In the fall of 1989, Democrats Jim Florio and Douglas Wilder were elected governors of New Jersey and Virginia respectively.
There wasn’t much else on the political calendar in that first year of President George Bush’s term, and Wilder’s victory, which made him the nation’s first elected black governor, grabbed the headlines.
Analysis of the two elections-some of it committed in this corner-drew a straight line between abortion rights and a trip to the political winner’s circle.
It’s an occupational hazard. Whenever voters go to the polls, there is a tendency to take the election snapshot and transform it into a road map for the future.
To steal a line from Winston Churchill, there is an urge to search for a theme in the pudding.
That’s what happened in 1989, when Florio and Wilder ran as unreconstructed supporters of a woman’s right to choose, beating Republican rivals who kept bobbing and weaving on the issue.
It was the year of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Webster case, which granted states broader power to restrict abortion. That ruling galvanized abortion-rights forces and transformed millions of women into single-issue voters.
Hello, Gov. Florio and Gov. Wilder.
The message of 1989 was that the abortion debate in America was over, that statewide races could be won only by candidates who backed abortion rights.
Now, in the fall of 1993, Florio and Wilder are gone. The Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions for poor women, is still on the books, despite Bill Clinton and the “Year of the Woman.”
And George F. Allen, a profoundly conservative, anti-abortion Republican, is governor of Virginia-by a whopping margin. Allen’s running mate, Michael Farris, who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, lost the lieutenant governor’s contest, but drew 46 percent of the statewide vote.
In New Jersey, abortion all but disappeared as an issue, although Republican Christine Todd Whitman never could quite get her story straight on how she felt about this most volatile of domestic issues.
Mary Sue Terry, the Democratic loser in Virginia, thought abortion, gun control and name recognition would see her through.
In fact, it was her status as the putative incumbent, the unanimous party choice to succeed Wilder, who could not by law succeed himself, that doomed her.
She pounded away at Allen for the money he took from evangelical conservatives such as broadcaster Pat Robertson.
Nothing worked for Terry, who ran away from Clinton and Wilder, then wondered why the Democratic base didn’t turn out for her in big numbers.
This was a Republican year in Virginia and elsewhere, but you have to wonder if Terry could have suffered a more debasing defeat-she received just 41 percent of the vote-had she thrown her arms around the president and dragged him across the Potomac River.
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There is some cold comfort to be taken from the fact that incumbent presidents often get bad news at the voting booth during their first year in office. Last week, Clinton himself pointed out that in Ronald Reagan’s first year in the White House, Democrat Chuck Robb was elected governor of Virginia.
The lessons of 1989 and the abortion debate suggest that promising to end parole for violent offenders, as Allen did, or promising to lower state income taxes by 30 percent over three years, as a desperate Whitman did, are slick tactics for a single Election Day.
Chances are they aren’t transferable, and won’t work as well a year from now.
The real danger for Clinton and the Democratic Party is not that Florio raised taxes and lost his re-election bid by 30,000 votes out of 2.4 million ballots cast.
It is that the depths of voter anger and impatience with incumbent politicians has yet to be plumbed, and that the 1994 midterm elections are bearing down on them with the ferocity of Ross Perot at an anti-NAFTA rally.
What Clinton must view with alarm is the effective coming together of social conservatives and Republicans across the South at the same time the historic Democratic coalition of urban liberals and minority voters in places such as New York City and Los Angeles is dissolving.
A vibrant economy and a credible health-care plan could solve that troublesome equation for Clinton and his party, but it is a mighty challenge.