The Peter Principles: The whole story
By Peter Roff
United Press International
Published 7/10/2003 10:52 AM
WASHINGTON, July 10 (UPI) -- The political character of the nation could change profoundly as a result of next November's election. In 2004 it will be 10 years since the Republican Party, riding atop the crest of a wave created by the "Contract with America," rode into the majority in the U.S. House, the Senate, the governorships and, for the first time in decades, reached parity with the Democrats in the number of state legislative chambers the party held.
There have been ups and downs for the GOP in the decade since. In 1996 it failed to win the presidency. In 1998 the Republicans, though they held on to the majority, suffered an unexpected net loss of seats in the U.S. House that led Speaker Newt Gingrich to resign.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the White House by the narrowest of margins, taking the Electoral College while losing the popular vote to former Vice President Al Gore. The GOP also lost its working majority in the Senate, thanks in part to the victory of a dead man in Missouri. Later in the year, a defecting Republican became an independent, giving the plurality Democrats control in a left-of-center coalition.
Nevertheless the past 10 years have been the brightest for the Republicans since Calvin Coolidge was president. They have, after 40 years out of power in the U.S. House Representatives and contrary to most predictions, maintained their majority.
They have defied expectations and maintained their lead in the number of Republican governors in office across America. To be sure, swapping Pennsylvania's governor's mansion for Maryland's or Michigan's for Hawaii's is not an even trade but the party has shown surprising strength in unexpected areas. For example all the governors in New England, currently with New York the anchor of East Coast liberalism, are Republicans.
The competition between the two parties has also remained vigorous at the state level. The GOP emerged from elections in 2000 and 2002 as the majority party in a majority of state legislative bodies; the current split is GOP 54, Democrats 44 among the chambers organized along partisan lines.
The story of the GOP advance has, in most quarters, been under-written and under-reported. The smart political reporting, especially since 2000, has tended to focus on the idea that the two parties are at parity and stuck there. The slim GOP majorities in the U.S. House and Senate and the narrowness of Bush's 2000 win are cited as proof of that assertion.
This may be true, if recent elections are used as the baseline. If the longer view is taken into account, the GOP has undeniably made significant gains and may well be on its way to becoming the natural majority party even as some analysts predict the political pendulum is about to swing to the left.
In the post-Watergate era, the Republicans appeared to be a permanent minority. After the 1974 elections, the Democrats were a 60-38 majority in the U.S. Senate with two senators in neither party. In 1976 they increased their majority to 61.
Things were not much better for the Republicans in the U.S. House. The Democrats won 291 seats, a veto-proof majority, in the November 1974 election compared to 144 for the GOP. Two years later they increased their majority to 292 seats as Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency from Republican Gerald Ford.
Carter won 50.1 percent of the popular vote to Ford's 48 percent but the victory was not really as narrow as it appeared. Carter won 297 votes in the Electoral College to Ford's 240 -- but came within a few percentage points of winning in California, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Virginia -- an additional 134 electoral votes that could have raised his total to 431, a landslide by any standard.
And, in a key measure of partisan sentiment, the Democrats after 1976 were the majority in 80 of the 98 state legislative chambers organized according to party representation.
The Republicans came very far, very fast in 1994 and have, in general, held their ground.
The word in Washington is that Bush has told his closest political advisers that he does not want, in 2004, to be another Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan, meaning the resources of the campaign are husbanded for the benefit of the incumbent president. Both Nixon and Reagan won 49 of 50 states in their re-election bids but had little effect on the outcome down ballot.
Nixon came out of 1972 facing a hostile Congress. Reagan gained nowhere near what was needed to win a GOP majority in the House in 1984. His party actually lost one seat out its majority that year and lost the rest two years later.
Bush, according to some GOP strategists, wants to expend political capital in 2004 much as he did during his successful 1998 run for re-election as governor of Texas. He wants to bring more Republicans into office with him, making it easier for him to pass his agenda through the Congress. As one GOP strategist said, "They don't remember how much you win by. They remember what you did once you were in office."
If the current political alignment holds, then parity and the accompanying gridlock in Washington will remain the order of the day. If Bush is able to cement his hold on the presidency -- no small if -- and campaign aggressively for Republicans running down ballot, then the long-predicted realignment may actually occur. The elements necessary for such an outcome are certainly in place. Whether the GOP can pull it off is a whole other story.
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(The Peter Principles is a regular column on politics, culture and the media by Peter Roff, UPI political analyst and 20-year veteran of the Washington scene.) |
