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Introduction
By Michael Barone
1998: The Politics Of Sogginess
The America Of The Exit Polls
The Political Government
The House Of Representatives
The Senate
The Presidency
The 2000 Field
Comes the new millenium, and the temptation is to think a whole new era is about to begin. Since the middle 1980s, American politicians have been saying that the next election will determine the course of the next century; and in a trivial way this of course is always true. The 2000 Election may very well present Americans with a choice between a Republican government and a Democratic government, because the political balance between the two parties is close and American voters, while professing independence, have been voting straight tickets more often in the 1990s than in any decade since the 1940s. A Republican president will likely bring in a Republican House and a Democratic president will likely bring in a Democratic House; Republicans will likely retain control of the Senate, but it is highly unlikely that either party will have the 60 seats needed to stop filibusters and establish working control.
For one-party control, by either party, is unlikely to change the character of the society in the way one-party control shaped it in the 1860s, when the Republicans won the Civil War and freed the slaves, or the 1930s, when the Democrats created the makeshift American welfare state and asserted the primacy of the federal government in controlling the economy. The initiative in shaping public policy is leaching out of Washington, to the states, the localities, the private sector. Since about 1993 crime and welfare have been declining on as steep a curve as the one on which they increased in the awful decade from 1965 and 1975, when crime and welfare tripled. But this was not the work of Washington. The initiative was taken by others-on welfare, most prominently by Wisconsin's Governor Tommy Thompson; on crime, most prominently by New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Congress's passage and Bill Clinton's signing of the 1996 welfare reform act simply enabled the states and cities to transform welfare more easily. The passage of federal crime laws has made only the most marginal contribution to the huge reduction in crime.
Nor has government done much to contribute to the vast increase in the wealth of ordinary Americans in the 1990s. The maintenance of low-inflation policies has of course contributed: Bill Clinton has had the good sense to follow Ronald Reagan here, and not Jimmy Carter (or, one might add, Richard Nixon). But Clinton can take little credit for the fact that stock ownership, in this decade of equity market growth, has increased from around 20% to around 50% of the American people. The primary cause has been the proliferation of defined contribution pension plans, a trend quietly encouraged by acts of Congress in the 1980s and reaching hurricane force in the 1990s. Indeed, by squelching proposals to include individual investment accounts in Social Security, Clinton (in his capacity as campaign manager for Al Gore) has delayed the public sector from catching up with the private sector here, as it has in other areas of American life.
Where the presidency can make a difference is in foreign policy. But it is hard to predict what that difference will be, and it depends very little on whether the president's party controls Congress. Few people predicted when Bill Clinton was running in 1992 that he would send military forces into or over Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Serbia and Somalia. Nor, in the 1990s at least, have many Americans cast their votes on foreign policy. Guesses can be hazarded of what foreign policy decisions various presidential candidates will make, and in some cases those guesses will be based on the candidates' past actions and experience. But it is a feature of the American system, which we take for granted but which arguably makes little sense, that men and women with the greatest foreign policy experience are generally considered ineligible to run. Only two of the dozen or so candidates have actually had experience making foreign policy in the executive branch, the two vice presidents, Al Gore and Dan Quayle. The others, for all their strengths, have never sat in those offices and affected the decisions being made.
So the odds are that, whoever wins in 2000, the basic conditions of American life will not be much changed. And the clear message from the elections of 1996 and 1998 is that most Americans do not want them vastly changed-at least not in ways that government can change them. The 1996 and 1998 elections were, above all, incumbent elections-and a vivid contrast to 1990, 1992 and 1994 in which incumbents in large numbers were eased to the door or booted out. The 1996 and 1998 House election results resembled each other more closely than any pair of House election results since 1976 and 1978, just as the 1992 and 1996 presidential election results resembled each other more closely than any pair since 1952 and 1956.
This left politicians of both parties deeply frustrated. In 1998 Democrats hoped to win a majority in the House, and Republicans hoped to increase their narrow majority. Both had some reason to expect they would succeed. Both failed. The failure of the Republicans was more dramatic, and led Speaker Newt Gingrich to announce his retirement three days later. Both parties had reason to hope that Bill Clinton would help them achieve their goal. Democrats hoped that the 70% job ratings he received after the Monica Lewinsky scandal surfaced on January 21 would help their candidates. It may have, but not enough. Republicans hoped that Clinton's admission August 17 that he lied to the American people would help their candidates. It may have, but after the Starr Report was made public September 11 Clinton's job rating went back up to 70% and many voters were visibly angry with Republicans. The response to the scandal and to impeachment was, among other things, proof of the strength of pro-incumbent fervor: Most Americans believed that things were going well, and did not want change.
And so they voted in November. Republican House candidates beat Democrats by 48.6%-47.7%, a narrow margin almost exactly the same as their 49.0%-48.5% popular vote margin in 1996. Only six incumbents were defeated, one Democrat and five Republicans. The Republican majority of House seats was slightly reduced, to a number perilously close to a minority but also very close to the results after the last two elections: 230 Republicans were elected in 1994 (their numbers went up to 235 by November 1996 because of party switches and special election victories), 227 Republicans were elected in 1996 (which went up to 228 by November 1998) and 223 Republicans were elected in 1998. A straight-line extrapolation of that pattern would give Republicans 218 seats in 2000, a one-vote majority. Of course it is true that the non-presidential party usually picks up seats in non-presidential years, and it has often (but by no means invariably) been the case that the non-presidential party makes major gains in the sixth year of a presidency. But the Republicans made their six-year pickup in Clinton's second year, after he had made the mistake presidents often make in landslide years-overinterpreting his mandate. Clinton, under the tutelage of pollsters Dick Morris and Mark Penn, was careful not to do that thereafter, and most voters liked the results.
Similar results were seen in the Senate races. Only one incumbent senator lost in 1996 and only three in 1998. Republicans had hoped to break even in 1996, and gained two seats; they hoped to make gains in 1998, and instead broke even. As for governorships, Republican incumbents had great victories in 1998, though the party had a net loss of one seat, not to a Democrat but to Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. After the elections Republicans held the governorships in seven of the eight largest states and in states with 64% of the nation's population (to 34% for Democrats and 2% for independents). But Democrat Gray Davis won a smashing 58%-38% victory in the largest state, California, and brought in a Democratic legislature and a Democratic near-sweep of top state offices.
The knife-edge margin between Republicans and Democrats in the House reflects the strength of most incumbents-and the weakness of both parties. Both are badly split-Republicans between economic and cultural conservatives, Democrats between New Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council stripe and left Democrats more comfortable with the AFL-CIO. The Republican split is subjected to intensive scrutiny by a press corps whose members vote about 90% Democratic; the Democratic split, though it has more consequences for public policy-on Social Security and Medicare reform, most notably-is mostly ignored. But even apart from these splits, the parties have fundamental weaknesses, which can be summarized by saying that the Democrats are the fragile party and the Republicans the stupid party.
That the Democrats are the fragile party can easily be ignored, yet it is in line with the historic character of the party, the oldest continuing political party in the world. The Democrats tend to be a collection of out-people, of groups which are regarded by others and themselves as something a little different from ordinary people. At their best these out-people unite and become the in-party; at their worst, they are a fractious rabble. The Democrats are fragile, because their institutional base depends on factors that are contingent, that are here today but may not be tomorrow. One is Bill Clinton's popularity, greater in 1997 or 1998 than when he was running; Clinton, like Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and John Kennedy, was elected without ever winning an absolute majority of the vote. Clinton's 49.2% of the vote in 1996 was matched, but not exceeded, by House Democrats' 48.5% in 1996 and 47.7% in 1998.
Nor is it clear that Clinton's popularity can automatically be transferred to the vice president he is campaigning for as no president has ever campaigned for any vice president before. In late 1998 and early 1999, when Clinton's job approval hovered around 70%, Al Gore was consistently running behind George W. Bush in polls for 2000. The Clinton-Gore fundraising base-even shorn of the illegal foreign contributions the 1996 campaign gleefully raked in-is awesome and seems committed to Gore. But it is highly dependent on what some might call the Lincoln bedroom factor: the president as fundraiser. Democratic candidates in 1996 and 1998 were heavily dependent on Clinton and Gore to raise money; if Gore is not president in 2001, it is not clear that Democrats will be able to raise nearly as much. Also, without a Democratic veto pen in the White House, a Republican government could pass laws which would vastly reduce the fundraising ability of labor unions and trial lawyers-two major sources of Democratic contributions. Clinton has also done a superb job of raising money from new generations of Jewish contributors, but if the Republican Party presents a face less menacing to them than those of Newt Gingrich and the Christian right, their contributions might also be harder to come by. And, while the Democrats are strong in California, they are in disarray in other large states-New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois-where they are finding it hard to generate good candidates for higher office as well as raise money. The Democrats in the years after 2000, if they are not successful then, may find themselves in the institutionally weak position they were in in the 1920s and 1950s.
As for the Republicans, they often bring to mind Benjamin Disraeli's description of his fellow Conservatives as "the stupid party." The fact is that a disproportionate number of talented people interested in government and politics in this country are Democrats, presumably because smart Democrats like government and political careers and smart Republicans dislike government and prefer to stay in the private sector. The Democrats, the party of bureaucracy, tends to produce political entrepreneurs; the Republicans, the party of entrepreneurs, tends to produce political bureaucrats. So we have the Republican House leaders, in a time when voters are full of contentment, raise provocative issues and scheme to depose their own speaker. And when the advantages of incumbency are overwhelming and the Republicans hold even in open House races, more of their incumbents than the Democrats' manage to lose elections. In the 2000 presidential race, the Republican primary field is swelled by candidates with credentials no one has ever before found convincingly presidential and who are determined to raise provocative issues in a way which seems sure to antagonize contented voters. Democrats in the 1990s, unlike the 1980s, have managed to keep their obstreperous left-wingers mostly out of public view; many Republicans seem determined to thrust their obstreperous right-wingers into the spotlight, and the anti-Republican press is happy to help. The Democrats in the 20 years between 1974-94 often held their House and Senate majorities thanks only to the superior skills of political entrepreneurs who were able to carry states and districts which didn't much like Democratic policies. The Republicans in the 20 years starting in 1994 seem at risk of losing House and Senate majorities because of the inferior skills of political bureaucrats who are unable to carry states and districts which don't mind Republican policies at all.
Still, a stupid party isn't necessarily doomed. Disraeli spent 22 years of his political career in opposition, but in the 130 years after he became prime minister in 1868, the Conservatives controlled the government for 90. American voters have been instructed by the press for the last third of the century to loath and despise the Republicans, but Republicans have held the presidency for 20 of the last 32 years and-despite negative polls, despite the personal unpopularity of Newt Gingrich, despite many weak candidates-voters have now elected Republican congressional majorities three times in a row, for the first time since the 1920s. Their margins have been too narrow for them to claim plausibly that they have a natural majority or, if they are sensible, to act as if they do. The Republican Congress, like the Reagan Presidency, is not a hideous and inexplicable accident, as many Democrats like to think; it has been voted in for reasons that are rational and explicable, and despite the party's many weaknesses.
1998: The Politics Of Sogginess
How was the 1998 election different from all other elections? Not in party strength: Republicans and Democrats won almost exactly the same percentages of the vote and number of House seats as in 1996. Nor was there any great mandate for change: only a handful of incumbents were defeated, and most were reelected by wide margins. Not even in turnout: Apart from some local variations, the 36% turnout was within the same 36%-40% range of all off-year elections in the past quarter-century. What was different about this election was a fundamental change in mood. In 1998, Americans voted against what a classic 1988 editorial in The Economist called "crunchiness" and for what the magazine called "sogginess." What do these words mean? "Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have a big effect," The Economist editorialist declared. Crunchy choices are binary; the light switch is either off or on, with clearly distinct consequences. "Sogginess," the editorial continued, "is comfortable uncertainty." Soggy choices make no crisply defined differences; adjusting the dimmer makes only a marginal, perhaps imperceptible change.
