that promote stability. They understood that welfare programs increasingly were run by social workers who did not believe in encouraging recipients to work, that schools were run by educators who did not believe in teaching basic skills and information but just in promoting self-esteem, that police departments were sometimes run by leaders who believed that "root causes" rather than individuals were to blame for crime and that prisons were run by penologists who did not believe in keeping people in jail.

Responding to these views, governors in many states sought to change the welfare system and the Clinton Administration, heedful of public opinion, granted some waivers from federal requirements. But the real change seems to have come with passage of the 1996 welfare reform act. Suddenly states were empowered to change the rules and, there is much reason to believe, suddenly recipients and potential recipients decided that welfare was something they could not rely on, and they had better try work. Welfare rolls, which peaked in 1994, started to fall and by late 1996, even before welfare reform was technically in effect, were falling rapidly. Similarly, crime rates in the middle-1990s, after years of staying up near peak levels, started to fall. These were more than responses to a prosperous economy; economic good times in the 1970s and 1980s produced no such result. It is possible, though not yet certain, that we are seeing a decline in welfare and crime beginning around 1994 as sharp and precipitous as the increase in welfare and crime that occurred between 1965 and 1975.

These trends were not uniform across the country. Welfare rolls were down most sharply in Wisconsin -- 28% between September 1995 and September 1996 -- and crime rates fell most sharply in New York City -- down by one-third since Rudolph Giuliani became mayor in January 1994. Specific individuals were responsible: Governor Tommy Thompson has been devising workfare programs for over 10 years and former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton made New York cops crack down on minor offenders and disturbers of the peace and used computers to isolate high-crime locales so that they could be flooded with police. But in a Tocquevillian America states and cities are laboratories of reform, and an experiment which works in one place can be copied elsewhere. But the successes of Wisconsin and New York City suggest that the culture of the care-giving professions can be changed by determined public officials and that actions by politicians can remove the apparent sanction of fatherless childbearing or criminal behavior.

In Tocqueville's America, politics became a kind of culture war, between a Yankee-led North and a cavalier-led South: indeed, eventually a real Civil War, in which 600,000 Americans lost their lives. Our America is in the midst of a less heated culture war, as Patrick Buchanan called it in 1992 (while showing more relish for it than suited most voters), whose contours are shown in the election results and the exit polls of the 1996 elections. To which let us turn.

The America revealed in the 1996 election results and exit polls is an America deeply divided, more along cultural than along economic lines, and increasingly along regional lines. Those who see economics as the motive force in political decision will find only modest support in the results. The Voter News Service exit poll showed the lowest income group (under $15,000) voted 59%-28% for Clinton and the highest (over $100,000) 54%-38% for Dole, but each of these groups was less than 10% of the electorate; among the other 80%, there was little difference between income groups. On racial lines there were large differences: whites voted 46%-43% for Dole, blacks 84%-12% for Clinton. But there were surprises as well: Hispanics, a disparate group which trended toward Reagan Republicans in the 1980s, voted 72%-21% for Clinton; Asians, portrayed by some activists as a minority in need of special help from government, voted 48%-43% for Dole. Men voted 44%-43% for Dole, women 54%-38% for Clinton: the gender gap that has become familiar since 1980, with an even bigger gap between married women (48%-43% for Clinton) and unmarried women (62%-28% for Clinton).

But the factor which divided voters more than anything else was religion. Definitions here are imprecise, and categories incommensurate between polls, but the overall picture is clear when one interpolates from the VNS and Los Angeles Times exit polls. The categories of Jews and those people stating "no religion" voted about 3-1 for Clinton. Traditional white Protestants voted about 2-1 for Dole. A similar pattern was apparent in House races, except that Protestants voted about 3-1 Republican.

Another factor that stands out in the results is education. From the New Deal up through the Reagan years, the pattern was clear: the least educated voters were the most Democratic, the most educated the most Republican. But in the 1990s that has changed. In the VNS poll those who had not graduated from high school voted 65%-35% for Democratic House candidates. But this group was only 6% of the electorate, including many elderly blacks. The three middle groups -- high school graduates, those with some college and college graduates -- were together 50%-49% Republican, with the former a few points more Democratic and the last a few points more Republican. But those with post-graduate degrees were more Democratic -- 51%-49% in House races and 52%-40% in the presidential race according to VNS, 49%-43% in the presidential race according to the Los Angeles Times. These graduate school degree holders are not just doctors and lawyers, but also teachers and social workers whose credentials earn them higher pay in government jobs under public employee union contracts; they reflect the liberal culture of the care-giving professions; they are now a significant, though nothing like a majority, part of the electorate, numerous enough to have replaced CIO union assembly line workers as the demographic base of the Democratic Party.

One of the striking features of the 1996 elections results is how voters in Democratic regions have become more Democratic, while voters in Republican regions have become more Republican. It was the result perhaps of local responses to national issues, but also a reflection, in a country with enormous social and geographical mobility: people are seeking out their own kind. Many commentators noted on election night that Republicans were becoming a kind of endangered species in the Northeast, and pointed out accurately that there were only four Republican congressmen left in New England, arguably the historic heartland of the Republican Party. True enough, and significant. But these commentators failed to notice that there were only four Democratic congressmen left in the Rocky Mountain states, arguably the heartland of William Jennings Bryan's Democratic Party but not the home base or college site of many of today's media elite. And, one might add, in the 1990s the Rocky Mountain states have more congressmen than New England, so that the Democrats' 19-4 advantage in New England was outweighed ever so slightly by the Republicans' 20-4 advantage in the Rockies. To which one might again add that the Great Plains states running north from Oklahoma to North Dakota elected 13 Republicans and one Democrat to the House.

The interesting point here is that both New England and the Rocky Mountains were becoming more monopartisan. Just four years before, after the 1992 election, both areas were much more evenly divided: the New England delegation was 14-8 Democratic and the Rocky Mountain delegation 13-11 Republican. What we are looking at here is something reminiscent of the realignment shown in the House elections of the 1930s. In 1932, when the economy was in collapse and Franklin Roosevelt was elected on an ambiguous platform, Democrats in House contests made uniform gains in all regions of the country, winning dozens of seats that never went Democratic before -- and some that would never go Democratic again. In the 1934 offyear elections, the Democrats actually gained nine seats -- the only time the party in power has done so in the offyear -- but they did not gain them uniformly. They lost seats in the small towns and rural areas of the East and Midwest, where the centralization of power in the National Recovery Administration and other New Deal agencies was resented as an interference with local arrangements. But they won seats in the industrial, factory districts which had gained population rapidly from 1900 to 1930 and then reeled from huge layoffs and the almost total devaluation of local real estate; in Pennsylvania alone, Democrats gained nine House seats in 1934 that they had not won in 1932 -- a harbinger of the industrial, unionized base of the Democratic Party for the next 30 years. House Republicans did not do quite so well in 1996; they lost seats on balance, though only eight. But they consolidated gains in the areas where support for their policies was strong, and lost few enough where support for their policies was weak to keep a majority in the House. Which is not to say that they are guaranteed a majority for as long as the New Deal Democrats, but only that they represent a growing force in public opinion, less visible in the precincts of the Washington-New York elite but more widely disseminated across the country as the emerging New Deal majority was in 1934.

