Republican Resurgence
I recall the 1996 election campaign fondly - not at the presidential level, of course, which was a death march - but in the contest for which party was going to have control of Congress.
The Democrats, spearheaded by a $40 million Big Labor smear campaign based upon the calculated twisting of a comment then-Speaker Newt Gingrich made about the Health Services Administration (a bureaucracy within the sprawling Medicare entitlement) that with the reforms he was envisioning the HSA would "wither on the vine" - were bound & determined to take Congress back after having unexpectedly (to them) lost both Houses two years earlier. And they were supremely overconfident that they would do so, too. As far as they were concerned, it was already in the bag. The press ran stories about Speaker Gephardt and Majority Leader Daschle and all the new Dem committee chairmen on both sides of the Capitol gleefully polishing up their gavels to wield after the poor, sad sack 'Pubbies went down in a landslide.
There was only one small problem with these best-laid plans: they never happened.
"Mediscare" peaked too soon. It reached high tide in the early summer of 1996 and then subsided. Bill Clinton was able to piggy-back it to victory by selling himself as a "check" on the GOP congressional majorities which would otherwise be "out of control" and proceed to "dirty the water and dirty the air" and "make old ladies eat Alpo" and "take food out of the mouths of children" and "force every American to thump Bibles and handle snakes" - and, of course, "gut" Medicare. But the premise of that gimmick was that the Republicans would remain in control, as they ultimately did.
I harken back to a decade ago because history looks to be repeating itself ten years later.
For the most part, the 109th Congress has been a bust. The GOP has had its moments here and there - confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the SCOTUS, extending the Bush tax cuts for a few more years, renewing the Patriot Act, tort reform - but many have been its failures and mistakes, from the infamous "memo of understanding" to the failure to push through drilling in ANWR to rampaging domestic spending and the avalanche of "earmarks" that crammed last year's energy and highway bills with enough pork to make the oinking audible several parsecs away. By rights the Pachyderms have earned relegation back to minority status, and then some.
And they probably would be, but for the fact that the Democrats have done zippo, zilch, nada to take advantage of the generous opportunity their foes handed to them. It took them a year and a half to come up with even the pretense of an alternative agenda, and it turns out to be the same tired old liberalism, and not even gussied up in all that attractive a camouflage wrapping, either. They spent over a year obsessed with scandal-mongering against Tom DeLay, only to get a lateral move over to John Boehner as his Majority Leader replacement. They got rid of Randy "Duke" Cunningham only to see one of their own, "Icebox Willie" Jefferson, match his malfeasances. And as an added bonus they gave us Patrick Kennedy's DUI smashup and Cynthia McKinney's assault on the Capitol Police. Thanks to al Donka's efforts, the "culture of corruption" was shown to be, at worst, a decidedly bipartisan affair.
More debilitating than anything else has been the Democrats' compulsive inability to let go of their Vietnam syndrome as it infects their approach to the war against Islamic Fundamentalism. Every time over the past twenty months that they have gotten any kind of momentum, one of their number has taken the anti-war bait, handed the Republicans the opportunity to put the seditious idiocy of a Jack Murtha or a Russ Feingold to a vote, and gotten humiliated. And when elected Donks haven't been stepping on rakes, their friends in the Extreme Media and the hard-left "nutroots" have taken turns at it, from Cindy Sheehan's antics to the supposed "massive" protests that invariably fizzled to the active quasi-espionage of the New York Times and its Clintonoid intelligence sources.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in the gradual turning of this latest tide is the fact that Republicans appear to be figuring some things out. Most significant among them is the House GOP's resolute stance against "comprehensive" immigration "reform," which was the biggest threat to their majority status come November if it passed in the form favored by the White House and Senate. The death of that mortal electoral hazard for this session looks like the fulcrum, along with the recent, and undeniable, breakthroughs in Iraq, on which the GOP comeback is pivoting.
The latest and most comprehensive indication of this trend is the latest Battleground Poll of Senate races, which shows Republicans retaining a minimum of fifty-two seats. Here's how they break down the competitive races, with my read correctively inserted where necessary:
ARIZONA: Leaning GOP retention (John Kyl will win in a walk).