According to The Economist's theory, crunchiness and sogginess work in cyclical fashion, the one giving rise to the other. "Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess." But crunchiness and sogginess do not produce the same results in government, or in the life of a nation. Crunchiness prevents wars and wins them. Sogginess provokes and prolongs them. Personifying crunchiness are two great leaders who literally charged to greatness in 1898, just 100 years before the 1998 election, Theodore Roosevelt in the charge up San Juan Hill and Winston Churchill at the Battle of Omdurman. Two years later, in the first year of the new century, both first won national office, Churchill as member of Parliament, Roosevelt as vice president. But at Versailles it was Woodrow Wilson, with his soggy ideas of internationalism and self-determination of peoples, who was in charge rather than the crunchy Roosevelt, and the great chance for a lasting peace was lost. In the interwar period, Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, believers in soggy appeasement, were no match for the crunchy totalitarians Hitler and Stalin. It took Churchill and the congenial but crunchy Franklin Roosevelt, who had closed the banks, defied the malefactors of great wealth and designed the great American war machine, to save Western civilization.
In the postwar years, presidents such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower set crunchy limits to Soviet expansion; they were set aside by soggy strategists who tried to fight half-a-war in Vietnam and allowed Soviet advances for the sake of detente. At home, the crunchy rules of civic morality of the 1950s produced a nation with low levels of crime and welfare, high levels of family stability and socially upward mobility; the soggy relativism of the Great Society years saw a tripling of crime and welfare and a skyrocketing rate of divorce. Crunchy economic rules barring budget deficits or dollar devaluation undergirded the growth and prosperity of a quarter-century; the soggy relativism of Keynesianism produced stagnant growth and nearly uncontrollable inflation-the stagflation of the 1970s.
In the early 1980s, Americans sensed their country as in trouble and called in the genially crunchy Ronald Reagan. In the prosperous, peaceful late 1990s, they have been comfortable with the incorrigibly soggy Bill Clinton. And they were deeply uncomfortable with the aggressive crunchiness of the most visible congressional Republican, Newt Gingrich. The results of the 1998 elections-and elections are always a crunchy process-produced no significantly different partisan balance. But they did produce very different outcomes for the two party leaders. For the soggy Clinton the result was soggy: It became less likely that he would be impeached, and unthinkable that he would be removed from office, though his personal popularity suffered to some unclear extent. For the crunchy Gingrich, the outcome was crunchy: he was forced to retire in just three days.
In 1998 voters were displeased with candidates who confronted them with stark (crunchy) choices and pleased with those who presented them with soothing (soggy) consensus. Not all of the latter were Democrats. Republican governors like George W. Bush and governor candidates like Jeb Bush in Florida were rewarded for presenting consensus-minded policies and visions of the future that are well to the right of Clinton's. In California, outgoing Governor Pete Wilson was considered a moderate, but he presented choices in a crunchy way: vote up or down for aid to illegal immigrants or racial quotas and preferences. Wilson was succeeded by Democrat Gray Davis, who said he would steer clear of such "wedge issues" and instead try to govern by consensus.
Sogginess comes naturally to a country that is fat and happy and optimistic, like America today. That is not at all apparent to many in Washington, focused as they were on the Clinton scandals and lamenting low voter turnout (as if the quality of the outcome would be improved by the input of the indifferent) and negative campaign ads (as if candidates for real offices, like candidates for second-grade president, are supposed to say only nice things about each other). But a quick look at the 1998 VNS exit poll shows an almost giddy sense of optimism. A solid 59% said the country is going in the right direction, while only 37% said it is off on the wrong track. That was the most positive response recorded around election time since Elmo Roper Jr. invented the question in 1973-even more positive than in 1984, when Ronald Reagan surged to reelection with ads proclaiming, "It's morning in America." That commercial, shot through gauze across the broad lawns of a small-town street, recalled an idealized past; later 1990s optimism, as in Bill Clinton's promise to "build a bridge to the 21st Century," was about a high-tech, multicultural, non-judgmental future. Sociologist Alan Wolfe described in his 1998 book, One Nation, After All, suburban middle-class Americans as not deeply divided on values, but ambivalent within themselves, tolerant sometimes to the point of indifference to principle. Underlying this attitude was not only good-heartedness toward one's fellow citizens but also a pervasive cheeriness about the country and its future. The 200 suburbanites whom Wolfe interviewed in depth cringed at crunchy choices and eagerly embraced soggy alternatives. Asked about affirmative action, one man said that it should apply to everybody. Or, as Bill Clinton put it in 1995, "Mend it, don't end it"-without ever defining what "mend it" meant.
The voters' optimism was reflected in the re-election of just about every visible incumbent. Only three incumbent senators were beaten: Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois was felled by scandal, New York Republican Alfonse D'Amato lost in a Democratic state when he finally drew a strong opponent and 70-year-old Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina lost to a much smoother, heavy-spending trial lawyer. Two incumbent governors lost: Republican David Beasley of South Carolina was inundated by a tsunami of video poker money, and Republican Fob James of Alabama fell victim to his own zany behavior and lazy campaigning. Just seven House members lost, one in a primary, five Republicans and one Democrat in November-the lowest number of House members beaten in the last 50 years. For the first time in 50 years, incumbent House members of both parties raised their share of the vote: 78% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats won higher percentagaes in 1998 than in 1996, and a dozen of the rest had lower percentages in 1998 only because they had no major party opposition in 1996 but did in 1998. Usually when Republicans' percentages go up, Democrats' go down, and vice versa. Not so in 1998: both parties incumbents thrived. The Republican stand-pat strategy failed to win seats, because this year, as in the 1970s and 1980s, with few favorable open seats open, Republican challengers had to beat Democratic members who had the advantage of incumbents too.
The resulting close partisan balance in a country with a taste for sogginess rather than crunchiness leaves one with a soggy uncertainty about what comes next. "We won," said Dick Gephardt after the election-but he is still House Minority Leader. The election was a victory for Bill Clinton and a defeat for Newt Gingrich, but it was not a victory for either party. Both fell short of their goals: Republicans failed to make the gains they had, with some reason, expected to make; Democrats failed to win the majority that they wanted and that they argued plausibly in spring 1998 was within their grasp. Republicans may have lost the confidence that history was moving inexorably in their direction. But Democrats have no cause for confidence that it is moving inexorably in theirs.
The weakness of the parties can be seen in 1998's most striking gubernatorial result. This was not the victory of Gray Davis in Caliornia or that of George W. Bush in Texas, but that of Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. Suburban mayor, former professional wrestler, Reform party nominee, Ventura was trailing in every poll. But he beat Democrat-turned-Republican Norma Coleman, the reform mayor of St. Paul, and he beat Democratic-Farmer-Labor party heir and tobacco-wars-victor Skip Humphrey. In the only state Ronald Reagan never carried, Humphrey won only 28% of the vote, less than half the 60% his father won in his first Senate race 50 years before. Ventura's victory, plus Ross Perot's rise to the top of the polls in spring 1992 and Colin Powell's poll leads in fall 1995, are signs that voters are ready to abandon the major parties for a candidate who provides what they want. What they wanted in the crunchy early 1990s were crisply articulated choices. What they wanted in the soggy late 1990s was consensus-minded, can't-we-all-get-along leadership.
The country has gone from crunchy to soggy within the decade. In 1990, voters had a hearty appetite for crunchiness. After all, the still-fresh triumphs of the 1980s-the revival of the economy after the Reagan tax cuts, the American victory in the Cold War-seemed to be products of crunchy policies. Suddenly, with recession, times looked hard, and hard times elicit crunchiness: politicians of both parties had just raised taxes; the economy was sagging; housing prices-then the major source of personal wealth then-were plunging in the Northeast and in California; American troops were being dispatched to the Persian Gulf. Voters responded in November 1990 by giving lower percentages to incumbents of both partes-the first time this had happened since World War II and the exact opposite of what happened in 1998. As one lobbyist said, "It's a tough year for the overdog." In 1992, voters again gave incumbents of both parties lower percentages, and the number of incumbents who retired or lost was the highest since 1948. The voters of 1992 ousted the incumbent president and seemed preprared for two months to elect an eccentric Texas billionaire. Then in 1994, they ousted Democrats from control of the Senate and-for the first time in 40 years-the House.
These were all victories for crunchiness. George Bush had won after a crunchy campaign, with its "Read my lips, no new taxes" pledge and its attack on Michael Dukakis for backing (as he had over 11 years) weekend furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole. But Bush quickly became soggy, pledging a "kinder and gentler" administration and breaking the no-new-taxes pledge in June 1990. In contrast, Gingrich, just elected minority whip by 2 votes, opposed the tax increase. In 1992, Bush faced two crunchy challengers, first Patrick Buchanan and then Perot, and saw his support dwindle that spring well before Bill Clinton's began to rise. Clinton, with his pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and to address "the economy, stupid," seemed sufficiently crunchy during the campaign. But then his support of an ever-changing health care finance plan and his flower-child stands on cultural issues made him seem pretty soggy.
But soggy was not yet in fashion. The 1994 election turned out to be a triumph for Republican crunchiness. It was personified in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, with its specific promises to bring 10 measures to a vote. (The Contract was imitated by the winning center-left Ulivo coalition in Italy in April 1996 and the victorious New Labour Party in Britain in May 1997.) Republicans crunchily pinned responsibility for the unpopular tax increase of 1993 on every Democrat who voted for it, since it passed both chambers by just one vote. And they were helped by other crunchy issues as well: gays in the military and gun control. The mood was apparent in culture as well as politics: Pop-culture critic Steven Stark has made the point that the two big film hits of 1994 were Forrest Gump and The Lion King, the first strongly anti-elite, the second pro-patriarchy-and both in tension with a president whose administration seemed permeated with elite feminism.
But the crunchy early 1990s gave way to the soggy late 1990s. Voters grew uncomfortable with the fierce rhetoric of revolutionary Republicans, and Clinton exploited the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by conflating the anger of critics of government with the rage of the bombers. Voters also deeply disliked the crunchy 1995-96 government shutdown, the Republicans' insistence that Clinton must sign their appropriations bills or have no government at all. More important, life in America was improving. Voters had been seeking reform-fiscal balance, welfare changes, crime control, better education-in a public sector that was not working well. A combination of the Clinton tax increase in 1993 and the Republicans' one-year standstill in federal spending in 1995 put the budget on the path to balance. The Republican-passed welfare reform, signed by Clinton after much hesitation in August 1996, freed up governors who were already reforming welfare and enabled them to cut the rolls by amazing percentages. Crime rates suddenly started falling with remarkable speed, as innovative mayors followed the lead of New York's Rudolph Giuliani. By 1998, even education reform was gaining steam, with charter schools, school choice, tougher standards and greater accountability.
Results were beginning to be perceptible by 1996. Americans were enjoying the benefits of low-inflation economic growth. And if incomes were rising not quite as vigorously as they had in the 1980s, wealth was rising more rapidly-not just the great wealth of entrepreneurs, but the wealth of ordinary people, as the percentage of Americans owning stocks doubled and the stock market zoomed upward. Crime and welfare were sharply declining, since 1993 on as steep a curve downward as they had risen upward in 1965-75, when crime and welfare both tripled. Then for nearly two decades crime and welfare plateaued, or changed slightly without much regard for the business cycle, and the idea grew among the elites that such high rates of crime and welfare were inevitable in a society as unequal and unfair as ours. Now suddenly, many things were getting very much better; it was not just "the economy, stupid" that accounted for voters' contentment.
In this atmosphere, the demand for crunchy solutions waned and the appetite for soggy rhetoric grew. Bill Clinton understood this better than the Republicans, and he won by a bigger margin in 1996 than House Republicans did. Governors of both parties also understood quite well what was happening: it was no accident that Republican governors associated with welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies were reelected by very large marins in 1998 in big and often-Democratic states like Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachuetts and Wisconsin. Nor did the Lewinsky scandal change voters' attitudes. After it broke in January 1998, not only Clinton's job rating, but the job ratings of Clinton critics like Alfonse D'Amato rose sharply-as if voters, confronted with the possibility of the president's ouster, were saying, please, please, please don't let anything change. And don't hold anyone accountable either, at least in the opinion of Steven Stark, who has pointed out that the leading pop culture events of 1998 were the last Seinfeld episode and the movie Titanic. Both featured immature, self-absorbed people seeking personal gratificaton with little concern for anyone else. If the success of Forrest Gump and The Lion King showed that people were sick of Clinton in 1994, the success of Seinfeld and Titanic in 1998 showed that people wanted to keep Clinton, no matter what.