To understand the contours of opinion across the country, let us move beyond the Northeast corridor to examine the political responses in all regions of the country, divided along lines that give meaning to the trends of the 1990s. Divide the country into five regions, four of which include about one-sixth of the voters, the other about one-third. The first is New England and the Metroliner Corridor -- the six states of New England and the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas, including most of New York, all of New Jersey and Delaware, southeast Pennsylvania, most of Maryland and the District of Columbia. The second is the South Atlantic states from Virginia south to Florida. The third is the Mississippi Valley -- a bit more than one-third of the nation -- from Upstate New York to Louisiana, from Minnesota to Alabama -- the part of America which was first settled from the 1770s to the 1840s and the great industrial base of the nation. The fourth region is the great Interior, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states from Texas to Idaho (and including Alaska): the Great American Desert, as it was referred to, during the years just before and after the Civil War. Finally there are the Pacific states, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, those far American outposts in the 19th Century and now our redoubts on the rapidly growing Pacific Rim. Each has its great economic capitals generating commerce and looking to the world beyond -- New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles -- and each has its own combination of economic interests and cultural attitudes that sends its politics in different directions. Let us look at each region in turn.

REGION		PRESIDENT		HOUSE
		(R-D-I%)		(R-D%)
United States 1996		41-49-8		49-49
Northeast Corridor		31-59-8		41-58
South Alantic		46-46-7		55-45
Mississippi Valley		41-49-9		49-48
Interior		48-42-8		56-41
Pacific Rim		38-51-8		45-51
United States 1994				52-45
Northeast Corridor				44-52
South Atlantic				58-41
Mississippi Valley				54-45
Interior				57-40
Pacific Rim				48-49
United States 1992		37-43-19		46-51
Northeast Corridor		33-49-17		43-52
South Atlantic		43-41-16		49-49
Mississippi Valley		38-43-18		46-51
Interior		40-36-23		48-49
Pacific Rim		33-45-21		41-55
United States 1990				45-53
Northeast Corridor				42-54
South Atlantic				45-55
Mississippi Valley				46-53
Interior				48-51
Pacific Rim				44-52
United States 1988		53-46		45-54
Northeast Corridor		49-51		42-54
South Atlantic		60-39		48-52
Mississippi Valley		53-46		46-54
Interior		57-42		49-50
Pacific Rim		50-48		43-55

New England/Metroliner Corridor. Throughout the 1996 election cycle, reporters wrote that voters were repelled by the Republican revolutionaries and the religious right, that they were ready to cast an overwhelming though not entirely enthusiastic majority for Bill Clinton, that they were especially annoyed by opponents of abortion, and -- while not interested in higher taxes -- they were queasy about the prospect of dismantling government. This was an accurate picture -- of one-sixth of the nation. The Northeast Corridor voted for Bill Clinton by a rousing 59%-31% margin, producing more than half his popular vote margin -- a more one-sided result than any of these regions in the last three presidential elections. And in House elections it voted 58%-41% Democratic, while the rest of the country voted 51%-47% Republican. There is no question that there is an anti-Republican trend at work here. The Northeast Corridor has long been Democratic, but not by so wide a margin: Clinton carried the area 49%-33% in 1992 and Democrats carried the House vote here by a steady 54%-42% in 1990, 52%-43% in 1992, 52%-44% in 1994.

The Northeast Corridor in 1996 voted more like post-Thatcher Britain than like the rest of the United States. Like Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major, Northeast Corridor Governors Weld, Pataki, Whitman and Ridge have been slashing spending and cutting taxes, and since the defeats of Neil Kinnock in Britain in 1992 and Jim Florio in New Jersey in 1993 it has become an article of faith that voters will not countenance a tax increase. But with threat of tax increases removed, other issues come forward. Privatization has not gone as far in the Northeast Corridor as it has in Britain, and many people here, especially in and around New York, have got a government-connected niche which they are loath to give up (note how Long Island Republicans squawked when Newt Gingrich attacked unions). On cultural issues, the Northeast Corridor is not as secular and liberation-minded as Britain, but is getting there. Even nominal Catholics do not take the church's teaching on abortion seriously, and there are very few tradition-minded conservatives here. Nor is American exceptionalism -- the idea that this country is special and different, a moral beacon for the world -- play especially well in an area where many think most people west of the Hudson wear sheets and hoods. Then there is style. The Northeast Corridor prizes articulateness and doesn't much mind corruption: the tight-lipped, forthright Bob Dole struck no chords here, and Newt Gingrich's denunciations of New York's welfare culture raised hackles, while Bill Clinton's sureness with words and off-and-on relationship with the truth play well.

But too much has been made of the Northeast Corridor's anti-Republican trend. This region looms unnaturally large in the minds of the mostly New York- and Washington-headquartered media. In 1944 this area cast 24% of the nation's votes, with New York City by itself accounting for 7%; in 1996 the same area cast just 16% of the national total, with New York City accounting for 2%. Democrats have already won almost every House seat they could hope to win here, and it casts only so many electoral votes -- counting New York's but not Pennsylvania's, 99 in 1996 and probably 96 after the 2000 Census. The Northeast Corridor controls the nation's mind less than it thinks -- "Home Improvement" has higher ratings than "Seinfeld." And it is in demographic decline: it generates relatively few new jobs and its population has only grown 2.1% in the 1990s, compared to 7.5% for the rest of the country. The Northeast Corridor cannot be ignored, but it is far from the whole story of America.

South Atlantic. A half century ago, there was not much to say about the South Atlantic states and their politics. They were America's backwater, economically far behind the rest of the nation, with low-wage Piedmont textile mills their only major industry, culturally bound by legally-enforced racial segregation, politically so heavily Democratic that few people bothered to pay their poll taxes and vote: they cast only 4% of the nation's votes in 1944. Now very much has changed. The surge of growth in the South Atlantic accelerated after the dismantling of segregation and has grown even faster in the 1990s; the South Atlantic grew 10% between 1990 and 1996 and in the latter year cast 15% of the nation's votes.

Yet the South Atlantic's politics are an outgrowth of deep traditions that go back in some cases to colonial days. Foremost among them is this area's Christian heritage. This is one of the most deeply religious places in any economically advanced country, with churches in every neighborhood and at country crossroads; if tone of daily life in the Northeast Corridor is secular, in the South Atlantic it is religious. The prominence of the religious right in the Republican Party is an asset here, not a liability. Economically, the South Atlantic was within living memory a kind of underdeveloped country, desperate even for low-paying textile mills; politicians here have worked hard to attract industry, keeping taxes down and insisting on right-to-work laws: this is the least unionized part of America. The colonies along the South Atlantic had no large city, unless you count Charleston, and there remains a country atmosphere to life here today. Even in metropolitan Atlanta, in the big urban strips in Florida, in the Northern Virginia suburbs spilling out into the countryside, the look of the place is country: kudzu, swamps, trees and greenery of all kinds dominate the view, and the pleasantry-laden tone of southern life even infects migrants from the North.