FLORIDA: Dem retention (Incumbent Bill Nelson should have been an easy pick-off, but…oh, hell, let's not go there…)
MARYLAND: Open seat of retiring Dem Paul Sarbanes; Dem retention (I think GOP Lieutenant-Governor Michael Steele is going to run down Dem Congressman Ben Cardin, who will be fighting off Qweise Mfume's vindictiveness as well, but it may take another of those electoral tsunamis to make it happen)
MICHIGAN: Leaning Dem retention (If Governor Jennifer Granholm goes down in the gubernatorial race, the undertow might take incumbent Debbie Stabenow - who barely won in 2000 - with her)
MINNESOTA: Open seat of retiring Dem Mark Dayton; toss-up between GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy and some forgettable lib broad who, let's face it, won't stand much of a chance against the Senate's next Kennedy (GOP pickup).
MISSOURI: Leaning GOP retention (It'll be close, but incumbent Jim Talent hasn't provided voters with a reason to get rid of him, so he should get by) .
NEVADA: GOP retention (To think that incumbent John Ensign came within fewer than a thousand votes of Dirty Harry in 1998….) .
NEW JERSEY: Seat vacated by disastrous Jersey guv Jon Korzine, who is running out of elective offices to buy; toss-up between space-taker-upper and former Dem Congressman Bob Menendez and Garden State favorite son Tom Keane (Ordinarily I'd pick the Dem by default, but Keane's parentage should be enough to overcome the hapless appointee - GOP pickup)
NEW MEXICO: Dem retention for incumbent Jeff Bingaman.
NEW YORK: Dem retention for incumbent and president-in-waiting Hillary Rodham Jack Bauer George Patton Bullbricker Clinton (Only suspenseful question left: Can she win by triple digits?)
OHIO: Dem pickup (GOP incumbent Mike DeWine is in trouble, and frankly, richly deserves to get his ass kicked by Dem challenger and current Congressman Sherrod Brown)
PENNSYLVANIA: Leaning Dem pickup (GOP incumbent Rick Santorum has been in trouble ever since Dem challenger and state treasurer Bob Casey announced, and frankly DOESN'T deserve to be; could still pull it out, but probably needs the same "tide lifting all boats" help that Michael Steele does)
TENNESSEE: Open seat of retiring Majority Leader Bill Frist; Battleground calls it a tossup, but I've seen nothing to persuade me that this seat won't stay "red" (GOP retention).
TEXAS: GOP retention for incumbent Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
VIRGINIA: Leaning GOP retention (George Allen will win easily - just look at his opponent)
WASHINGTON: Leaning Dem retention (I'll admit I'm surprised that GOP challenger Mike McGavick is making as strong a run as he is; this should be a blowout for incumbent Maria Cantwell at least to the magnitude of the Patty Murray-George Nethercutt race in '04 [53-44]. If this race were taking place two years ago with George Bush and Dino Rossi further up the ticket, I might have given McGavick a chance for the upset; hell, if Rossi had challenged Cantwell this would have been a pre-emptive GOP pickup. As it is, I just can't see it - at least not yet)
WISCONSIN: Leaning Dem retention (If former GOP governor Tommy Thompson were challenging incumbent Herb Kohl, it'd be like the aforementioned Rossi-Cantwell showdown that never was; but this one doesn't look like it's materializing either).
So, as I read things, it comes out a wash - the Democrats pick off Santorum and DeWine, the Republicans off-set by pocketing the Minnesota and New Jersey seats. If things break heavily the GOP's way, as the wily Michael Novak believes, perhaps Santorum and DeWine hang on and the 'Pubbies bag Stabenow and the Sarbanes seat as well to get to fifty-nine seats. But as I wrote the other day, just holding serve after the crapola cascade of the past year and a half will be a moral victory for the Republicans, and a catastrophe for al Donka.
Or, to let Novak have the last word:
I believe I said that.