And so the move from confrontation to consensus, from arguments to agreement, from crunchiness to sogginess. The sogginess is personified by Clinton himself, a leader who tries to leave everyone more or less pleased, and who uses his charm and verbal skills, honed at governors' conferences and Democratic Leadership Council meetings, to proclaim a "third way," on which everyone can agree and be friends. A similar distaste for argument and confrontation became apparent in other democracies. In Britain, the crunchiness of Margaret Thatcher had given way to the sogginess of Tony Blair, who explained on election night in May 1997 that there was no reason for political argument any more now that New Labour was in power. In Italy, the Ulivo coalition, in its final rally in April 1996 flew over Rome's Piazza del Popolo a banner reading, "Un Italia, forte e serena"-an Italy strong and calm. It was a meaningful contrast from the banner at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas that read, "America-better, stronger, prouder": a crunchy nation seeks to be proud, a soggy nation to be calm.
Crunchiness is not necessarily conservative and sogginess is not necessarily liberal. George W. Bush in Texas defined his policies as "compassionate conservatism" and, after winning narrowly in 1994, built a consensus around a set of positions notably to the right of Clinton's-tort reform, welfare reform including delivery of services through faith-based institutions, tougher penalties for crime, tax cuts, autonomy for local school districts. Some of these positions were originally crunchy, but by 1998 in Texas they were the essence of sogginess-just about everyone seemed to agree, and Bush was reelected with 69% of the vote. Other Republicans achieved similar consensus after some controversy, and at points of varying distance to the right of Clinton-George Pataki and Rudolph Giuliani in New York, Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania, George Voinovich in Ohio, John Engler in Michigan, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin.
At the same time, some Democrats sounded positively crunchy. In the 1998 campaign, Al Gore tried to draw sharp distinctions between Democrats and Republicans on Social Security, education and impeachment. This was partly a matter of falling into the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog, but it also reflected a genuine streak of strong partisanship. Gore speaks privately as well as publicly with sharp animosity toward Republicans, and he has never been much inclined to work across party lines; he showed his crunchiness as well in his book Earth in the Balance with its extreme environmentalism, and in debates in his losing performance against Dan Quayle in 1992 and his winning performances against Ross Perot in 1993 and Jack Kemp in 1996. In contrast, Bush speaks only respectfully about Democrats, and indeed worked so cooperatively with them in Austin that he was endorsed for reelection by the Democratic incumbent lieutenant governor. It is possible that in the 2000 presidential race the Republican will seem more soggy and the Democrat more crunchy-a reversal of 1996.
In 1998 both parties failed to come up with a consensus-minded national message capable of capturing the voters' imaginations in 2000. The congressional Republicans' stand-pat message protected most of their incumbets, though not quite enough to prevent some losses, but it did nothing to help Republican challengers in that soggy year. The Democrats did not have much of a strategy either. The big government programs they advanced through the year mostly fizzled-campaign finance reform; the tobacco tax; and, only slightly more successful, HMO regulation. Their October mantra of saving Social Security and spending more on education was of only marginal help. And neither seems likely to be sustainable in 2000. In 1999 Clinton declined to advance a serious Social Security reform, while the number of seniors worried that their benefits won't be paid is declining and the number of baby boomers and generation Xers concerned that the current system will implode before they reach retirement is on the rise. And on education, the emphasis is shifting from spending to reform, on which a Democratic advantage is by no means guaranteed.
But what matters in the long run is not campaigning but governing. Sogginess can win an election, but ultimately it can't govern. "Crunchiness brings wealth. Wealth leads to sogginess," The Economist editorial begins. But there is more. "Sogginess brings poverty. Poverty creates crunchiness." But perhaps all is not as appears. Consider Bill Clinton. In many ways he is all sogginess. But at the same time, his soggy success owes much to a substratum of crunchiness. There is the crunchiness of hard money: Clinton, guided by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, has had the wisdom to understand that he must please Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and the international marketplace by maintaining a strong dollar. No soggy inflation as in the Carter years. There is the crunchiness of military hegemony: Clinton has shown few traces of the neo-isolationism of George McGovern or the near-pacifism of Michael Dukakis. There is the crunchiness of Clinton's acceptance of the work requirements that have reformed welfare and the "no broken windows" police tactics that have cut crime. There is always the danger, though, of warm sogginess thawing the crunchy permafrost. From 1994 to 1997 the Clinton economic strategists undercut hard money when they urged devaluation on Mexico, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia. But in 1998 they weren't urging it on China or Japan. Clinton's inclination to settle foreign crises with a soggy verbal formula has worked in some places, but may not continue to do so in the very crunchy cases of Iraq and North Korea. His March 1999 bombing of Serbia to "degrade" its military capacity plus his pledge not to use ground troops left him the option of a soggy exit but put crunchiness on the side of letting Milosevic pursue his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
How will the 2000 election be different from all other elections? It seems likely to be an election with no incumbent in a pro-incumbent time, an election that may match New Democrats and New Republicans at a time when the partisan balance is close to even: Clinton won with 49% in 1996 and House Republicans won with 49% in 1996 and 1998. Clinton's victories in 1992 and 1996 stand for the proposition that New Democrats beat Old Republicans, and the House Republicans' victories in 1994, 1996 and 1998 stand for the proposition that New Republicans beat Old Democrats. But we have little evidence for what will happen if New Democrats face New Republicans in 2000. Moreover, voters are likely to face a crunchy choice of a Republican government or a Democratic government. In the late 1990 they have been satisfied with the soggy choice of divided government, but they have also voted straight tickets more often. With the presidency open and the Senate and House narrowly divided, the it is entirely possible that one party will take all three and quite likely that the same party will win the presidency and the House. Which leaves the last and most fateful open question, for 2001 and after: can the president's party, having won with a presumably soggy campaign in a soggy-minded country, maintain and strengthen the crunchy underpinnings that give this happy country the luxury of sogginess?
The America Of The Exit Polls
The America revealed in the presidential and congressional election results and the exit polls of the late 1990s 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 decisions will find only modest support in the results. The Voters' News Service 1998 exit poll showed the lowest income group (under $15,000) voting 57%-39% Democratic in House races, but that was only 8% of the electorate, and the next group ($15,000-$30,000) was only 53%-44% Democratic-not much of an aggrieved proletariat there. But neither were high-income groups heavily Republican. Half the voters reported incomes over $50,000, but they voted only 53%-45% Republican-not much of a plutocracy. And, despite all the talk of generational politics, there were no major differences by age. Interestingly, voters over 65 were 54%-43% Republican, an indication that the days are gone when the Social Security or Medicare issues could swing them to Democrats. Voters under 45 were even: an indication that neither party has yet inherited the future.
Differences are much greater along lines of race. Whites voted 55%-42% for Republicans, blacks 88%-11% for Democrats. Hispanics voted 59%-35% Democratic, much less than Clinton's 1996 margin of 73%-20%, and in fact closer to the percentages for whites than for blacks. But these national figures mask regional differences: California Latinos voted 78% for Democrat Gray Davis for governor, while Republican gubernatorial candidates won majorities or near-majorities of Hispanics in Florida and Texas. With 5% of the national vote and rising, and a disproportionate number of swing voters, Hispanics will be a major target for both parties in 2000. Asians, portrayed by some activists as a minority in need of special help from government, voted Democratic, but by only 54%-42%. That was a Democratic gain from 1996, when they were 48%-43% for Dole over Clinton; this trend reflects the good Democratic trend in California, where nearly 40% of Asian American voters live.
But the factor which divided voters more than anything else was religion. Definitions here are imprecise, and categories incommensurate between polls, but the chasm between groups is enormous. White voters who classified themselves as "religious right" (13% of the total) voted 73%-24%-the most Republican demographic group in the VNS polls. Jews (3%) and those with no religion (9%) voted 78%-21% and 65%-32% Democratic. White Protestants gave Republicans a big margin, 64%-34%, and white Catholics a small one, 50%-47%. These numbers track closely with the 1996 exit polls.
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 were the most Republican. But in the 1990s that has changed. In the 1998 VNS exit poll those who had not graduated from high school voted 57%-41% Democratic; but they were only 5% of the electorate, and are tilted heavily toward low-income seniors, still voting for (or less often, against) Franklin Roosevelt. The three middle groups, making up 69% of the electorate, were closely divided, with small increases for Republicans as incomes rise. High school graduates voted 49%-47% Democratic, those with some college 51%-45% Republican and college graduates 53%-44% Republican. But those with post-graduate degrees voted 52%-45% Democratic, and they were 18% of the electorate. Why? 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 provided Democrats with less than half again as big a margin in popular votes than the party's former core constituency of non-high school graduates, and in states like New York are now the Democratic core constituency.
One of the most striking features of late 1990s elections is how voters in Democratic regions have become more Democratic, and voters in Republican regions have become more Republican. This is partly a result of local responses to national issues, but it is also a reflection in a country with enormous geographic and social mobility how people seem to be seeking their own kind. Many commentators in the national media have noted that Republicans have become a kind of endangered species in the Northeast, and point out accurately that there are only four Republican congressmen left in New England, arguably the historic heartland of the Republican Party. True enough, and significant. But the same commentators do not always notice that there are only five 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. Since the Rocky Mountains states have grown more rapidly than New England, they have one more congressmen (and will have a bigger advantage after the 2000 Census); so the Democrats' 19-4 edge in New England is pretty much balanced off by the Republican's 19-5 edge in the Rocky Mountains. To which one might add the Great Plains states running north from Oklahoma to North Dakota, which elected 14 Republicans and one Democrat to the House in 1998.
The interesting point here is that both New England and the Rocky Mountain states have become much more monopartisan in the 1990s. As recently as 1992 they elected much more evenly divided delegations, New England 15-8 Democratic, and the Rocky Mountains 13-11 Republican. What we are looking at here is something reminiscent of the realignment in House elections in 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 election Democrats gained nine seats, winning seats in the industrial, factory districts which had gained population rapidly-a harbinger of the industrialized, unionized base of the Democratic Party for the next 30 years. In the three elections of 1994, 1996 and 1998, Republicans consolidated gains in House seats in areas where support for their policies was strong, and lost few enough in areas where opposition was strong to maintain their new majority. 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 major force in public opinion, less visible in the precincts of the Washington-New York elite but as widely disseminated across the country as the New Deal majority of 1934.
| Region |
President
(R-D-I %) |
House
(R-D %) |
|
United States 1998 |
|
49-48
|
|
Northeast Corridor |
|
40-58
|
|
South Atlantic |
|
54-42
|
|
Mississippi Valley |
|
51-47
|
|
Interior |
|
57-39
|
|
Pacific Rim |
|
43-52
|
| |
| United States 1996 |
41-49-8 |
49-49
|
|
Northeast Corridor |
31-59-8 |
41-58
|
|
South Atlantic |
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 |
45-51
|
| |
|
United States 1990 |
|
45-53
|
|
Northeast Corridor |
|
42-54
|
|
South Atlantic |
|
44-55
|
|
Mississippi Valley |
|
46-53
|
|
Interior |
|
48-51
|
|
Pacific Rim |
|
44-52
|
| |
| United States 1992 |
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
|
| |
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 each 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 down to the Potomac River. 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 settled from the 1770s to the 1850s 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 includes Alaska): the Great American Desert, as it was referred to in the years just before and after the Civil War. Finally there are the Pacific Rim states, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, those far American outposts in the 19th Century and now our redoubts on the Pacific facing Asia. 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 combinations of cultural attitudes and economic interests that send its politics in a different direction. Let us look at each region in turn.
New England/Metroliner Corridor. Throughout the late 1990s, reporters have been writing that voters were repelled by Republican revolutionaries and the religious right, that they supported Bill Clinton in overwhelming, if not always enthusiastic, majorities, that they were especially annoyed by opponents of abortion and supporters of impeachment 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 59%-31% for Bill Clinton in 1996 and 58%-41% and 58%-40% for House Democrats in 1996 and 1998. This is the one region that moved toward the Democrats in the 1990s: in the three House elections of 1988-92 it produced a 11% Democratic margin; in the three House elections of 1994-98 it produced a 14% Democratic margin. In contrast the rest of the country moved from a 6% Democratic margin in 1988-92 to a 7% Republican margin in 1994-98.