Politically, the South Atlantic is one of the two most Republican regions (the other is the Interior). It cast off its Democratic heritage as early as 1952, when most states here went for Dwight Eisenhower; it began electing Republican congressmen in the 1950s, governors in the 1970s. By 1988 it was voting 60%-39% for George Bush; it has been closer since in presidential races, but still more Republican than the nation: 43%-41% for Bush in 1992, 46.1%-45.8% for Clinton in 1996. Clinton owes this carry to his intensive campaigning for Florida's 25 electoral votes; he lost the four other states, including Georgia, which he won in 1992. The underlying Republican trend is stronger. It shows up in House races: the South Atlantic voted 55%-45% Democratic in 1990, a last vestige of its old allegiance, then 49.0%-48.8% Republican in 1992, 58%-41% Republican in 1994, 55%-45% Republican in 1996. Republican strength goes even further downballot: Republicans control four of the area's 10 state legislative chambers and have a tie in another.

The South Atlantic's traditions mix well with 1990s Republicanism, indeed have helped shape it: Newt Gingrich is from Georgia. Hostility to unions and high taxes are deeply ingrained here; strong traditional religious faith comes naturally. Democratic as well as Republican governors here, aware of the need for high skills, have emphasized the need for tough standards even as they have raised teacher pay. And no politician here sees a need to apologize for being tough on crime: the South Atlantic is ready to execute murderers and let law-abiding citizens carry concealed weapons. The major dissenters from this consensus are the South Atlantic's blacks -- 21% of the population, more than in any other region. Fresh from seeing desegregation imposed from Washington, they have seen a large and interventionist federal government as their agent of change, even as their states have improved local schools and the booming private economy has brought new jobs. But most South Atlantic voters disagree and prefer their regional economic and moral order to liberal Washington's.

The Mississippi Valley. In 1682 the French explorer LaSalle sailed up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi Valley: the first man to traverse the region we call the Mississippi Valley. This land between the Appalachian chains and the Great Plains is the center of America, the heartland, a place of great variety that is likely to be the central battleground in elections to come. It votes almost exactly like the nation as a whole: 49%-41% for Bill Clinton and 49%-48% for Republican House candidates in 1996; 48%-43% for Clinton and 51%-46% for Democratic House candidates in 1992. Clinton carried every state here except Mississippi and Alabama. When the Mississippi Valley does diverge from national patterns, it is worth inquiring the reasons. In 1994 it voted 54%-45% for Republican House candidates at the same time as most of its states were voting lopsidedly for Republican governors who boasted of cutting taxes and spurring economic growth. And while the Republican percentage dropped in 1996, it did not fall to the levels of 1992 and before; Republicans lost some seats here, but kept enough for a majority.

Historically, the Mississippi Valley was divided politically by the Old National Road, later U.S. 40 and Interstate 70, which runs through southwest Pennsylvania, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Kansas City. North of the line people voted mostly Republican, south mostly Democratic. Then in the 1930s, with the CIO industrial unions organizing auto, steel and rubber factories, the big metropolitan areas of the Great Lakes became heavily Democratic. In the 1960s, white voters in the South shifted from Democrats toward Republicans, as did some blue collar workers; blacks in both the South and the big cities of the north became heavily Democratic. All these shifts have left the Mississippi Valley pretty close to evenly divided between the parties.

The economy here is mostly industrial, until one gets to the southern reaches of the Mississippi River, and competition between the parties is also a contest between two visions of industrial governance. The Democrats have been allied closely with the big industrial unions, and mostly see government as an instrument of economic redistribution. The constituency for that -- blue collar workers in big Great Lakes metro areas -- seemed to die out in 1994, but came faintly flickering back to life in 1996. The Republicans, historically allied with big company management, have moved now toward market economics, trusting that lower taxes, less welfare and fewer regulations will invigorate their economies. And in fact manufacturing, in almost terminal condition in the early 1980s, is now thriving, with hundreds of thousands of jobs in small businesses quietly being created -- many more than were noisily lost in big company plan closures and layoffs. In 1996 Clinton got some credit for this; in 1994 Republicans did, and they hope to again in 1998.

On cultural issues the Mississippi Valley, like America, is exceedingly diverse. Support for abortion rights seems to be an asset in Illinois and a liability in Louisiana; in other states there are large constituencies for both points of view. Neither of the core cultural constituencies of the two parties -- the religious right and the feminist left -- dominates the local political dialogue, as the former do in the South Atlantic and Interior and the latter in the Northeast Corridor and Pacific Rim.

The Interior. As farmers moved west across the Great Plains, they came to land with less and less rainfall, until they reached the 100th parallel, which runs through North Dakota south to Texas and has long been considered the boundary between farm fields and grazing land. The land of most of this Interior region is brown and empty today, while farm counties have lost population as fewer hands are needed to harvest the crops. Except for its eastern edge, most of the Interior today is place with large metropolitan areas rising from barren land, with small settlements -- resorts, oil drilling towns, county seats -- in the vast space in between. Even Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas are on their way to becoming city-states.

The original politics of these states revolved around Civil War loyalties and mining and farming interests: Texas voted for the Confederacy, Colorado for the union, Arizona for copper, North Dakota for wheat. But by the 1980s politics in all these states began revolving around the same theme: local interests versus federal control. Texans and Oklahomans were disgusted with federal oil and gas price controls; Nevada was furious at being designated the nation's nuclear waste disposal site; Utah's Mormons disliked the cultural liberalism of Washington bureaucrats; Idahoans and New Mexicans rebelled at the ukases of federal land agencies. Even farm subsidies started to evoke not support but disdain: in 1996 Kansas and Nebraska placidly accepted the phasing out of wheat and corn subsidies. Added to these complaints in many parts of the Interior, though not all, was strong traditional Christian beliefs.

The result is that the once mostly Democratic Interior was in 1996 the most Republican region in the country. The Interior voted 48%-42% for native son Bob Dole over Bill Clinton, and 56%-41% for Republican House candidates in 1996; the latter was almost identical to its 57%-40% support of Republican House candidates in 1994. This was similar to the Interior's 57%-42% vote for George Bush in 1988. The changeover in congressional voting came in 1994; before that the Interior voted Democratic for the House, 51%-48% in 1990, 49%-48% in 1992. Now Democratic congressmen are about as scarce here as Republican congressmen are in the Northeast Corridor. In the House the Interior is represented by 47 Republicans and 22 Democrats, of whom 17 come from Texas, with the cleverest Democratic redistricting plan of the 1990s. (Texans voted 54%-44% Republican for House, but elected 13 Republicans and 17 Democrats.) But Democrats are not likely to control redistricting again here -- Governor George W. Bush is highly popular going into 1998 and the state Senate is now Republican -- and so the Republicans stand to make redistricting gains in 2002.