UPDATE: And so is the Washington Prowler:
The Democrats, spearheaded by a $40 million Big Labor smear campaign based upon the calculated twisting of a comment then-Speaker Newt Gingrich made about the Health Services Administration (a bureaucracy within the sprawling Medicare entitlement) that with the reforms he was envisioning the HSA would "wither on the vine" - were bound & determined to take Congress back after having unexpectedly (to them) lost both Houses two years earlier. And they were supremely overconfident that they would do so, too. As far as they were concerned, it was already in the bag. The press ran stories about Speaker Gephardt and Majority Leader Daschle and all the new Dem committee chairmen on both sides of the Capitol gleefully polishing up their gavels to wield after the poor, sad sack 'Pubbies went down in a landslide.
There was only one small problem with these best-laid plans: they never happened.
"Mediscare" peaked too soon. It reached high tide in the early summer of 1996 and then subsided. Bill Clinton was able to piggy-back it to victory by selling himself as a "check" on the GOP congressional majorities which would otherwise be "out of control" and proceed to "dirty the water and dirty the air" and "make old ladies eat Alpo" and "take food out of the mouths of children" and "force every American to thump Bibles and handle snakes" - and, of course, "gut" Medicare. But the premise of that gimmick was that the Republicans would remain in control, as they ultimately did.
I harken back to a decade ago because history looks to be repeating itself ten years later.
For the most part, the 109th Congress has been a bust. The GOP has had its moments here and there - confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the SCOTUS, extending the Bush tax cuts for a few more years, renewing the Patriot Act, tort reform - but many have been its failures and mistakes, from the infamous "memo of understanding" to the failure to push through drilling in ANWR to rampaging domestic spending and the avalanche of "earmarks" that crammed last year's energy and highway bills with enough pork to make the oinking audible several parsecs away. By rights the Pachyderms have earned relegation back to minority status, and then some.
And they probably would be, but for the fact that the Democrats have done zippo, zilch, nada to take advantage of the generous opportunity their foes handed to them. It took them a year and a half to come up with even the pretense of an alternative agenda, and it turns out to be the same tired old liberalism, and not even gussied up in all that attractive a camouflage wrapping, either. They spent over a year obsessed with scandal-mongering against Tom DeLay, only to get a lateral move over to John Boehner as his Majority Leader replacement. They got rid of Randy "Duke" Cunningham only to see one of their own, "Icebox Willie" Jefferson, match his malfeasances. And as an added bonus they gave us Patrick Kennedy's DUI smashup and Cynthia McKinney's assault on the Capitol Police. Thanks to al Donka's efforts, the "culture of corruption" was shown to be, at worst, a decidedly bipartisan affair.
More debilitating than anything else has been the Democrats' compulsive inability to let go of their Vietnam syndrome as it infects their approach to the war against Islamic Fundamentalism. Every time over the past twenty months that they have gotten any kind of momentum, one of their number has taken the anti-war bait, handed the Republicans the opportunity to put the seditious idiocy of a Jack Murtha or a Russ Feingold to a vote, and gotten humiliated. And when elected Donks haven't been stepping on rakes, their friends in the Extreme Media and the hard-left "nutroots" have taken turns at it, from Cindy Sheehan's antics to the supposed "massive" protests that invariably fizzled to the active quasi-espionage of the New York Times and its Clintonoid intelligence sources.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in the gradual turning of this latest tide is the fact that Republicans appear to be figuring some things out. Most significant among them is the House GOP's resolute stance against "comprehensive" immigration "reform," which was the biggest threat to their majority status come November if it passed in the form favored by the White House and Senate. The death of that mortal electoral hazard for this session looks like the fulcrum, along with the recent, and undeniable, breakthroughs in Iraq, on which the GOP comeback is pivoting.
The latest and most comprehensive indication of this trend is the latest Battleground Poll of Senate races, which shows Republicans retaining a minimum of fifty-two seats. Here's how they break down the competitive races, with my read correctively inserted where necessary:
ARIZONA: Leaning GOP retention (John Kyl will win in a walk).
FLORIDA: Dem retention (Incumbent Bill Nelson should have been an easy pick-off, but…oh, hell, let's not go there…)
MARYLAND: Open seat of retiring Dem Paul Sarbanes; Dem retention (I think GOP Lieutenant-Governor Michael Steele is going to run down Dem Congressman Ben Cardin, who will be fighting off Qweise Mfume's vindictiveness as well, but it may take another of those electoral tsunamis to make it happen)
MICHIGAN: Leaning Dem retention (If Governor Jennifer Granholm goes down in the gubernatorial race, the undertow might take incumbent Debbie Stabenow - who barely won in 2000 - with her)
MINNESOTA: Open seat of retiring Dem Mark Dayton; toss-up between GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy and some forgettable lib broad who, let's face it, won't stand much of a chance against the Senate's next Kennedy (GOP pickup).