The Northeast Corridor in the late 1990s voted more like post-Thatcher Britain than like the rest of the United States. Like Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Northeast Corridor Governors William Weld, George Pataki, Christie Whitman and Tom Ridge have slashed spending and cut taxes; 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 the threat of tax increases removed, other issues come forward. Privatization has not gone as far in the Northeast Corridor as 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. On cultural issues, the Northeast Corridor is not as secular or liberation-minded as Britain, but it's getting there. Nominal Catholics do not take the church's teaching on abortion or other issues 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-very congenial in an area where many people 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 rancor of many Republicans and the earnestness of others turn Northeasterners off, while Bill Clinton's skill 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. The Corridor looms unnaturally large in the minds of the mostly New York- and Washington-headquartered media. In 1944 the region cast 24% of the nation's votes, with New York City by itself accounting for 7%; in 1996 and 1998 the same region cast 16% of the nation's votes, with New York City accounting for 2%. Democrats have already won almost every House seat they could hope to win here, and the Corridor casts only so many electoral votes-counting New York's but not Pennsylvania's, 99 in 2000 and probably 96 after the 2000 Census. The Northeast Corridor controls the nation's mind less than it thinks, and like Western Europe it is in demographic decline: Even in the prosperous 1990s, it has generated relatively few new jobs, and its population has grown only 2% in the 1990s, compared with 9% 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 the surge of growth in the South Atlantic, accelerated after the dismantling of segregation, has grown even faster in the 1990s; the South Atlantic grew 10% from 1990-96 and in the latter year cast 15% of the nation's votes. (Its share of the vote declined in 1998 because Florida does not tabulate vote totals in races that are uncontested, as most Florida House races were.)
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 the 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 pleasant 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, 46.4%-46.1% 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%-44% 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, 54%-42% in 1998. 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 mixed well with 1990s Republicanism, indeed helped shape it: Newt Gingrich is from Georgia. But an offset is the support for lotteries and gambling by blacks and many downscale whites, which helped Democrats win gubernatorial elections in Georgia all through the decade and in South Carolina in 1998. Democratic as well as Republican governors here, aware of the need for high skills, have emphasized the need for tough education 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 regarded 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 that of liberal Washington.
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; 54%-45% and 51%-47% for Republican House candidates in 1994 and 1998. When the Mississippi Valley does diverge from national patterns, it is worth inquiring the reasons. There is evidence of coattails and straight ticket voting in these results: House Democrats did significantly better in 1996 when Bill Clinton led the ticket than in 1994 or 1998 when popular Republican governors led their tickets in many of these states. Here as in the nation 1994 was a great divide: Democrats won the Mississippi Valley House vote in 1988-92 by 53%-46%; Republicans won it in 1994-98 by 51%-47%. The differences look small, but in the closely-divided balance of American politics they are large, and have had decisive consequences.
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 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, came faintly flickering back to life in 1996, then seemed to die down again in 1998. 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 plant closures and layoffs. In 1996 Clinton got some credit for this; in 1994 and 1998 Republicans did.
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 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, as farm counties have lost population because fewer hands are needed to harvest the crops. Except for its eastern edge, most of the Interior today is a 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 and Colorado's new suburbanites 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 and 1998 Kansas and Nebraska placidly accepted the phasing out of wheat and corn subsidies.
The result is that the Democratic Interior which cast 3% of the nation's votes in 1944 has been transformed into the Republican interior which cast 16% of the nation's votes in 1996 and 1998 and is now 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; in 1998 it voted 57%-39% for Republican House candidates, almost exactly the same as 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, 50%-48% in 1988-92. Now Democratic congressmen are about as scarce here as Republican congressmen are in the Northeast Corridor. In the House the Interior is represented by 46 Republicans and 23 Democrats, of whom 17 come from Texas, with the cleverest Democratic redistricting plan of the 1990s. (In 1998 Texans voted 52%-44% Republican for House, but elected 13 Republicans and 17 Democrats.) But Democrats will not control redistricting again here-George W. Bush won overwhelmingly here in 1998, Republican Rick Perry squeaked through in the lieutenant governor race; the state Senate is Republican and the state House, while Democratic, is not very partisan-and so Texas 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 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 have beem 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; Bill Clinton showed Democrats how to do so in the 1990s. 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 narrowly, 49%-48%; in 1998 Democrats won 52%-43%, an upswing from 1996 which was the result of their sweep in California. Reagan's success was based on his economic conservatism, his strong defense policy and sunny temperament; Clinton's success was based on his economic moderation, his careful attention to California and the Pacific Northwest and his personification (to an extreme, in his personal life) of the values of cultural liberation. 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, and from economic creativity and innovation. The economic interventionism which Democrats used to gain votes in the old industrial and farm belts was a liability here, from which Clinton has set his party free.
At the same time, cultural conservatism is affirmatively unpopular on the Pacific Rim. 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 in many ways resemble the Interior, but are vastly outvoted by coastal counties in these states). Pacific Rim voters here tend to see the religious right as a rebuke and even a threat to their lifestyle. 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. California Governor Gray Davis, elected by a huge 58%-38% margin, is a product of the political culture of the capital city of Sacramento; the governor of Oregon is a legislative veteran, the governor of Washington headed the liberal government in Seattle's King County, the governor of Hawaii, narrowly reelected despite the state's economic decline, is a fixture of the Democratic machine which has held control of the governorship and the legislature without interruption since 1962. A possible countertrend: Oregon has elected a Republican legislature, perhaps to counterbalance liberal Democratic governors, perhaps because the values of its 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; the 1998 results show the same eerie resemblance. In effect Clinton and Ross Perot got Americans to end their habit of voting Republican for president in 1992, while Clinton's actions in his first two years in office and Newt Gingrich's strategies got Americans to end their habit of voting Democratic for Congress in 1994. There, with minor corrections and qualifications, things stand in mid-1999.
But there is an important difference: Clinton's 49% in 1996 was contingent, while the House Republicans' 49% in 1996 and 1998 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' victories, 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 and those pluralities in 1996 and 1998. It would be wrong to say that Republicans are bound to win future congressional elections; Democrats were confident in early 1999 that they would win the House elections in 2000, and certainly they could do so. But it is wrong to not acknowledge that the Republican victories in 1994, 1996 and 1998 show 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 57 Democratic senators. Now there are 45. In November 1992 there were 266 Democratic congressmen. In mid-1999 there were 211. When Clinton took office in January 1993 there were 28 Democratic governors. Now there are 17, in states with just 35% of the nation's population, only 23% outside California. Not all of these losses can be blamed on Bill Clinton, but many can. Some Democrats have successfully applied the New Democrat formula Clinton employed in 1992 and 1998: Governors Zell Miller and Roy Barnes of Georgia, Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Gray Davis of California, though Miller and Hunt were winning statewide races while Bill Clinton was just finishing law school. Davis's victory in 1998 is of national significance. But overall it is surprising how seldom a winning national formula has been applied in the states; it suggests that Old Democratic interest groups and activists still have decisive influence in most states' Democratic parties.
The Political Government
In the ordinary course of things, incumbents who are re-elected to office emerge from the election more powerful and confident than when they went in. This is all the more true when the voting public is in a state of contentment with, and even enthusiasm for, things as they are. But federal officeholders have not responded with sureness and confidence since the election of 1996. The 49% president has been distracted by scandal and by foreign crises and conflicts he seems ill-prepared to handle. The 49% House Republicans have been distracted by something akin to a loss of nerve, a sense that history is no longer moving their way. Leaders of both parties said the election results in both years were 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 be preoccupied by the Clinton scandals and seething with mistrust of an executive whose word is not good. Republicans had the sense that Clinton was somehow not legitimately the president, and Democrats had the sense that the Republicans were somehow not legitimately the House majority. 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 and seven of the last eight offyear elections) have chosen a president of one party and a House of the other.
Fortunately, in the late 1990s the state of the nation was good and the public agenda fairly clear. The United States was clearly the preeminent power around the world, at peace with other nations, at least until the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. 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's conclusion in 1997 that the Consumer Price Index overstates inflation means that wages and incomes have been rising, not falling since 1973. The culture, it was generally conceded, was malfunctional in some ways, but crime rates were falling, welfare rolls were shrinking, the rate of divorce was declining-in very 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 needed to sign appropriations bills maintaining those parts of government that have been performing well while preserving the balanced budget achieved, well ahead of schedule, in 1998. In a post-industrial society where power has been devolving from the center to local communities, Congress needed to set terms and conditions under which government programs are devolved and commerce deregulated.
The looming major problem after the 1998 elections was what to do about the major entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. These creations of a now-gone industrial America were proceeding on an unsustainable course: Pensions and health care cannot indefinitely be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis by a payroll tax in a country where there are, as there will be soon enough, only three for but every two retirees. And since reform is unlikely without bipartisan backing, and since it seemed likely that the same party would control the presidency and the Congress after the 2000 election, the 106th Congress provided a window of opportunity. But in early 1999 no one seemed willing to take advantage of it. There were latent majorities for reform in both houses. Republicans have increasingly favored using part of the payroll tax for a system of individual accounts, to allow Social Security beneficiaries to build greater wealth from the market economy than can be obtained from future payroll taxes. Similar plans were supported in 1998 by serious Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, John Breaux and Charles Stenholm. The bipartisan Medicare commission came up with a majority (though not the supermajority required for an official recommendation) for a "premium support" plan similar to federal employees' health care plan, sponsored by Breaux and Republican Bill Thomas.
But Bill Clinton quickly shot both initiatives down. His Social Security plan, offered in broad outline but not actual legislation, would have the government invest part of the payroll tax in the stock market-a proposal that would not have a majority even in a Democratic Congress. And almost without a comment he rejected premium support and called for coverage of prescription drugs-an expansion of a system already facing insolvency. After the 1996 election many expected Clinton to seek consensus solutions to these problems as a lasting legacy. But the legacy he seemed more interested in was the election in 2000 of Al Gore. His torpedoing of Social Security and Medicare reform can be seen as an attempt to preserve these issues for the Gore campaign in 2000 (although their efficacy has grown less as younger Americans come to believe the policies will implode before they become elderly) or, more charitably, to reserve the issues until a Democratic president and Congress can tackle them after 2000. In any case, the 106th Congress seemed more likely to be preoccupied with its quotidian tasks than with the major work of entitlement reform.
The House Of Representatives
With the retirement of Newt Gingrich three days after the 1998 elections, the House of Representatives reverted to the workaday functions it has performed during most of our lifetimes, away from the agenda-setting function it has performed during most of the 1990s. The Framers had expected the House to be the prime institution of the federal government except in time of war: Article I of the Constitution is not about the president, it is about Congress, and the House of Representatives, not the Senate, comes first. The Framers took care to require that all tax laws originate in the House, and by custom appropriations bill originate there too. But in the 20th Century's decades of depression and World War, Cold War and welfare state, Congress became used to waiting for the president's program and then responding, usually with changes at the margins. Then, as the Cold War ended, Congress took on something of its old role. 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. Then in 1994 a Republican Congress was elected and Speaker Newt Gingrich, armed with the agenda of the Contract with America he had persuaded almost every Republican House candidate to sign in September 1994, passed a series of bills and set an agenda.
It is generally believed that Gingrich's showdown with Clinton over the budget in 1995-96 was a failure, and indeed it helped Clinton's ratings in the polls and hurt Gingrich's. But it also resulted in passage of a standstill, no-spending-increase budget which turned out to be an indispensable step toward the balanced budget the Republican House got Clinton to agree to in June 1995 and which became a reality three years later. The Republican House achieved a goal which would never have been reached with a Democratic Congress, and with political damage minimal enough that they retained their majorities, narrowly, in 1996 and 1998.
Then the Republicans lost their nerve. They were exhausted after their struggle to re-elect Gingrich speaker in 1997 despite the ethics charges he faced. In July 1997 Republican leaders plotted a coup to oust Gingrich, and failed. Beginning in January 1998, they were preoccupied with the Clinton scandals, and with their puzzlement over his rising popularity as his immoral behavior was exposed. Gingrich and other Republicans believed that their 1994 victory was the prelude to the election of a Republican president in 1996 and the enactment of a Republican program in 1998. When Clinton's triangulation and the voters' sense of contentment with incumbents enabled him to win re-election, Gingrich realized that Republicans would have to compromise with Clinton and mostly mark time until a breakthrough could be achieved in 2000-and that breakthrough looked to be, if still possible, far from certain in 1997 and 1998. The ouster of Gingrich and the installment of Dennis Hastert, then unknown outside the House, in January 1999, gave House Republicans a leader of the temperament and unloquaciousness capable of pursuing such a course. But it also meant that the House would be mostly reacting to events rather than setting a national agenda.