Pacific Rim. If the Interior is wide open, the Pacific Rim is densely packed: most people here live in metropolitan areas filling up the narrow interstices between ocean and mountains. Houses are expensive, lots are small, offices are distant over clogged freeways (one reason why so many people work at home). This is the homeland of America's computer creativity and its connection with the surging economies of East Asia; it produced bounteous growth for decades, then foundered as California and Japan went through a deep recession in the early 1990s. California (but not Japan) has now recovered and is rapidly generating jobs and creating new goods and services; Washington and Oregon in the Pacific Northwest are booming; only tourism-dependent Hawaii is lagging. This is the part of America most affected by the vast flows of immigration from Latin America and East Asia. The Pacific Rim cast 10% of the nation's votes in 1944, 16% in 1996.

Ronald Reagan showed Republicans how to carry the Pacific Rim in the 1980s; they have not been able to do it since. George Bush won here in 1988 by only 50%-48%, but lost to Bill Clinton by a resounding 45%-33% in 1992. Clinton carried the Pacific Rim 51%-38% in 1996, while Democratic House candidates were prevailing 51%-45%. Even in 1994 Democrats won 49%-48%. Reagan's success was based on his economic conservatism, his strong defense policy and sunny temperament. The Pacific Rim is quite aware that its growth has come mainly from the private sector, with the important exception in the 1980s of defense. The defense cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s helped trigger southern California's economic collapse, with the upshot that its economy is now less defense-dependent.

Cultural conservatism has never been especially popular here. This is the most secular part of the nation, the place where people are least moored to old communities and folkways (as many still are in the slow-growth Northeast corridor). Exercise, environmentalism, New Age beliefs, gay identity, feminism -- all have become religion substitutes for many Pacific Rimmers, and all correlate highly with political liberalism. Traditional religion does have some followers, notably in eastern Washington and Oregon and the Central Valley of California (which might fit in fairly well in the Interior). But the balance is on the other side. Voters here tend to see the religious right as a rebuke and even a threat to their lifestyle. And in the apolitical atmosphere here, so different from the blaring tabloid culture of the Northeast Corridor, voters have been willing to let highly skilled Democratic machine politicians control their legislatures; the California Assembly, briefly Republican, is now back in Democratic hands, as is the Senate. Hawaii's legislature is the most Democratic in the land, and the governorship has been handed down by one faction of Democrats since 1962. A possible countertrend: Washington and Oregon have elected Republican legislatures, perhaps to counterbalance liberal Democratic governors, perhaps because the values of their eastern regions are seeping west.

These regional differences help make some sense of the political trends of the 1990s. There is a seeming paradox here: presidential voting became more Democratic while congressional voting became more Republican. But in fact Americans in the 1990s have been voting more straight tickets than at any time since the 1940s. In the 1970s and 1980s many voters stuck with their ancestral Democratic preference in House races, or voted for the smart young Democratic political entrepreneurs who were so numerous in those years, even while voting Republican for president. In the 1990s such behavior has stopped. In 1992, as a look at the table shows, voters in each region produced about the same margin for each party for president and for the House; this is what we should expect if Perot voters split their House votes evenly. In 1994, voters were plainly responding to national issues in general and Bill Clinton in particular. In 1996, the percentage for Clinton in each region is eerily similar to the Democratic percentage in House races. Some Democrats may take that as evidence that if Clinton's lead was as large as in most polls, they would have won the House. Perhaps. But the fundraising scandals which seem to have lowered his poll numbers were not incidental to the way his campaign raised those numbers in 1995 and early 1996; they were a central part of his campaign strategy, one without which he would probably not have been running so well. In the political marketplace nothing is free; there is some question, however, about when you pay the price. Just as Republicans must worry whether they can again assemble a presidential majority without antagonizing their base, so Democrats must worry whether their 49%s in 1996 were a ceiling rather than a base.

It bears repeating that Clinton's 49% in 1996 was contingent while the House Republicans' 49% was fundamental. Clinton's victory owed much to superior skills and favorable circumstances not all of his making. Other Democrats are not guaranteed those advantages in the future. House Republicans' victory, on the other hand, occurred in unfavorable circumstances and despite the grave unpopularity of the most visible Republican leaders. Not all those disadvantages are guaranteed in the future. Much has been made of the unpopularity of House Republicans in the Northeast Corridor and, to a lesser extent, in the Pacific Rim. Less has been made about their affirmative strength in other regions. In 1990 none of these five regions voted for Republican House candidates. In 1992 only one did, by a fraction of a percentage point. But in 1994 Republican House candidates won 58% in the South Atlantic, 54% in the Mississippi Valley and 57% in the Interior. They held most of that vote in 1996. It would be wrong to say that Republicans are bound to win future congressional elections. But it is wrong to not acknowledge that their victory in 1996 shows that they represent a potential majority coalition capable of asserting itself in presidential as well as congressional contests.

Indeed, one could make the case that the Clinton presidency has been disastrous for the Democratic Party. When Clinton was elected in November 1992 there were 58 Democratic senators. Now there are 45. In November 1992 there were 259 Democratic congressmen. Now there are 208. When Clinton took office in January 1993 there were 28 Democratic governors. Now there are 17, in states with just 25% of the nation's population. There are 500-plus fewer Democratic legislators than there were when Clinton first won. Not all of these losses can be blamed on Bill Clinton, but many can. And there is also clear evidence that the Republican gains in Congress reflect a genuine impulse in the electorate.

THE POLITICAL GOVERNMENT
In the ordinary course of things, incumbents who are reelected to office emerge from the election more powerful and confident than when they went in. But not in early 1997. The 49% president was distracted by scandal. The 49% House Republicans were distracted by something akin to a loss of nerve, a sense that they had somehow lost the election that they actually won. The Senate, looked to for leadership, was hobbled by rules which make it easy to prevent decisive action. Leaders of both parties interpreted the election results as a demand for bipartisan cooperation. But Democrats continued to resent the aggressive tactics Republicans used to win control of the House in 1994, and Republicans continued to resent the mendacity of the Democrats' campaign against Medicare "cuts" in 1996. The voters clearly were in a mood for tranquillity and were tired of what they regarded as bickering. But a free and representative government will have an adversarial politics, and it was the voters themselves who (as in five of the past seven presidential elections) chose a president of one party and a Congress of the other.

Fortunately, the state of the nation was good and the public agenda fairly clear. The United States was the preeminent power around the world, at peace with other nations, with troops on assignment in Bosnia and elsewhere not under concerted attack. The macroeconomy was performing well: steady economic growth, an outpouring of new jobs, low inflation. Indeed, the economy for some time has been performing better than most political rhetoric suggested: the Boskin Commission conclusion that the Consumer Price Index overstates inflation means that wages and incomes have been rising, not falling since 1973. The culture, it is generally conceded, is malfunctional in some ways, but crime rates were falling, welfare rolls were shrinking, the rate of divorce was declining -- in many ways things seemed to be moving in the right direction.

