My, you turned out to be a fickle band of revolutionaries.
You, the voter. That wasn’t just a midterm election you staged one year ago, it was a bloodless coup.
Remember? You ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. You beat Chicago’s big heat, Dan Rostenkowski. You defeated the speaker of the House for the first time in 132 years. You ship-wrecked the Clinton presidency and set sail with Newt Gingrich.
You re-elected every single Republican governor and member of the House and Senate who was on the ballot. You hadn’t blessed one political party in that way for decades.
This wasn’t the South rising or California dreaming or Midwestern stubbornness. This was a coast-to-coast anointing of the Republican Party as leaders of the republic.
So now what, you want to pull an Emily Litella and say, “Never mind”?
The Republican Party is doing just what it pledged it would do in the 1994 campaign. Balance the budget. Replace the welfare state. Cut taxes. They never said it would be pretty. But then, you didn’t want it to be pretty. You wanted carnage.
So, along comes the inevitable train wreck in Washington, D.C. One would have figured you’d be cheering in the streets when all those federal bureaucrats were furloughed–especially when you saw it really didn’t make a whit of difference in your own life. (By the way, it occured to me while watching the Air Force Academy lose to Notre Dame last weekend–who decided that Air Force football coaches were “essential personnel” while 800,000 other workers were sent home?)
You got exactly what you voted for–and you promptly abandoned the revolution. You don’t want to be associated with them anymore. Newt, for one, is not taking this well.
Every poll taken in the last two weeks has shown that you’re mad about the government shutdown, you blame the Republicans and you have no use for the way they want to balance the budget.
A USA Today-CNN-Gallup Poll found that you preferred the Democrats’ deficit-reduction plans over the Republicans’ by a 49-36 ratio.(Never mind that the Democrats didn’t have any real deficit-reduction plans until the Republicans goaded them into it.) The poll found you had soured on Bob Dole and were ready to fricasse Gingrich. Clinton, the president you pummeled last November, looks downright Trumanesque to you.
What gives?
We deserve some blame for treating the Contract with America as a marketing gimmick rather than a manifesto when all those Republican hopefuls came home from D.C. waving their signed copies. They weren’t going to run things, so we didn’t bother you with the details. We also didn’t explain that the loveable Newt came attached as a rider.
I doubt that, on Election Day, many voters could have described even one of the 10 points in the contract. But then, if we had run the contract every day on the Commentary page for a week, I don’t think it would have made any difference in the election outcome. It looked harmless enough on paper. And you were out for blood, Democrats’ blood.
I’m no disciple of the Republican revolution. The leaders in Congress want to run social experiments on poor kids and spread around tax breaks to people who are doing quite well, thank you. But there also wouldn’t be a push to a balanced budget if the GOP hadn’t taken charge. Soften their edges a little bit, and you have something.
But I think they’re getting the shaft from you. You pumped them up, sent them off to Washington like 230 Jimmy Stewarts on parade, they did what they promised to do and at the first sign that things were getting rough, you pulled a 180.
Weathervane voters beget weathervane politicians.
Now, this thing could work out two ways. Clinton and the Republicans could decide that the one thing they have in common is stark terror at what you might do next year. So they’ll reach some kind of compromise on a seven-year balanced budget and hold their breath and hope you don’t decide to kick them all out because they took a nick at Medicare.
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Or, they could just decide to have one big, down-and-dirty, no-survivors brawl for a full year. No deal, no budget, no passports, no Social Security checks, a $1.5 trillion government on hold until you decide next November whether it’s going to be Clinton’s way or the Republicans’ way. It would be the clearest referendum on the future of the country since 1932.
But then, you’d probably elect President Dole and toss Congress back to the Democrats.