MISSOURI: Leaning GOP retention (It'll be close, but incumbent Jim Talent hasn't provided voters with a reason to get rid of him, so he should get by) .
NEVADA: GOP retention (To think that incumbent John Ensign came within fewer than a thousand votes of Dirty Harry in 1998….) .
NEW JERSEY: Seat vacated by disastrous Jersey guv Jon Korzine, who is running out of elective offices to buy; toss-up between space-taker-upper and former Dem Congressman Bob Menendez and Garden State favorite son Tom Keane (Ordinarily I'd pick the Dem by default, but Keane's parentage should be enough to overcome the hapless appointee - GOP pickup)
NEW MEXICO: Dem retention for incumbent Jeff Bingaman.
NEW YORK: Dem retention for incumbent and president-in-waiting Hillary Rodham Jack Bauer George Patton Bullbricker Clinton (Only suspenseful question left: Can she win by triple digits?)
OHIO: Dem pickup (GOP incumbent Mike DeWine is in trouble, and frankly, richly deserves to get his ass kicked by Dem challenger and current Congressman Sherrod Brown)
PENNSYLVANIA: Leaning Dem pickup (GOP incumbent Rick Santorum has been in trouble ever since Dem challenger and state treasurer Bob Casey announced, and frankly DOESN'T deserve to be; could still pull it out, but probably needs the same "tide lifting all boats" help that Michael Steele does)
TENNESSEE: Open seat of retiring Majority Leader Bill Frist; Battleground calls it a tossup, but I've seen nothing to persuade me that this seat won't stay "red" (GOP retention).
TEXAS: GOP retention for incumbent Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
VIRGINIA: Leaning GOP retention (George Allen will win easily - just look at his opponent)
WASHINGTON: Leaning Dem retention (I'll admit I'm surprised that GOP challenger Mike McGavick is making as strong a run as he is; this should be a blowout for incumbent Maria Cantwell at least to the magnitude of the Patty Murray-George Nethercutt race in '04 [53-44]. If this race were taking place two years ago with George Bush and Dino Rossi further up the ticket, I might have given McGavick a chance for the upset; hell, if Rossi had challenged Cantwell this would have been a pre-emptive GOP pickup. As it is, I just can't see it - at least not yet)
WISCONSIN: Leaning Dem retention (If former GOP governor Tommy Thompson were challenging incumbent Herb Kohl, it'd be like the aforementioned Rossi-Cantwell showdown that never was; but this one doesn't look like it's materializing either).
So, as I read things, it comes out a wash - the Democrats pick off Santorum and DeWine, the Republicans off-set by pocketing the Minnesota and New Jersey seats. If things break heavily the GOP's way, as the wily Michael Novak believes, perhaps Santorum and DeWine hang on and the 'Pubbies bag Stabenow and the Sarbanes seat as well to get to fifty-nine seats. But as I wrote the other day, just holding serve after the crapola cascade of the past year and a half will be a moral victory for the Republicans, and a catastrophe for al Donka.
Or, to let Novak have the last word:
The Left is going to lose — big — because they have nothing noble, nothing beautiful, nothing real, nothing true, with which to lead. They are the merchants of illusion. And a significant majority of Americans, although not all, see through them.
In a democratic election, however, it only takes a small majority to win. And the upcoming election of 2006 is not likely to be all that close.
The Democrats piqued too soon.
I believe I said that.
UPDATE: And so is the Washington Prowler:
Democrat National Committee chairman Howard Dean is seeing polling numbers that are making him a nervous man. Recent internal polling data for Senate races from Washington state, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, and Maryland - with the exception of Missouri, which is a GOP defense - shows Democrat support cratering if not crumbling around the edges. [emphases added]Gee, was it something I said….?
posted by JASmius at 4:32 PM
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