The agenda of officeholders in Washington was fairly clear. Congress needed to pass and the president to sign appropriations bills maintaining those parts of government that have been performing well and sending the budget somewhere close to balance by 2002. In a Tocquevillian society where power naturally devolves from the center to local communities, Congress needed to set terms and conditions under which government programs are devolved and commerce deregulated: as the 104th Congress did with welfare reform and telecommunications. And something needed to be done about the looming insolvency of the major entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. Ronald Reagan used to say that the solutions to complex problems were simple but not easy. That seemed to be the case again in the wake of the 1996 elections. In our Tocquevillian America, power has been flying out of Washington. But the terms and conditions under which power is devolved can make vast changes in people's lives; and setting those terms and conditions is the job of our elected federal officials in Washington.

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Article I of the Constitution is not about the president; it is about Congress, and the House of Representatives, not the Senate, comes first. So the Framers expected it to be in government, except in war when the president's power as Commander in Chief would naturally be paramount. The Framers took care to require that all tax laws originate in the House, and by custom appropriations bill originate there too. The power of initiation is the power to frame issues, and as all political consultants know the side that frames the issues usually determines the outcome. That power came to seem less in the wartime conditions of the last 60 years; during the economic emergency of the Depression, during World War II and during the long Cold War, Congresses grew accustomed to waiting for the president's program and the president's budget and then responding to it, usually with changes at the margins.

But then the Cold War ended, and something like the original constitutional order was restored. The Democratic Congress forced George Bush first to drop his capital gains tax cut in 1989 and then to break his "Read my lips" promise and support a major tax increase in 1990. The leaders of the Democratic Congress also pressed Bill Clinton in 1993 to increase taxes, though without any Republican support they had great difficulty rounding up the votes to pass it. Then in 1994 a Republican Congress was elected -- the first time voters had chosen a Republican House since 1952. Speaker Newt Gingrich, without whom this historic victory would not have been achieved, had the foresight to prepare an agenda in the form of the Contract with America which he persuaded almost every Republican House candidate to sign in September 1994. And the new Republican House set out writing a budget and enacting tax cuts and setting a goal, embraced by Bill Clinton in June 1995 to the chagrin of many Democrats.

It is widely believed -- and by many Republicans -- that this strategy was a terrible mistake and resulted in disaster for the House Republicans. To be sure, they did make mistakes. They proposed similar amounts in tax cuts and reduced increases in Medicare, which let Democrats attack them as backing Medicare "cuts" for tax cuts for the rich. And they seemed to take glee in watching the government shut down in December 1995, although in fact it was Bill Clinton's veto that shut it down; they had passed, if tardily in some cases, appropriations bills. But these mistakes aside, the House Republicans' strategy in important ways succeeded. It resulted in cuts in domestic discretionary spending for the first time since 1971 -- and this was after restoring monies demanded by Bill Clinton. It produced little outcry about programs cut back or eliminated: few people missed them. And it provided part of a platform on which Republicans won control of the House again in 1996.

Chastened by bad poll results, perhaps spooked by hostile press coverage, the Republicans retreated a bit in 1996, allowing domestic discretionary spending and the budget deficit to rise. But they avoided a second showdown with Clinton and won in November. And they mightily affected public policy, in ways that were not always visible: the press reported elaborately on concessions they made to Clinton, but said very much less about the parts of their budget which a Democratic Congress would never have passed but which Clinton accepted.

But in the first months after the 1996 election, the House Republican leaders took a different course. They refused to put forward their own budget proposals, saying they would react to Clinton's. They failed to provide an agenda with anything of the urgency of the Contract with America. They gave up, for a moment anyway, the initiative to shape public policy. Why? One reason was that Newt Gingrich was understandably preoccupied with his case before the ethics committee, from the time the subcommittee report was made public January 17 until the House finally voted January 21. He had little choice: his survival as speaker was a close-run thing. Another reason may be simple weariness. It is far more difficult and time-consuming to write your own budget bills than to make marginal changes in someone else's. And it is hard to summon up the energy to write your own tax bill when it seems sure to be vetoed and then another will have to be written after endless negotiations. Bill Clinton seems to enjoy these marathon sessions; few others do.

There seems to be another reason -- many Republicans seemed to have lost their nerve. They seemed to lack the confidence they can take their case to the country, past an articulate, popular president and a hostile, monopartisan media, and prevail. They seem more comfortable responding to the Clinton agenda and waiting until 2001 in the hopes there will be a Republican president. But that is not clear, nor, if they continue their present course, is it clear there will be a Republican House. Republicans assume that the party in power always loses large numbers of seats in its sixth year in the White House, as happened in 1974, 1966, 1958, 1938 and 1918. But it didn't happen in 1986, 1926 or 1902: nothing is inevitable. The 1992 and 1996 presidential elections stand for the proposition that in the 1990s a New Democrat beats an Old Republican. If Republicans in the House seem to stand for nothing, it is conceivable that the Clinton White House could recruit enough activist, innovative New Democrats who could win the 10 seats Democrats need to win the House in 1998.

But the impression of inactivity may not prove lasting. The natural rhythm of congressional sessions is for little activity in the first four months: in January committee and subcommittee assignments are still being made, in February and March and April come the Presidents' Day and Easter recesses, and it ordinarily takes more time to draw up complex legislation -- a budget, a telecommunications or electricity deregulation bill -- than just a few weeks. Gingrich and the Contract with America set a precedent for early decisive activity which very few Congresses are in a position to follow. In March 1997 Gingrich traveled to China and articulated bluntly to its leaders basic American policies which Vice President Al Gore just days before had been at pains to slough over, and he followed up this show of resolution by returning to Washington and presenting a vision of this Congress making small but significant steps toward the long-term goal of reducing taxes and the size and scope of government.

Moreover, Gingrich had in place a set of committee chairmen committed to moving toward that goal. These chairmen were not necessarily chosen by seniority. Back in December 1992 Gingrich, then still minority whip, backed John Kasich over a more senior member for ranking position on Budget; that is why he is Budget chairman today, and one of the party's most appealing spokesmen. Just days after the 1994 election, Gingrich passed over four more senior members and named Bob Livingston chairman of Appropriations; his confidence that the strong-tempered Livingston would push through spending cuts proved justified. Other major committee chairmen came in with genuine strengths: Bill Archer of Ways and Means, Henry Hyde of Judiciary, Pat Roberts of Agriculture, now a senator, who passed the Freedom to Farm Act phasing out most farm subsidies over seven years. The committee chairmen are also under a deadline: the Republican Conference voted that they can keep their chairmanships only six years. Archer has already announced he will retire in 2000; Kasich seems bent on running for president in that year; the chairmen know that if they want to pass landmark legislation, they must do it while the Clinton-Gore Administration is in office. Important legislation is up before several committees; Transportation must reauthorize ISTEA, Education must reauthorize the Higher Education Act, Commerce has electric utility deregulation, Banking has repeal of Glass-Steagall. Kasich began working up his own budget, Archer began working on tax bills.

The thrust of all these laws, if Republicans do their work, will be to further devolve power from Washington, leaving choices to state and local governments, voluntary associations, parents, consumers and citizens, and leaving competition to be regulated by the market. But very much matters in the terms and conditions of such legislation. Take the familiar example of Social Security, though it is unlikely to be tackled by this Congress or this president. Many have proposed that taxpayers be allowed to invest some or all of their Social Security taxes in the financial markets, which have produced returns much greater than today's FICA taxpayers are scheduled to obtain from the government. On a 1996 commission two proposals attracted significant support. One would let the government invest such funds, with the proviso that it should not interfere in companies' operations. The other would let taxpayers choose between several investment vehicles.