The House Republicans' continuing problem is that the House is a crunchy institution operating in a soggy time. The House by majority vote strictly limits the time for debate and the terms and conditions under which legislation is considered. These limits are set by the Rules Committee, on which the speaker's party has a 9-4 majority; and both parties' speakers have had iron control of Rules since the retirement in 1972 of Rules Chairman William Colmer, a conservative Southern Democrat, whose chief aide was a young man named Trent Lott. The House leadership expects that all party members, regardless of their views on the substantive issue, will support Rules on procedural votes, and they almost always have, with just occasional embarrassing exceptions, under Democratic Speakers Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright and Thomas Foley as well as under Gingrich. This makes for crunchy debate. The minority party will always have an incentive to argue that the rules are unfair, that the majority is framing the issue in a way that guarantees or at least enhances its chances for success on the floor; and of course that is often true.
But business in the House can be done in no other way. One consequence, however, is a heightening of partisan debate and dissension. Democrats' complaints about the majority's control of the impeachment debate, familiar to television viewers and persuasive to many, echo almost eerily Republicans' complaints, few seen by such large audiences, against hundreds of Democratic rules during their long ascendancy. The partisan atmosphere has been increased by the increasing homogeneity of the parties in the House. As the number of conservative Southern Democrats has fallen toward zero, the House Republican Conference has become more uniformly conservative and the House Democratic Caucus has become more uniformly liberal. There are exceptions in both groups, enough to make a big difference on votes in a closely-divided House. But Gingrich, like the Democratic speakers before him, spent much of his time holding together his party majority, and the House Republicans succeeded far more often in doing so than not. Managing the House is not an easy thing: Its rules are the most complex parliamentary rules in the world, not written down in any one source; its members represent a complex and variegated nation, and have geographical, economic, cultural and committee interests that are often in tension; holding together majorities large as well as small is not an easy thing to do. That Gingrich, Foley, Wright and O'Neill-all highly able, dedicated, politically sophisticated leaders-were able to do so as often as they did is what is remarkable, not that they sometimes failed.
On Speaker Dennis Hastert no final verdict can be pronounced. He is a professional legislator with nearly 20 years experience in Springfield, Illinois, and Washington; he was a high school history teacher and wrestling coach who managed to travel widely abroad and win a national championship. He worked against Gingrich in the race for minority whip which Gingrich won by two votes in March 1989; in November 1994 he supported Tom DeLay over Gingrich's choice for majority whip, and became DeLay's deputy. He is given to speaking briefly, with no flourishes or crescendos; he is known as a good listener, a fashioner of consensus, at least among Republicans, a frank negotiator who stands true to his word. (He was urged to run for majority leader in November 1998, and probably could have won, but declined to run because he had promised Dick Armey his vote.) In his first month he seemed to abandon the practice of speakers from O'Neill through Gingrich of trying to assemble majorities from the majority party only. The Republican majority was just too small, and the public hankering for consensus too great. Instead, he urged Republicans to seek agreement, and to give up ground to get them, with moderate and conservative Democrats. The result was some early successes: passage by wide margins of a missile defense resolution and an EdFlex bill, both considerable advances toward Republican positions. He also insisted on timeliness: Republicans won passage of the budget resolution by the often-ignored deadline of April 15, a step toward avoiding a highly-publicized confrontation over the budget.
Hastert is also more inclined to respect the autonomy of committee chairmen than Gingrich was. Gingrich, faced with a party that had never served in the majority and with senior members that many regarded as deadwood, elevated relatively junior members to chairmanships they would not have got under strict seniority-John Kasich at Budget, Bob Livingston at Appropriations, Henry Hyde at Judiciary, Thomas Bliley at Commerce. He abolished some committees and imposed a three-term limit on committee chairmen. He worked to enforce leadership priorities on chairmen. All this produced considerable friction, but it was probably the best way to run a newly Republican House. Hastert, with committee chairmen in place, and many serving what is their third and presumably last term, seems sure to give them more autonomy.
What of House Democrats? They returned to the 106th Congress still in the minority but supremely confident that they will be in the majority after the 2000 elections. And they continued to show in the minority a degree of unity and good fellowship that they had by no means always showed when they were the majority party. But in a crunchy House it is usually easier for members of the minority party to achieve a soggy consensus: they have the luxury of knowing their positions will seldom prevail, so they do not have to live with the consequences, and they can pick and choose their issues to split the majority. Democrats did this shrewdly with the minimum wage in 1996 and campaign finance in 1998; and in the face of Clinton scandals, from the Banking Committee's hearings in July 1995 to the impeachment vote in December 1998, they enthusiastically defended Clinton against all charges, to the point of appearing at the White House with Clinton in a kind of campaign rally the day he was impeached-a spectacle the senior Democrat in Congress, Robert Byrd, called "an egregious display of shameless arrogance." That was 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 their 48.5% of the vote in 1996 and 48% in 1998 tracked closely with the 49% he won in 1996, with results uncannily close in dozens of districts, and that when he was in trouble in November 1994 their percentages were lower. They could not help but hope that the unity they showed in his behalf would be rewarded in 2000 with a share of the votes similar to the majority in polls opposed to impeachment.
But the unity the House Democrats have achieved only papers over cracks and differences which may become more apparent when they are in the majority again. After six years of the Clinton Presidency, there was clearly no Clinton Democratic Party in the House. 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. On Social Security and Medicare, some House Democrats are ready for reform, but Gephardt and Bonior most assuredly are not; Clinton's blocking of reform leaves those differences unexplored. Gephardt is a skillful caucus leader, a good listener with genuine good will for his colleagues, careful in his utterances and always uncomplainingly ready for more hard work. His hopes to be president have been destroyed by Bill Clinton's historically unprecedented campaign to install his vice president in his place; Clinton and Gore made no discernible effort in 1996 to elect a Democratic House, and rallied to House Democrats only when the impeachment issue arose. But Gephardt has shown, and perhaps feels, no rancor for Clinton or Gore, and seems eager to soldier on steadily in their behalf.
His achievements are all the more impressive when one considers the heterogeneity of the Democratic Caucus. Nearly one-fifth of its members are in the Congressional Black Caucus, most of them far to the left on the issues, as are many of the party's Hispanics. The non-minority Democrats from big cities and heavily unionized districts are far fewer in number than they were in the Democratic majorities of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet seats crucial to any future Democratic majority are held, and not just in the South but in the Midwest and West as well, by moderates. Even they are disparate: the Blue Dog Democrats tend to be conservative on cultural issues and liberal on economics; the New Democrat Coalition tends to be conservative on economics and liberal on cultural issues. Both are wooable by Republicans on certain issues and House Democrats, from their days of large majorities, have less tradition of party unity than House Republicans. A small House Democratic majority in January 2001 might be even harder to hold together than the small Republican majority has been since January 1996.
Which party should be favored to win the House in 2000? Neither. The 1996 and 1998 elections were so close that a shift of 1% or 2% of the vote could change control. A district-by-district review of prospects in House seats in early 1999 could plausibly produce a prediction of 240 Republicans or 240 Democrats, or anything in between. Much will probably depend on the presidential contest, in an era when voters are increasingly voting straight tickets; but quirky results in a few out-of-the-way districts could make all the difference. What is likely is that the next House leadership, like this one, will have to struggle to provide soggy-looking leadership in what is quintessentially a crunchy institution.
A note on redistricting. It will not take effect until the 2000 election, but it is very much on the minds of members and challengers in states with six or more seats. Population trends mean that states in the Southeast and West will pick up new seats, while the big industrial states and a few others will lose. On balance that should help Republicans, but not everywhere; certainly not in California, where Democratic Governor Gray Davis and, almost certainly, a Democratic legislature will draw the new lines for 53 or 54 districts. Offsetting California will be Texas, where Republicans will dominate the drawing of lines in the state that currently has the most partisan Democratic districting plan, and Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, where Republicans need only hold their current legislative majorities to have total control. Some results are preordained: Massachusetts and Oklahoma are likely to lose a seat each, and their delegations respectively are all Democratic and all Republican.
The Senate
The Senate, first on the Sunday talk shows, comes second in the Constitution, after the House; its traditions are grand, but sometimes its performance seems less so. This is partly a matter of misplaced expectations. The Framers created the Senate as a balance wheel, a cooling saucer for hot coffee, a place where superior wisdom and experience could prevent unwise and rash mistakes. 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. If the House disappoints a soggy nation by its crunchy character, the Senate disappoints an action-oriented nation by its plodding performance. No one could fail to be awed by the Senate's impeachment trial, with the chief justice on the podium and every senator in his seat, most listening intently. But much of this was rote performance; the moment the Senate acted together as a body was in the unprecedented session in the old Senate Chamber, which was closed to the public and press and for which no transcript presumably will ever be published.
Yet neither the pomp of the trial nor the candid interchange in the closed session is typical of the way the Senate actually works. 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 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. It is less a Senate than a collection of senators. Washington talk shows seem to assume that Majority Leader Trent Lott can run the Senate, but majority leader is a misleading title; its holder is often more of a coat-check attendant than a maitre d' or chef. The majority leadership is not a particularly historic office, like the speakership; it goes back to only 1911, and many of its holders have been obscure party wheelhorses. The notion that the position is powerful goes back to four years in the 1950s, when Lyndon Johnson exercised his extraordinary skills in a closely-divided Senate; when his Democrats gained 13 seats in 1958, Johnson's power was actually diminished because liberal Democrats insisted on pressing for measures that, under Senate rules, could not be passed. A better understanding of the position's power came from the man who held it longest, Mike Mansfield; in a speech intended to be delivered on the day that President Kennedy was murdered and which he only delivered in 1997 at the first Leader's Lecture, Mansfield argued that the majority leader should be the servant, not the master, of senators. So it must almost always be in a Senate which conducts most of its business under rules requiring unanimous consent for procedure, allows unlimited discussion and introduction of non-germane amendments at any time and requires a 60% supermajority for passage of strongly-opposed legislation.
Of course it still matters which party has a majority in-one should not use the word controls-the Senate. The partisan balance of the Senate, like the House, shifted sharply in the early 1990s and in the late 1990s has remained about the same. There were 57 Democratic senators when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, 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 June 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. In January 1996 Republicans lost Bob Packwood's Oregon seat to Democrat Ron Wyden; in November 1996, Republicans won three open seats while losing one incumbent. In 1998, though Republicans seemed to have more targets, the result was stasis: Republicans won three open seats and beat one incumbent; Democrats won two open seats and beat two incumbents. And so the Senate stands: 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 18 Republicans and only 8 Democrats in the Senate. The eight Rocky Mountain states and Alaska are represented by 14 Republicans and only 4 Democrats. Almost all these Republicans are staunch conservatives, dedicated to reducing the power of the federal government and cutting spending and taxes, and so conservatives have a firm majority in the Republican Conference. Yet they do not in any sense control the Senate. Half a dozen or so Republicans disagree with conservative positions on many issues. And the 45 Democrats are more than enough to sustain a filibuster.
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 he is retiring in 2000. 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. These are fair- and medium-sized fish in a small and sometimes turbulent pond.
Will the Republicans retain control in 2000? The easy answer is, probably, but not for sure. Retirements by May 1999 opened up seats which incumbents would probably easily have won: Democratic seats in New York, New Jersey and Nevada, Republican seats in Rhode Island and Florida. Democrat Charles Robb of Virginia, re-elected with a plurality in 1994, faces a tough challenger in former Governor George Allen. Republican John Ashcroft of Missouri, who seemed to be running for president in 1998, faces a tough challenger in Governor Mel Carnahan. Republican freshmen who are not well known face serious challenges in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania; Democrats have some hopes of beating veterans in Delaware, Vermont and Washington, but it was not clear in May 1999 that they would field strong challengers. Sweeps for the two parties would produce something like 59 Republicans or 54 Democrats-results that observers in May 1999 considered extremely unlikely. The more likely result, if the late 1990s pro-incumbent contentment continued, is a Senate pretty much like the one today.
The Presidency
We have become accustomed to hearing that the president "runs the country." But as the 20th Century ends-as the private economy expands and reshapes the nation and power is devolved from Washington to states and localities and the private sector-the United States is not a country that any one person can run; the president is fortunate to run the government, or the parts of it he considers significant at a given time. This is not out of line with what the Framers intended. The words of the Constitution provide that 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. And in cases of high crimes and misdemeanors, he can be impeached and removed from office.
This, one could argue, is how the Presidency has mostly 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; yet when peace came, his grandest policy was 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 frightening 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."
But after the American victories in the long Cold War in 1989 and the brief Gulf war in 1991, is the presidency as important anymore? One never hears people talking about "the Bush years" or "the Clinton era"; there is not even any convenient name for the Clinton scandals. When Bill Clinton started running for 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, several years before he launched the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, 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. He has won some place in history: as the 15th president elected to a second term, and the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to do so, and as the second president to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors but not removed from office.
