Vin Weber recalls the last time an election shattered single-party power and left Americans with divided government.
Weber was a Republican congressman and a top adviser to Newt Gingrich when the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 seized the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The GOP took the Senate that year, too.
It was a time of great promise. With his futuristic ideas about government efficiency, Gingrich appeared to have beaten the Democrats to the 21st century political paradigm. Working with Bill Clinton, Congress passed welfare reform and set the country on the path to a balanced budget.
But the Republicans succumbed to ideological and political “excesses,” Weber admits. After shutting the government down in 1995 and moving to impeach Clinton, the GOP lost seats in the 1996 and 1998 elections. Gingrich resigned. Republicans became what they once opposed: big-spending, nest-feathering, pay-raise-taking pols. And 1994 became their high-water mark in the House.
The lesson for Democrats? If they take control of the House on Tuesday, Weber says, Nancy Pelosi and her troops can best build their majority and help a Democrat capture the White House in 2008 by compiling a record of centrist, bipartisan reform.
Republican spin? Maybe. But from the opposite side of the political divide, Mike McCurry has strikingly similar views. He watched the Gingrich revolution from his perch as Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 until 1998.
“What Pelosi shouldn’t do” is overreach, and yield to her party’s anger and liberal instincts, says McCurry. That would “allow Bush to demonize her the way we were successful at demonizing Gingrich.”
Pelosi’s hand will be stronger, and her agenda bolder, if the Democrats take the Senate as well as the House, says lobbyist Tommy Boggs. More will be expected of the Democrats if they hold both chambers; they may have to, and want to, take up such thorny issues as Social Security, energy independence and health-care reform.
But given the president’s veto power, and the absence of a super-majority to cut off filibusters in the Senate, the Democrats will still have to forsake much off their liberal wish lists, says Weber. Pelosi should move quickly to curb lobbying, spending and other congressional debauchery, pass popular legislation like a hike in the minimum wage, and tap White House and Senate support for a comprehensive immigration-reform bill.
“Bush’s immigration bill is more popular with the Democrats than it is with the Republicans. If I were Speaker Pelosi, I would say, All right, let’s do that,’ and prove that we are going to cooperate with this White House on something,” says Weber. “The House Republicans would really squirm with this legislation because the bill would come up with their president’s support.”
Weber’s advice is based on the unproven assumption that Bush, looking to buff his historic legacy, will abandon his scorched-earth partisanship and return to the infinitely more cooperative approach he practiced as Texas governor.
And there are Democrats who differ. The party’s rambunctious progressives made their presence known in this year’s election, on the Internet and in the polls. They think the party needs to be more, not less, militant.
“What is the worth of a Democratic majority if we do not make sure that majority pushes for fundamental change?” writes David Sirota, a liberal blogger.
“If Democrats somehow manage to seize a mid-term loss from the jaws of victory in 2006,” Sirota writes, “a very compelling case can be made that the party lost the election because it projected weakness and timidity.”
The fulcrum for post-November politics is likely to be Iraq.
Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, in line to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee if his party takes the Senate, says the swelling ranks of Republican critics of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq will give Democrats plenty of political cover as they push for incremental redeployment.
And Weber notes how the Democrats have recruited a moderate class of candidates to run for office in the House this year. “The center of gravity in the Democratic caucus will move toward the middle,” he predicts.
Even so, among the party’s rank and file, “a big, big chunk of the Democratic base wants out of Iraq,” says Weber. They may press their representatives to cut off funding for the war. If Congress refuses, “there will be a lot of angry Democrats at the grassroots level.”
And so, for the Democrats, the key to success will be self-restraint. And whether the net roots can be disciplined.
“Nancy Pelosi will be as good a speaker,” says Weber, “as her party allows her to be.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective.