Note that the two alternatives have very different effects on citizens (leaving aside the effect on corporations if the government doesn't obey the proviso). The first leaves citizens as passive objects of government benevolence, with an entitlement and an incentive to seek gains from decisionmakers in Washington. The second encourages citizens to be active shapers of their own future, looking to the private sector for gains. In private pensions and in some public pensions (the state of Michigan, for example) the movement now is away from defined benefit plans, which promise a certain set pension and create a mentality of entitlement, to defined contribution plans, which give the employee a right to make decisions himself and create a mentality of responsibility. Laws do more than appropriate money and forbid bad conduct. They set incentives and cultivate a state of mind. They give sanction to some behaviors and remove sanction from others. As George Will has written, "statecraft is soulcraft." The statecraft of the last Republican Congress performed some soulcraft, notably on welfare reform; the question is whether this Republican Congress can summon up the nerve and energy to do the same.

But what of other House Republicans? And what of House Democrats? It is said often that the Republicans will have a hard time holding their majority together, and it is a fact that only 10 defections will leave them short of a 218-vote majority. But it is often true that a legislative party holds together best when its margin is small, and when the consequences of a defection are readily apparent to all. After the 1958 election, when Democrats gained 13 seats in the Senate and 49 in the House, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was exultant over the results; but Speaker Sam Rayburn glumly said, "Too many Democrats," and proved to be right as Democrats felt free to spurn party discipline and he and Johnson had a harder time winning votes than they did when Democrats had a bare majority. House Republican leaders did a fine, though not perfect, job of holding their conference together in the 104th Congress, letting a few members take a bye when they must and rallying the rest; this is hard work, in which they didn't have much practice. It helps that Gingrich has close ties to many Republican moderates, to whom he has paid intellectually serious attention going back to the 1980s. As for conservatives, their chief complaint in early 1997 was that he was not pursuing the Republican agenda enough.

If House Republicans have mostly shown great party unity, so have the diminished numbers of long-fissiparous House Democrats. Many Democrats did support much of the Contract with America in 1995, but in 1996 they united around issues like the minimum wage to split Republicans in turn. Moreover, as of early 1997, nary a peep was heard from House Democrats in criticism of the various Clinton and White House scandals. That is not because House Democrats love Clinton or trust him very much -- many cried out in dismay when he accepted the goal of a balanced budget in June 1995 and signed welfare reform in August 1996. But they seem to regard him as the main political force working in their favor: they can't have escaped noting that he won 49% of the vote in November 1996 and they won 48.5%, with results uncannily close in dozens of districts, and that when he was in trouble in November 1994 their percentages were lower. The two major themes virtually all Democratic candidates voiced in 1996 -- denunciations of Gingrich and Medicare "cuts" -- did not win them many districts.

Yet there is clearly no Clinton Democratic Party in the House (or in the Senate either). The two top House Democrats, Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and Minority Whip David Bonior, take a different line on policy -- economically less respectful of markets and free trade, culturally somewhat more tradition-minded. Gephardt seems clearly to be running for president against Clinton's choice, Al Gore; Bonior is a committed social democrat who has taken great political risks for his causes. Their opposition to adjustment of the Consumer Price Index in March 1996 scared Clinton off the issue, though his top appointees had told Republicans and Democrats alike that he was in favor. With Clinton's eye on a third term (this time for Gore), Gephardt can -- and seems inclined to -- cast a kind of veto over policies which require bipartisan support for passage. Only about half the House Democrats share their policy views and Bonior's diehard determination to demonize Gingrich. But they have the levers of party leadership and every incentive to persevere. An interesting question: What kind of Democrats will be persuaded to remain in a House where they seem likely if not certain to be in the minority until at least another term or to run against Republicans or for open seats?

Another interesting question: Can peace be made and compromises worked out by moderate Democrats and Republicans? Certainly there is no lack of volunteers. The Blue Dog Democrats and Lunch Bunch Republicans have active organizations and talented leaders, looking seriously into important policy questions and producing on occasion serious policy proposals. They even have some communication with each other as well as with their parties' leaders. But they are not a perfect fit. The Blue Dogs tend to be economically somewhat liberal and culturally rather conservative; they tend to be from the South and West and many are, to take one important example, against gun control. The Lunch Bunch tend to be economically pretty market-oriented and culturally not so traditional; many are from the big metro areas of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, and are ardent backers of gun control. In a huge and diverse country, in the midst of a kind of culture war, it is hard to amass a majority for any position; the miracle is not that the two parties have trouble holding together their coalitions but that they have any coalition to hold together at all. The Blue Dogs and Lunch Bunch may well be there offering solutions, but it is not clear whether others will take them up.

THE SENATE
The Senate, first on the Sunday talk shows, is second in the constitutional order. As the 105th Congress assembled, there was talk that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was going to take charge in setting the policy agenda for Congress -- plausible talk given his high skills and the woes then besetting Newt Gingrich. But by mid-March it was apparent that for all Lott's efforts he could not pass the balanced budget amendment and could not produce an agreement on the budget or even a public undertaking by the Clinton Administration to back the adjustment of the Consumer Price Index which Bill Clinton had caused it to be known he would definitely support. The problem was not any mistakes by Lott, but the character of the Senate. For today's Senate is surely not "the greatest deliberative body in the world," as it likes to style itself; it is very seldom deliberative, and if often scarcely a body at all. This is a legislature where it is every man and woman for him or herself, where the whole is equal to a fair lot less than the sum of its parts, where it is far easier to kill someone else's initiative than it is to sustain one's own. But this is perhaps what the Framers intended. With only one-third of its members elected every two years, with a fair number of its members freed from political pressures because of their personal relationship with voters in small or one-party states, with its rules allowing even the politically weakest and personally least regarded of its members to stop the forward motion of legislation for some precious period of time, the Senate supplies some caution to the enthusiasms of the House.

What else it supplies is open to question. The partisan balance of the Senate has shifted as sharply, in percentage terms, as control of the House since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. There were 58 Democratic senators then, not quite the 60 needed to stop a filibuster, but a strong Democratic position with a Democratic president. But Democrats lost two seats very quickly -- one in the Georgia runoff three weeks after the election, the other in May 1993 when Kay Bailey Hutchison won Lloyd Bentsen's seat in Texas by a 2-1 margin. Democrats then proceeded to lose 10 seats in 1994, all eight open seats plus two incumbents, and two more when Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell switched parties in November 1994 and March 1995. Republicans then lost Bob Packwood's Oregon seat to Democrat Ron Wyden in January 1996. But in November 1996 they gained three seats, in Alabama, Arkansas and Nebraska, while losing one, Larry Pressler's in South Dakota: which leaves the Senate 55-45 Republican.