The final verdict on Bill Clinton's presidency cannot be written until January 2001 at the earliest. But in mid-1999 at least some things can be said. What is interesting at this point is that he leaves a legacy less of achievements than of accommodations, less of initiatives than of maneuvers, less of achieving honor than of evading, or trying to evade, dishonor. Some of this is the result less of the man than the times. Clinton has been the beneficiary, though he can also reasonably claim to be to some extent the maker, of the shifts in underlying political attitude in the 1990s. When he announced for president in October 1991, voters were in an anti-incumbent mood, full of discontent and anger with things as they were; when he was re-elected in 1996 and saved from removal from office in 1999, voters were in a pro-incumbent mood, full of contentment and a yearning for consensus and a desire to leave things as they were. As a candidate in a field none of whom had convinced people they were of presidential stature-a field winnowed of larger figures because so many leading Democrats had expressed an opposition to the Gulf war which seemed poor judgment when it was quickly won-Clinton's gifts of articulateness and divining public opinion enabled him to win a nomination which seemed worthless in March 1991 and proved to be worth very much indeed by July 1992. In this endeavor he was given invaluable assistance from Ross Perot, who as a billionaire and former military offiecr was able to, in the words of then deputy Democratic National Chairman Paul Tully, departisanize the critique of President George Bush in the spring of 1992 as no Democrat, including Clinton, then could. Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the race on July 16, 1992, and Clinton's acceptance speech that evening, enabled Clinton to rise more points in the polls in a 24-hour period than any candidate ever had before and than any candidate is likely to ever again. Perot-and the anti-incumbent mood of the voters and Clinton's own skills-handed Clinton the presidency.
At first he did not seem to know quite what to do with it. Unintentionally on some issues (gays in the military), intentionally on others (the stimulus package, taxes, health care), he presented Congress and the electorate with left-wing policy initiatives toward which most members and voters were dubious or hostile. Clinton is a man who tends to respond rather than to lead, and in 1993 and 1994 he responded to the desires and priorities of the Democrats on Capitol Hill, abandoning some projects when they disapproved, shaping other initiatives (like the budget and tax package and the crime bill) to suit their needs. All this was done in the confidence that Democrats would continue to hold their majorities in the House and Senate as they had mostly done for the previous 20 years, not so much by sticking closely to public opinion, but by using the advantages of incumbency and their candidates' superior political skills. But in an anti-incumbent time it didn't work. With Democrats in control of both the legislative and executive branches, Democratic candidates could no longer camouflage their views in anti-Democratic states and districts. Newt Gingrich's leadership enabled the Republicans for once to recruit a competitive number of politically competent candidates and in the Contract with America did the unusual thing of providing an articulate and unified basis for the out party's campaign. The result was the smashing Republican victory of 1994. It might be said that Clinton brought ruin to the Democratic majorities: since the eve of the 1992 election, they have gone from 57 senators to 45, from 266 House members to 211, from 28 governors to 17, from control of 37 state Houses to 26 and 32 state Senates to 26. But it also might be said that Democrats simply fell to their natural level, given the balance of opinion in the country, and that their previous majorities had been due to special factors and unusual circumstances which could be expected to vanish sooner or later.
So in 1995 Clinton took a different course and got a new seat of advisers including the pollster Dick Morris. With no Democratic majorities to respond to, he responded instead to the Republican initiatives of Newt Gingrich and others-sometimes confronting them when he sensed the voters would be with him, often accommodating them when he sensed that would suit the voters better. Morris has described the process as "triangulation," with Clinton taking a position between and, importantly to Morris, above both congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans. The major confrontation came in 1995-96 over the budget. Congress "shutting the government down" was how Clinton and the press styled the controversy, though technically it was Clinton who shut the government down; the Republicans had passed appropriations bills, and he had vetoed them. But Gingrich and the Republicans invited that characterization in the confidence that voters would rather like to see government shut down for a while. Clinton's numbers went up, the Republicans' numbers went down: a great Clinton victory, it seemed. Yet on substance the Republicans won a great victory of their own. For the budget that was finally adopted actually cut domestic discretionary spending for a year. Without that cut, the budget would never have been balanced in 1998, and spending today would be considerably higher. Similarly, on welfare reform Clinton let the Republicans prevail on substance. When they passed a free-standing welfare reform bill in August 1996, Clinton signed it-though, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan tartly noted, if it had come 14 weeks after the election instead of 14 before he would have vetoed it, as he had vetoed similar measures twice before. Clinton won with the voters, but by responding to and accommodating the Republican Congress.
This was good political strategy, because by 1995 and 1996 the voters had moved from an anti-incumbent mood to a pro-incumbent mood, from a zest for crunchiness to a yearning for sogginess. Clinton had hurried this along by his response to the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which he (aided by the news media) conflated the anger of many Gingrich Republicans with the presumed anger of the Oklahoma City bombers. Also aiding this mood was continuing low-inflation economic growth, which had started before Clinton's election and continued mostly smoothly through his first term and more than halfway into his second. To the extent Clinton was responsible for this, it was because he had learned from the experience of the Carter Administration that Americans would not tolerate inflation and from the Reagan years that economic markets, if left generally to themselves, would produce bountiful growth. But there is evidence that the economy was stimulated by the presence of a Republican Congress. Interest rates fell in Clinton's first year, then rose in 1994, then started to fall again when the Republicans won, and mostly stayed down after that. The Dow Jones average rose from 3223 to 3831 from Election Day November 1992 to November 1994, then rose to above 11,000 in May 1999. Another important trend, not stimulated by Clinton's policies but not retarded by them either, was a growth in wealth, not just the vast wealth of rentiers and entrepreneurs, but the wealth of ordinary citizens: Stock ownership rose from about 20% in the early 1990s to well over 40% in 1997. Growth in wealth underlay continued exuberant consumer spending; it underlay a contentment that was not just a satisfaction with the economy at the moment, but a confidence in the long-run future; it underlay a desire to avoid confrontation and controversy that threatened to muck things up.
In industrial, big-unit America, where big government, big business and big labor seemed to run the country, decisions made by the president steered the major institutions of society and set the course of the lives of millions. In post-industrial, Tocquevillian America, where institutions are decentralized, power is devolved and markets are more powerful than bureaucracies, decisions made by the president make minor adjustments to existing trends and send sympathetic signals to various voters. This is the environment in which Clinton and Morris produced a poll-driven, photo-op, policy-gimmick presidency, with breathless announcements of major initiatives like encouraging school uniforms (after lots of schools adopted them) and presidential vacation sites were chosen by poll (rough-hewn Jackson Hole in election year 1996 rather than effete Martha's Vineyard). Though not quite fair to either past president, one could say that the Clinton strategy was to employ the rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt and follow the policies of Calvin Coolidge.
The photo-op presidency was also a way for Clinton to take credit for happy developments which were occurring with almost entirely no input from the federal government. Starting around 1993 and 1994, crime and welfare rolls have been declining in America on about as steep a curve as the one on which they rose (and tripled) in the awful decade from 1965 to 1975. The initiative in each case was being taken in states and localities, which were developing policies almost the opposite of those which the federal government in both Republican and Democratic administrations had urged. The lead in welfare was taken by Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, and after him by other governors-mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well; the lead in crime was taken by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then by other mayors of both parties. To this process Clinton and the Republican Congress have been interested and occasionally helpful spectators. But from the happy results they have profited at the polls.
For 1996 was, most of all, an incumbents' election-and so was the offyear election of 1998. Clinton was re-elected 49%-41%, a bit more than his 1992 margin of 43%-37%. The results of these two elections were more similar to each other than any two presidential elections since 1952 and 1956; in those the same two candidates ran against each other, while in the 1990s the elderly George Bush was replaced by the elderly Bob Dole, but otherwise the candidates were the same. Clinton increased his margins notably in some parts of the country-the Northeast Metroliner corridor and coastal California-but his margins shrunk or Republican margins increased in others-the Rocky Mountain basin, much of the South. At the same time, Clinton made virtually no effort to elect Democratic majorities to Congress: Clinton's and Al Gore's acceptance speeches at the Democratic Convention in Chicago each contained one sentence urging a Democratic Congress. Triangulation, after all, meant separating yourself from your party. In 1997 Clinton followed the same pattern in his dealings with the Congress. In May 1997 he and Republicans reached agreement on a balanced budget plan and, as the voters seemed to want, controversy seemed to subside.
It is against this background that the outcome of the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment process makes sense. The issue struck suddenly in January 1998 when voters wanted anything but change. It confirmed what many suspected about Clinton-that he continued to be sexually promiscuous as president, that he was willing to parse words and lie to avoid political unpleasantness, that he was willing to use the perquisites of office ruthlessly to maintain his position. But voters wanted him to stay anyway. The late columnist Joseph Alsop used to say during the Watergate scandal that Americans regarded politicians like toilet fixtures: It was enough that they served their intended purpose, they need not be beautiful. That may not have been the case in 1974, but it was in 1998. Republicans mostly shied away from taking formal action against Clinton, until his admission of lying on August 17 forced them to the conclusion that he lied under oath-an obvious violation of the president's constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Democrats mostly shied away from confronting the case at all, until the question of impeachment forced them to respond. The reaction on both sides could be attacked as partisan, though both could be defended: Republicans had available a strong argument that Clinton violated his constitutional duty; Democrats had available an argument, not perhaps as strong but not contemptible either, that the remedy was out of proprotion to the offense. There is a natural human tendency to break ties in favor of the home team, and the strong feelings of party activists on both sides, and of Democratic fundraisers, gave added strength to the impulse to take one's party's side.
Neither party extracted great gain from the process. Republicans had hoped that the anti-Clinton faithful would turn out in droves in November 1998 but, after their disillusionment with the omnibus budget bill of October 1998, they didn't. Democrats hoped, more in retrospect after the returns were in than at the time, that their party faithful would turn out in great numbers to protect their president. But Democrats failed to gain the majority in the House that in the spring of 1998 they had hoped, with some reason, to gain. And Republicans failed to increase their majorities in Congress, and even lost five House seats, against the usual trend of opposition parties in offyears. Newt Gingrich was out as speaker in three days; but Dick Gephardt was not in, nor either, it turned out, was Speaker-designate Bob Livingston, who announced his retirement the morning of the impeachment vote. The new Speaker was Denny Hastert, formerly deputy whip, respected in the House but almost totally unknown outside.
The real winner of the impeachment crisis was Bill Clinton, who seemed sure to remain in office with a cowed congressional Republican majority and an energized Democratic minority who seemed confident of winning back the House in 2000 and to whose liberals Bill Clinton had shown increased deference ever since they emerged as his chief champions against removal. The question now was what Clinton would do. Conventional wisdom in Washington has had it since 1996 that Clinton, unable to run again, would seek a legacy of great bipartisan reform, and there were certainly issues-Social Security, Medicare-on which he was well positioned to do so. And when Clinton ordered the bombing of Serbia in March 1999, it seemed that he might be preoccupied by his duties as commander-in-chief during much of his remaining months in office.
But the role for which Clinton seems to have most relish is that of campaign-manager-in-chief. Bill Clinton has been running for public office since he was 27, and he was not about to stop just because he could no longer run for president. More than any other president in American history, he has been campaigning hard for his vice president to succeed him. Ronald Reagan did little for George Bush in 1988, and was conspicuously neutral during the primaries; Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower made comments that undermined Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1960; many presidents-Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, the list goes on and on-did not want their vice presidents to succeed them at all. Only two presidents have been succeeded by their vice presidents, Andrew Jackson in 1836 and Ronald Reagan in 1988, and in both cases those victories burnished their claims to have set the course of the nation for a generation. There is every reason to believe that Bill Clinton seeks similar validation for his presidency in the election of his vice president (and one wonders whether he will much mind if that successor fails to win the next term on his own, as Martin Van Buren did in 1840 and George Bush in 1992).