It is a more partisan, more conservative Senate than the Republican Senate of the 1980s. The 13 states of the South (leaving aside industrial West Virginia) now are represented by 19 Republicans and only 7 Democrats in the Senate; one of the latter has announced his retirement in 1998, and two more may. The nine Rocky Mountain states and Alaska are represented by 14 Republicans and only 4 Democrats, two from Nevada and one each from Montana and New Mexico. Almost all of these are staunch conservatives, dedicated to reducing the power of the federal government and cutting spending and taxes. Conservatives have firm control of the Republican Conference. Yet they do not in any sense control the Senate. The 45 Democrats are more than enough to sustain a filibuster. Half a dozen or so Republicans disagree with conservative positions on many issues.

Harry McPherson, who worked for Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s, writes of a Senate made up of whales and minnows -- a dozen or so men of large abilities and concerns, and then the rest who circled around waiting to follow. Today's Senate has very few whales and not so many minnows. Daniel Patrick Moynihan stands out, for the strength of his historic vision and his ability to spot issues before their time. But although he is capable of difficult legislative work, as he showed when he passed the ISTEA transportation bill in 1991 and the Clinton budget and tax package in 1993, he is often the prophet ignored, as on welfare reform in 1996. Most committee chairmen and ranking Democrats are competent men and women, highly skilled and of admirable character in very many cases, but they are more workmanlike than inspirational. On the other hand, there are fewer minnows than there were in the 1950s, fewer weak senators who defer to the leadership of others.

Will the Republicans retain control in 1998? The easy answer is, why not? There are two obviously endangered seats. One is in New York where Alfonse D'Amato is opposed by the brainy and publicity-loving Congressman Charles Schumer; but D'Amato has shown the wiliness to survive before. The other is in Indiana, where Dan Coats is retiring and former Governor Evan Bayh is highly popular; but popular governors of one party running in states heavily favoring the other, in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Massachusetts, have lost in the highly charged partisan atmosphere in recent years. Two Democratic retirements announced in early 1997 have given Republicans excellent chances for pickups in Ohio and Kentucky, and Carol Moseley-Braun in Illinois seemed in trouble. Both parties seemed to have a solid lock on 11 seats, which left four Democrats and three Republicans in some jeopardy. Democrats would have to sweep just about every close contest to win back control; Republicans would have to sweep just about every close contest to win the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster; both results seemed unlikely.

THE PRESIDENCY
The presidency was not expected to be an important office. Article I of the Constitution is about the Congress, and has 10 long sections; Article II, establishing the Presidency, has just four. The longest sets out how the president is elected -- much of this had to be scrapped in 1804 -- and specifies the oath he must take. Section 2 says that the president is commander-in-chief, that he can require the opinion in writing of officers of government, issue pardons and appoint ambassadors and Supreme Court justices and such other officers as Congress may provide for. Section 3 prescribes that he communicate annually to Congress, recommend laws to them, call Congress into session and "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Section 4 is the impeachment clause. Interesting are the omissions. Article II doesn't say that the president can fire officers of government, or set public policy, much less that he "runs the country." Mostly, his powers are what Congress gives him. The Framers' scheme seems pretty simple. In peacetime the president presides, does what Congress requires and little more. In wartime he has greater powers, unspecified, indeed unlikely to be challenged in the midst of great exigencies.

This, one could argue, is how the Presidency has worked in practice. In wartime the president has terrible powers: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and expanded federal powers vastly. But 20 years later Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of political science, could argue that Congress runs the government and the president matters hardly at all. As a wartime president, Wilson himself exercised powers that would make us quail and, when peace came, saw his grandest policy frustrated when the Senate declined to ratify the peace treaties he had made. The power of the Presidency subsided again in the 1920s, only to be revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the terrible economic disorder of the 1930s. Then came the extended experience of war -- World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam -- in which the Presidency became the center of government -- indeed, as a symbol of the whole country. We depended on presidents to preserve the nation, to prevent a world war; we were always aware that this one individual had the power to blow up the world. We spoke of "the Eisenhower era" and "the Johnson years"; a president's scandal could give its name to our times,"the Watergate era," or to a set of policies, "the Reagan revolution"; a record parodying the president and his family could soar to number one on the hit parade.

But after the American victories in the long Cold War in 1989 and the brief Gulf war in 1991, is the presidency as important any more? One never hears people talking about "the Bush years" or "the Clinton era." When Bill Clinton was elected president, he like almost all Americans had no living memory of a time when presidents were not utterly central to our politics and government, when the office was swelled up to its wartime dimension. But now it seems to have shrunk back toward the size the Framers envisioned it would have in ordinary times. Clinton seems to understand this; at one point he bemoaned that he did not have a real crisis like World War II on which to exercise his talents and win a large place in history.

Clinton has won at least one place in history: he is one of 15 presidents to have won a second term, and the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt, before Clinton was born. It was not at all apparent two years before, after the Republicans' stunning victory in the congressional elections, that Clinton would win, or how. It helped certainly that the nation in 1996 was in a time of peace and prosperity; but the same could have been said of 1994, when Clinton clearly would have lost if he had been on the ballot (as he lost for reelection as governor of Arkansas after his first two years). What got Clinton reelected was a combination of verbal and rhetorical skills of a high order, a perseverance and a discipline not much apparent in his first two years, a well-thought-out political strategy and some wily tactics. First comes rhetoric: Bill Clinton's greatest gift is his way with words: he uses the language eloquently, sinuously, with down-home accents when he wants them and soaring elevation the next moment; when folks are angry at him, he can talk them back to his side, as he has done hundreds of times in Arkansas, a state small enough that he could speak personally to every important person and many thousands not so important. His problem in early 1995 was getting people's attention; in March 1995 he was reduced to asserting that he was still "relevant." But he seized the occasion when the Oklahoma City federal building was blown up in April 1995 to sound authentic notes of consolation and to argue for the worthiness of the enterprise of government, and to suggest if only subliminally that those who criticized government were somehow connected to this crime. From that point he once again had the nation's ear.

Then came the disciplined execution of a shrewd political strategy. The idea, as explained by his constant adviser of 1995 and 1996, pollster Dick Morris, was "Triangulation": Clinton would stand not only between the two parties, as he did in much of the campaign of 1992, but above them both, a healer over the bickerers, a national symbol trying to make peace between petulant partisans. Clinton rationed his public statements as he rationed his food: this naturally weight-gaining middle-aged man actually lost 15 or 20 pounds in a position where he is constantly surrounded by tempting food. Clinton watched as the Republican Congress worked to enact its program, only vaguely threatening to use his veto; he stood apart from his fellow Democrats when in June 1995 he acceded to the Republicans' goal of a balanced budget by 2002. And there was a certain wiliness, even dissimulation, in his negotiations with Republican leaders. He lulled them into believing that he shared their goals and was just inches away from agreement with their plans, and let them believe that he would capitulate to them out of weakness as he had on numerous occasions before. But this time he stood up and opposed their plans, vetoed their appropriations and accused them of shutting the government down. Technically, this was not true: Congress had passed, though in some cases tardily, appropriations to keep the government going; it was Clinton's veto that shut it down. But Republicans gleefully welcomed this clarification, unwisely confident that the voters shared their mistrust of government; and Clinton pressed his advantage for all it was worth.

From January 1996 on, it is apparent in hindsight, Clinton was leading in a presidential race whose course did not much change until November. A more supple opponent might have run better than Bob Dole, and a Clinton veto of welfare reform could well have cost him votes. But a presidential election is usually a referendum on the incumbent, and the verdict was yes. But if Clinton clearly won in politics and at the polls, it is questionable whether he won in governance. His economic policy in 1993 had passed by the barest margin and his healthcare finance reform crashed in ruins in 1994. While he won in the polls over the budget controversy, he lost in substance: the compromise budget he signed in early 1996 actually reduced domestic discretionary spending for the first time since 1971 -- surely not a result he sought when he ran in 1992. To pursue his triangulation strategy, he signed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, modified slightly to be sure by his negotiations, but in sum eliminating the federal entitlement to welfare which had existed since 1935 -- something he had never publicly advocated. Similarly, the foreign policy which he was conducting as he was reelected was diametrically opposed to his earlier policies on American engagement in Bosnia, on trade relations and human rights in China, on NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.

In governance Clinton invites comparison with Richard Nixon. Coming to office as a moderate conservative at a time when the Washington establishment and much of the country was still liberal, Nixon largely acquiesced in liberal policies: his administration recognized China and ended American involvement in the Vietnam war; it produced the first racial quota programs, created EPA and OSHA, took the dollar off the gold standard and put government controls on wages and prices. An argument can be made that in policy terms Nixon was the most liberal president of all time. Similarly, Clinton came to office as a moderate liberal at a time when most of the country and a growing part of the Washington establishment was conservative, and he acquiesced in conservative policies: an expansive foreign policy, cuts in spending, an end to the welfare entitlement and most farm subsidies, deregulation of telecommunications and other industries. An argument can be made that his policies on many if not all issues have been more conservative than Ronald Reagan's. Nixon, unlike Clinton, was able to exert great power in foreign affairs as a president in time of war; but of them both it can be said that in domestic politics they were more creatures of their times than shapers of the future.

On election night 1996 Clinton noted that he had waged his last campaign, and many commentators opined that he would now look not for political gain but to his place in history. But there is little evidence that this man who has been running for public office since he was 27 has suddenly given up a preoccupation with electoral politics. There are very many indications that he is looking for further certification of his worthiness by electoral success, most notably his efforts during the 1996 campaign and convention to increase the stature of his Vice President, Al Gore. Clinton surely knows from history that only two presidents have had the satisfaction of seeing their vice presidents elected as their successors, Andrew Jackson in 1836 and Ronald Reagan in 1988, and that those victories were taken, with some good reason, as validations of those presidents' records and the centrality of their importance in Jacksonian America and the Reagan years. What more fitting way to establish Clinton as a masterful president than to secure the election of his vice president, especially one who shares so much of his approach to policy and who has been an important member of his administration? From the arrangements at his Chicago convention to his backdowns from a fight with likely Gore rival Richard Gephardt over adjusting the Consumer Price Index, Clinton has sought to advance Gore's candidacy and fight for a third consecutive Clinton-Gore victory.

Clinton must hope that the prospects for that are not soured by the scandals over campaign fundraising, the first glints of which became public three weeks before election day and much more of which burst into public view in the first months of 1997. The systematic raising of illegal foreign contributions by John Huang and perhaps others, the decision by the DNC not to vet big contributors for possible ethics problems, the fundraising phone calls from the White House in clear violation of Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 607(a) (which prohibits political fundraising in government buildings), the denials of knowledge and involvement that became inoperative as more information came out: these besmirch Clinton and Gore as well, as does Gore's appearance at the April 1996 Buddhist temple fundraiser. Yet these things were not accidental, but were an integral part of the disciplined Clinton-Gore campaign strategy, which required an unprecedented amount of funds for early television advertising. They paid little price for this before the election; perhaps they will pay more later.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2000
The office of the Presidency may be diminished in this time of peace and devolution of power, but there is no lack of applicants for the job. And no lack of interest. The spring of 1997 may be just the beginning of a presidential term, but it is only two years and nine months away from the 2000 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and by spring 1997 several candidates were already running. The 2000 contest stacks up to be unusual for two reasons. The first is that it stands to be one of the few in our recent history in which no incumbent president is running. The last such was 1988, and before that 1960 and 1928. The second reason is that the size of the fields in the two parties is at odds with their basic character. The Democratic Party has always been fissiparous, a collection of out-people which at its best amounts to a diverse but fractious majority. But the Democrats had no contest for their nomination in 1996 (the first time that was true since 1944) and, as of early 1997, had only a few plausible candidates for 2000. The Republican Party, in contrast, has always been a party with a central faith and a clear sense of hierarchy and order, which has ended up deferring to seniority in its nominations; most recently with Bob Dole. Yet for 2000 there is no Republican with a plausible claim to precedence, and a very large number who could conceivably run. To winnow among them, the Republicans must operate under a system of primaries and caucuses which was largely contrived by Democrats in response to, if not always turning out to be in harmony with, their perceived needs.

The Democrats. Their frontrunner obviously is Al Gore, who ran for the 1988 presidential nomination before he was 40. His obvious chief rival is Dick Gephardt, whom he outlasted in 1988, though both failed to become Jesse Jackson's main opponent -- and therefore the nominee -- as Michael Dukakis did. Other possible entrants include Senators Bob Kerrey and John Kerry, both Vietnam war heroes but otherwise not particularly alike. Gore's strategy in 1996 and early 1997 was to emerge so strong among the party's fundraising and activist constituencies as to deter Gephardt from running.

Back in 1960 Theodore H. White identified the Democratic Party's three major constituencies as the big city bosses, the southern governors and organized labor. In the late 1990s there are no big city bosses left (even Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley can't be described as one), only four southern governors (two of whom must leave office in 1998) and organized labor represents less the old CIO industrial unions than public employees (42% of AFL-CIO members are public employees). The greatest source of energy, enthusiasm and elan in the Democratic Party is the feminist left (just as the greatest source of energy, enthusiasm and elan in the Republican Party is the religious right). About 20% of Democratic primary votes are cast by blacks, who will be represented by leftish black politicians at the convention. It is not clear that any of these candidates has a lock on any of these constituencies.

The Republicans. The following is a list of 27 Republicans who have been mentioned as candidates and whose candidacies, if they ran, would be as plausible as those of Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes in 1996 -- and that is said not in jest: both came within a few votes of being positioned to win the nomination. They are, in alphabetical order, Lamar Alexander, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Patrick Buchanan, Carroll Campbell, Dick Cheney, Elizabeth Dole, John Engler, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm, John Kasich, Jack Kemp, Trent Lott, Dan Lungren, Connie Mack, John McCain, Don Nickles, George Pataki, Colin Powell, Dan Quayle, Tom Ridge, Fred Thompson, Tommy Thompson, George Voinovich, Christine Todd Whitman, Pete Wilson. It is not possible that all of them will run, and many pretty clearly will not. But many are thinking about it, and not just wistfully as they fall to sleep at night. And there could be more, emerging from the elections of 1998.

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