Clinton's priority was apparent even before the 1996 election, when he showcased Gore and humiliated Gephardt and other potential opponents at the Chicago convention. It was apparent in 1997 and 1998, as he and Gore worked to monopolize fundraiser and organizational support and eliminate other Democratic candidates from the 2000 race and mostly with success. In late 1997 and early 1998 one after another dropped out of the race: Paul Wellstone, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson. Only Bill Bradley remained, and Clinton and Gore made sure that party insiders in his home state of New Jersey were on the Gore team. This campaign required also that key Democratic constituencies, most of them on the left, be propitiated. Organized labor, miffed by Clinton-Gore support of NAFTA, was lavished with attention. In early 1999 Clinton purposively squelched the move to reform Social Security and Medicare. Serious reforms were advanced and were capable of winning bipartisan majorities in Congress-individual retirement accounts for Social Security were supported by Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, John Breaux and Charles Stenholm; Breaux and Kerrey worked out a bipartisan premium support plan on the special Medicare commission chaired by Breaux. Clinton, while proclaiming that he wanted reform, effectively vetoed them both. And even as Gore posed as the great champion of the American high-tech industry, Clinton threatened the bipartisan Y2K liability legislation with a veto that would have been favored by the trial lawyers, the constituency for whom he suffered his one veto override in his first term.
Clinton's problem may be that he is trying too hard. The centrality of his role tends to increase the institutional tendency of the Vice Presidency to diminish the incumbent; when Clinton called Richard Berke of the New York Times in May 1999 to argue that Gore's campaign was not going all that badly, certainly not as badly as it had been a few months before, Gore and advisers were understandably furious. Plus, a Hillary Rodham Clinton Senate candidacy in New York, even if it is successful in that heavily Democratic state, will tend to associate Gore in other states with a figure who is polarizingly unpopular there and may diminish his candidacy as one part of a ploy to prolong Clinton power. Clinton's success in narrowing the Democratic field may have been too successful. Never has a party in which the incumbent has not been running had a candidate field as small as two, and this positions Bill Bradley, who cannot be dismissed as a fringe or frivolous candidate, to be a remainderman, the choice of all those voters who have any problem at all with Gore. Gore would probably be better off with a three- or four-candidate field, in which opposition would be split. He may lament the fact that it was only a bad back that kept Paul Wellstone out of the race.
The 2000 Field
The 2000 election is only the fourth in the last three-quarters of a century in which it was clear from the outset that the incumbent was not running; the others were 1988 and 1960, when the incumbent was also barred by the 22d Amendment, and 1928, when Calvin Coolidge said "I do not choose to run." It is also peculiar for the fact 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 under Bill Clinton's tutelage, and now that it seems clear that the party can count on no natural majority, the Democrats had no contest for their nomination in 1996 (the first time that was true since 1944) and only two candidates running in mid-1999. 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, or staging battles labeled by one of their contestants Armageddon between two claimants to party orthodoxy (1976, 1952, 1912). But for 2000 no Republican starts out with a plausible claim to precedence, and mid-1999 a very large number, 11, were running or considering a 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 schedule has been refined and changed as various states scramble for the attention that early contests might bring, to the point that three-quarters of the delegates will have been chosen just a few weeks after the Iowa Caucus.
Let us turn now to look quickly at the strengths and weaknesses of the field of candidates as of May 1999, with the caveat that additional entries are always possible; Ross Perot didn't announce that he was thinking of running till February 1992.
Democratic Presidential Hopefuls:
Bill Bradley has been in the national spotlight on and off for a third of a century, first as an extraordinary basketball player for Princeton and the New York Knicks, then for 18 years as a senator from New Jersey. He grew up in Crystal City, Missouri, a small town 30 miles south of St. Louis, where he worked hard to develop high intellectual and academic skills. He has strong convictions on issues and has a penchant for studying them in depth, away from the spotlight, and then pushing for action. His signal success in the Senate was the 1986 tax reform which flattened tax rates and eliminated many tax preferences; many others in both parties contributed to the result, but Bradley more than anyone else put it on the national agenda and pushed it to passage. He is plainly a serious man and, while modest and unfond of grandiosity, a fierce competitor. Bradley is not, as is often noted, a great orator, but the stemwinder is not the persuasive form of political communication it was in the days of William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt; on the more conversational medium of television, Bradley could turn out to be quite effective.
Bradley's greatest weakness as he begins his candidacy is that he is without institutional support. Almost every Democratic Party leader, even most in his own New Jersey, has been enlisted by the Clinton-Gore team; organized labor is just as unhappy with Bradley's free trade position as with Gore's (indeed, on that issue the big unions are closer to Patrick Buchanan); the feminist left, the biggest force at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, has been loyal to the Clinton-Gore team, as the reaction to the 1998 Lewinsky scandal showed, in the most trying of circumstances. Indeed, it was hard initially to see much difference on issues between the two candidates, which would seem to work against the lesser known. But Bradley has shown he is a good fundraiser, and he cannot be dismissed as a frivolous candidate; and he has the advantage of being the only alternative for whom any Democrat who for any reason does not want to vote for Gore.
Al Gore has had a long career in the federal government-eight years in the House, eight years in the Senate, going on eight years as vice president-and a family political heritage as well. His father Albert Gore was elected to the House in 1938 and the Senate in 1952 and served with distinction until he was narrowly defeated in 1970; Al Gore, who grew up mostly in Washington but also on the family's farm in Carthage, Tennessee, can remember rolling a bowling ball down the marble halls of the Russell Senate Office Building as a child. He remains on many issues a New Deal Democrat in the mold of his father-Social Security and Medicare foremost among them. But he developed on his own an interest in science and environmental issues; if he exaggerated when he claimed to be responsible for "creating" the Internet, he did much to promote it, and his belief in the theory of global warming set the course for the Clinton Administration's clean air standards (overturned in court in May 1999) and Kyoto treaty (not submitted to the Senate). He has been well acquainted with defense issues since the early 1980s. Gore is aggressive and often effective in debate, as he showed when he bested Jack Kemp in 1996 and Ross Perot in 1993, although his tendency to stick to his script can hurt, as it did when he was bested by Dan Quayle in 1992 (he never tried to refute Quayle's repeated charge that "Bill Clinton has trouble telling the truth"). He is well-disciplined and his personal life is by all accounts exemplary.
Gore begins with the institutional weakness that has bedeviled vice presidents even after Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale gave substance to the job: the very faithfulness to a president's policies the voters demand makes the vice president seem somehow less than his own man, not the commanding figure voters want in the presidency. This can be overcome, as George Bush showed in 1988; but Clinton's close embrace of Gore and the major role he has taken in his campaign may make that more difficult this time. It is often said that Gore is wooden, and he chooses his words with evident care. But his greater problem could be that in a soggy era, when voters prize consensus, he is temperamentally crunchy, given to harshly condemning opponents in private as well as public, and with a bitterness that Bill Clinton (or George W. Bush) almost never sound. And finally there is Gore's involvement in the 1996 Clinton-Gore fundraising scandals. He was spared an independent counsel investigation by Attorney General Janet Reno, and his sins seem more venial than mortal. But if voters' distaste for scandal in 1998 worked for Bill Clinton, a similar distaste in 2000 may work against Al Gore.
Republican Presidential Hopefuls:
Among the 11 Republicans, two started off far ahead-first George W. Bush, then in second place Elizabeth Dole-seeming to squeeze the oxygen out of the rest of the field. But their greatest vulnerability will probably come in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters expect to meet candidates personally and scrutinize them closely. The most valuable commodity in those contests is time, and Bush and Dole do not have the advantage in time that they seem likely to have in national fame, fundraising and support from party leaders. Setbacks in Iowa or New Hampshire for either could be explosive, and could supply a lot of oxygen for one or more of the candidates in the rest of the field. And since most other states will be voting in just a few weeks after Iowa and New Hampshire, the possibility of an upset cannot be ruled out. Consider the experience of the Democrats in 1984. Eight candidates went into Iowa, where Walter Mondale won about 50% of the vote. But Gary Hart, who had been trailing badly, came in second with 16%, and the headline was "Gary Hart surge." Hart proceeded to win New Hampshire and came very close to winning the nomination. Something like that could happen in 2000.
Lamar Alexander has been a serious political figure for more than a quarter-century. He grew up in Maryville in ancestrally Republican east Tennessee, the son of teachers; nothing suggested that he would become a major politician. But he rose quickly: He worked in the Nixon White House, went home to Tennessee to run for governor in 1974, at 34; he lost then, but then walked across the state in a plaid shirt and won in 1978, and was easily re-lected in 1982. He was the first governor to implement merit pay for teachers; he helped Tennessee become one of the economically fast-growing states in the South. He served as secretary of Education in the Bush Aadministration (1991-93). He has been running for president since 1993. He is hard-working, persistent, organized, disciplined: The morning after the November 1996 election, he held a 9:00 a.m. fundraising conference call. Alexander has changed his theme, though not his positions on issues, since his campaigning began. In the crunchy early 1990s his theme was "Cut their pay and send them home"; in the late 1990s it is helping parents raise children in a time of cultural turmoil.
It is a long time since Alexander was elected to office, and the press tends to dismiss this disciplined, now suit-clad candidate as a plaid-shirt automaton. But he has had a splendid fundraising organization, based in Nashville which has become a leading source of Republican money, and in 1996 he came within 7,625 votes of beating Bob Dole for second place in New Hampshire. If he had done that, Dole would probably have dropped out, and the race would have been between Alexander and Patrick Buchanan, and Alexander would almost certainly have won. Alexander's calm, moderate-sounding demeanor made him the Republican the Clinton-Gore team most feared in 1996 and seems well suited to the national mood going into 2000.
Gary Bauer has never won elective office; he was a domestic policy advisor in the Reagan White House, sometimes pushing successful projects, more often being frustrated by conventional political thinkers higher up on the staff. He grew up in a modest home in gambling-ridden Newport, Kentucky, and brings strong moral views to public policy: He is an especially fervent opponent of abortion, and is very much ready to say so. For ten years he headed the Family Research Council in Washington, and in 1997 founded the Campaign for Working Families PAC, which raised $7 million in two years. This fundraising success evidently sparked the idea, improbable to so many others, of running for president. In his appearances he is fluent, forthright and more polished than many expected; he talks fervently about the need to promote religious values.
Bauer's ability to raise money through direct mail is not in doubt and his capacity to mobilize Christian conservatives could turn out to be impressive. But his lack of experience in a job of the stature ordinarily considered necessary for a presidential candidate and the likelihood that opponents and the press will attack him as the candidate of a limited faction make it hard to imagine him winning the nomination.
Patrick Buchanan is one of America's most eloquent public figures, and one of its most intellectually honest and learned. He grew up in Washington, D.C., perhaps the only presidential candidate to have done so, in a large Catholic, feistily conservative family. But he has always seen himself as representing the little people beyond the Beltway who are overlooked and scorned by the capital's elite. He worked for Richard Nixon when he was making his political comeback in the middle 1960s, was a speechwriter in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, and otherwise has made a good living as a columnist and television commentator-pugilist, really, on The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire. In December 1991 he launched a primary campaign against President George Bush. Initially, he seemed primarily interested in cultural issues-he has always been a strong and outspoken opponent of abortion-but when he encountered laid-off workers in New Hampshire, his focus turned to trade.
Trade has been Buchanan's focus ever since. He is convinced that American jobs are being lost to foreign countries, that the family-wage factory jobs which were once the economic sustenance of the patriotic working class are vanishing, to the benefit of the economic elite. In 1996 he ran for president again, won the New Hampshire primary, and fought-the word is carefully chosen: in Arizona he allowed himself to be videotaped in a black hat carrying a six-gun-unsuccessful primary battles against Bob Dole. In his 1998 book The Great Betrayal he argues for policies much like those of Republicans from Abraham Lincoln through William McKinley and after, with characteristically Buchananite turn of phrase and with a knowledge of history that few if any practicing politicians can match. In happy economic times, his thesis attracted less attention that Buchanan must have hoped. Buchanan is not a naif: After his two presidential races, he knows that even if he becomes one of the two surviving candidates in early primaries his high negatives make it very difficult for him to win the nomination. He knows that the biggest anti-free trade constituency is made up of the dwindling number of blue-collar union members who are strong Democrats. His candidacy can best be seen as an unselfish attempt to advance ideas which he believes are vitally needed to help ordinary Americans.
George W. Bush is the first son of a president to run for that office since Robert Taft and if elected would be the first to win since John Quincy Adams. He grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas-the twang is authentic, went off to school in the East, where he disliked trends on the elite campuses of the 1960s and 1970s, and returned to Texas to work in the oil business and to run for office-unsuccessfully for the House in 1978, successfully for governor in 1994 and 1998. Bush is focused and disciplined, likes to be prepared and dislikes improvisation; he studied Texas issues and communities hard before campaigning in 1993 and 1994 and has been taking tutorials in national and international issues in 1998 and 1999. He has prepared short agendas of serious reforms and mostly pushed them through, a sharply defined task since there is only one 90-day legislative session every two years. He has built a consensus around Texas issues-for tort reform, welfare reform including services by faith-based institutions, tough juvenile crime laws, limited tax cuts, friendly relations with Mexico-which is perceptibly more conservative than Bill Clinton's attempts at consensus, just as Texas is more conservative than the nation as a whole.
The question is whether he can duplicate his Texas success in the entire country. Bush's unwillingness to wing it on issues (so sharp a contrast with Clinton) will surely help him avoid mistakes, but can also make him look uncertain, as in his initial comments on the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. His ability to forge a consensus in Texas has been helped by the fact that the media environment there is heavily tilted to the left, as it is nationally. And his candidacy must pass through the chokepoint of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he will have no more time-indeed, given his concentration on Texas through June 1999, less time-to be in touch with voters than other candidates. Bush was well ahead in both primary and general election polls in the first half of 1999, but those results are not etched in stone, and represent more of a favorable first impression than a settled verdict.
Elizabeth Dole startled many people when she announced her retirement from the Red Cross in January 1999 and prepared to run for president. Her name had been mentioned before as a possible candidate, and she has had a career which entitles her to serious consideration. She grew up in North Carolina, went to Duke University and then was one of the few women in her class at Harvard Law School. A nominal Democrat (like most North Carolinians then), she made her way ahead in the Nixon Administration. In 1975 she married Bob Dole, then already a national figure as senator and Republican National Committee chairman. She was not noticed much as he ran for vice president in 1976 and president (winning very few votes) in 1980. Instead she held important office herself, as secretary of Transportation in the Reagan Administration and secretary of Labor under Bush. In 1991 she became head of the Red Cross, and by most accounts solved some serious problems there.
Dole is an accomplished speaker whose specialty is talking into a hand-held mike and walking amid the audience, repeating a memorized talk-not as easy as it looks. But she has had little experience in the hurlyburly of campaigning. Nor as of May 1999 had she staked out positions on some major issues. The thought is often advanced that she is running for vice president, and she certainly would be a plausible running mate. But it is also noteworthy that her candidacy is being taken seriously on its merits; the fact that she is a woman seems not to be an asset nor a liability. Without much notice, the Dole candidacy has moved America past a political milestone.
Steve Forbes was never considered a political, much less a presidential candidate, before he launched his candidacy in September 1995; he has hardly stopped running ever since. Forbes grew up in New Jersey, the son of Forbes publisher Malcolm Forbes; both Forbeses vastly increased the circulation and value of the magazine, and Steve Forbes has used some of his fortune to self-finance his campaigns. Forbes is brainy, well-learned in history and economics, with strong beliefs in free markets, hard money and flat taxes. His saturation ad campaigns, many of them directed at Bob Dole and others, made him a serious contender in several 1996 primaries, and the winner of some. But he stumbled in Iowa by criticizing the Christian right and in antitax New Hampshire ran poorly. In 1997 and 1998 he made amends with Christian conservatives, strongly backing the partial-birth abortion ban and calling for an effort to change public opinion so as to make abortion extinct.
Forbes's intellect and money make him a contender who cannot be ignored in 2000; strategists for Bush and others worry about him launching a barrage of negative attacks. But Forbes labors under certain handicaps. The flat tax may be a good message, but it is not clear that someone of Forbes's net worth is the best messenger. While Forbes has been successful in dulling the animosity and even attracting the affection of Christian right leaders, their setbacks in 1998-and the fact that almost every candidate has sought to meet their litmus tests-may have made them less inclined to flex their muscles in the Republican nominating process. Forbes's 1996 campaign was quintessentially crunchy, in the spirit of the early 1990s, condemning the political system and calling confrontationally for wholesale change-an appeal that seems out of sync with the soggier mood of the late 1990s.
John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, grew up in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, the son of a mailman; he became a Republican partly because he disliked the bureaucratic restrictions he encountered as a student at Ohio State. Kasich's energy and enthusiasm propelled him to the Ohio Senate and the U.S. House, each at an early age and in Democratic years; his position as Budget chairman he owes to Newt Gingrich's decision in 1992 to elevate him over a more senior, more somber colleague. Kasich can take pride in playing a major part in achieving a balanced budget, and certainly has an in-depth knowledge of government; but some Republicans chafe at the compromises he has felt compelled to accept.
Kasich's greatest assets are his energy and enthusiasm; his backers hope he will shoot up out of the pack through "spontaneous combustion." His enthusiasm for the Grateful Dead and other rock musicians perhaps puts him in closer touch with younger Republican voters than any rival; some rivals say he is short on gravitas. He constantly proclaims his religious faith and has written a book, Courage is Contagious, profiling everyday Americans who have done extraordinary things to improve their communities or the lives of others. Kasich, more than any of the others, has an inspirational appeal. The question is whether there is enough oxygen in this crowded field to produce spontaneous combustion.
Alan Keyes is running a second time. He was born in New York City, but grew up on various military bases. He is a serious scholar, a Straussian who believes that the nation has strayed from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, especially in its abandonment of the respect for life which he sees in its elite's toleration of abortion and hostility toward family life. Keyes is a gifted speaker, energetic and articulate, who brings audiences full of cultural conservatives to their feet with cheering applause. He has won significant percentages in some straw polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere.
Keyes served in the Reagan Administration's State Department, but has never had a job of the stature ordinarily considered necessary for a presidential candidate. That, and the likelihood that opponents and the press will attack him as the candidate of a limited faction, make it hard to imagine him winning the nomination.
John McCain is the son and grandson of admirals. He grew up in Navy posts, finished near the bottom of his class at Annapolis, was a Navy flier in Vietnam and was a prisoner of war for five and a half years: As he put it when he was attacked as a carpetbagger in his first Arizona House campaign, the longest place he had ever lived was Hanoi. In Vietnam he endured torture and refused offers of early release; he returned home in 1973 on crutches. McCain served out his Navy duty as a liaison to the Senate; he moved to Arizona, his wife's home, and ran for and won an open House seat in 1982. In 1986 he was elected to Barry Goldwater's Senate seat. McCain has conventional conservative views on most issues, and expertise on military matters. He is ordinarily pleasant, but is gifted with a strong temper. Most of all, he seems motivated in Washington, as he was in Hanoi, by a sense of humor. This helps to explain his two departures from Republican orthodoxy, sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill (a sort of atonement for his tangential involvement in the Keating Five affair) and of the tobacco bill that failed in 1998 (he was assigned the task by Trent Lott and carried it out).
McCain attracted attention in spring 1999 with his astringent criticism of Bill Clinton's strategy in Kosovo. With his usual spare eloquence, he argued that Clinton's ruling out of ground troops gave Slobodan Milosevic the opportunity to ethnically cleanse Kosovo. His poll ratings rose as he distinguished himself from the field and spotlighted his special credentials. Yet his stands, as on campaign finance and tobacco, can repel many Republican politicians and voters.
Dan Quayle is the only Republican candidate who has had what is arguably the experience a president most needs, of working in the White House and gauging how decisions made there work in the world beyond. He grew up in Arizona and Indiana, and beat strong incumbent Democrats to win election to the House in 1976 and the Senate in 1980. There he concentrated on military and job training issues. His selection as vice presidential nominee was a surprise and he responded maladroitly to questions then, and still suffers from the impression he made, and from a few subsequent gaffes heavily publicized by a hostile press. But Quayle, like Vice Presidents Mondale, Bush and Gore, was closely involved in making national policy, making contributions like selecting the NASA head who was kept in office by Al Gore, advising Bush to seek congressional approval of the Gulf war and besting Gore in the 1992 presidential debate.
Quayle's problem in 2000 is not just to exceed expectations, which are very low, but to demonstrate that he is up to the office. With more gray in his hair, he speaks more fluently and confidently than he did in 1988, and shows close acquaintance with major issues though he has been out of office since 1993. Quayle must make a breakthrough in Iowa and New Hampshire, or his candidacy will wilt; he hopes that if he can he will have changed public impression enough to be a competitive candidate in the fall. But he must convince many skeptical Republicans who fear that he is a sure loser.
Bob Smith, to the surprise of just about everyone, has decided to run for president in 2000. Smith grew up in New Jersey, served in Vietnam, then went into teaching and real estate in New Hampshire. With conservative support he won a seat in the House in 1984 and the Senate in 1990. He was narrowly re-elected in 1998; the VNS exit poll showed him losing. Smith is a pleasant, earnest man who gives an eloquent stump speech which energizes audiences at Republican cattle shows and caucuses.
But he has shown very little support in polls even in his own New Hampshire. Nor has he had great successes as a legislator; his efforts at Superfund reform had not borne fruit as of mid-1999. Smith has said that he will not continue his campaign if he does not make a good showing in Iowa, so it is not clear what impact he will have on New Hampshire if any.
The General Election
The fact is that in mid-1999 no one could be sure who-or which party-would win the 2000 election. Democrats could take comfort from Bill Clinton's victories in 1992 and 1996 and his high poll ratings during much of his second term, and believe that he has shown the formula for victory. But Clinton won only 43% and 49% of the vote in those two contests, and it is not clear that either Democratic candidate has the particular set of skills and appeals to duplicate those plurality showings, much less win a convincing absolute majority. Republicans could take comfort from their party's victories in three successive congressional elections, in which their House candidates won pluralities despite negative press coverage and the great unpopularity of their most conspicuous congressional leader. But if they won 52% of the votes in crunchy 1994, they won just 49% in soggy 1996 and 1998. The 1992 and 1996 presidential races stand for the proposition that in today's America New Democrats beat Old Republicans. The 1994, 1996 and 1998 House elections-and many governor races besides-stand for the proposition that New Republicans beat Old Democrats. The elections of the 1940s through the 1970s stand for the proposition that Old Democrats beat Old Republicans. But there are precious few, if any, elections that tell us what happens when New Democrats face New Republicans. The 2000 election may turn out to be the test.
Past performances give both parties bragging rights, but give neither side any warrant for confidence they will win. Democrats can point to Bill Clinton's 70% job ratings in the second half of 1998; Republicans can point to George W. Bush's 20%-plus poll leads over Al Gore in the first half of 1999. But the odds are long that these numbers will not be translated into voting percentages in November 2000. It is more realistic to look at actual votes, and these tell a different story: Clinton's 49% in 1996, House Republicans' 49% in 1996 and 1998. Republicans can point to the success of their candidates for governor, but in doing so they must gaze at their debacle in California in 1998, and the brute fact is that even their successes have not been registered at the presidential level in the 1990s. Democrats can argue that Bill Clinton's New Democrat formula is a solid basis for success, but they can point to few candidates who won statewide with a similar formula: Gray Davis in California is the one shining example, Roy Barnes in Georgia may be another.
One way to gauge the electoral balance is to look at the different regions examined earlier, considering in each state not only the 1996 presidential vote but also the 1998 House vote. Four of the five look very one-sided for 2000. The New Engand/Metroliner by that measure is almost entirely Democratic; only New Hampshire and Delaware produce a Republican average, the latter because of the personal popularity of its single incumbent congressman. Score it 95-3 Democratic. Similarly, the four states of the Pacific Rim all lean Democratic by significant margins: 76-0. The South Atlantic states all lean Republican (if one adds to the reported figures the untabulated votes cast for unopposed Florida Republican House members): 73-0 Republican. The Great Interior is even more Republican; only New Mexico and North Dakota produce a Democratic average, the latter because of the personal popularity of its single congressman. Score the Great Interior 92-5 Republican. That leaves Democrats ahead by 176-168: pretty close.
The decision therefore is likely to be made in the Mississippi Valley. Two states there are solidly Democratic, West Virginia and Minnesota; add Al Gore's Tennessee and you get 26 electoral votes. Three states seem solidly Republican, Indiana, Alabama and Mississippi, with 28 electoral votes. This leaves the decision to 10 states. Five are from the industrial Great Lakes region: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois. Five are from the Mississippi Valley, with varying degrees of southern accents: Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. In an even race, the combined 1996-98 vote totals would yield 85 Republican and 51 Democratic electoral votes; that would mean a 281-253 Republican margin. But we are operating here well within the margin of error, overall and in many of these states. The focus of American politics has sometimes been on the two coasts, sometimes on the new and emerging South; in the 2000 general election it is likely to be on the Midwestern heartland.
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