Monday, November 9, 1998
Election should be viewed as wake-up call, not defeat
CONGRESS: Republicans must consider platform, choose better
leadership
By Martin Chippas
As is the case in every election, no sooner do the poll returns
come in the pundits begin spinning the outcome. As UCLA’s official
resident Republican hack, it is my sworn duty to present the party
line, which is as follows.
The Republican Party still dominates both the House of
Representatives and the Senate. It controls 31 out of 50
governorships including 9 of the 10 largest states. One out of 8
Americans are now governed by a Bush. And for the first time in 70
years, the Republican party has controlled congress for three
consecutive terms. Most aspects of American government at the
national and local levels are controlled by Republicans.
This is all true and bears repeating as the media focus on
Democrat successes in this election. It should be pointed out that,
but for the notable exception of California, Democrats are
essentially celebrating that they didn’t lose the way they feared
they would and that the other party still controls most everything,
albeit by a narrower margin.
But of course the Democrats know something that Republican
loyalists are afraid to admit publicly. The GOP should have won
this election. The fact that it didn’t win this election weakened
its abilities to direct policy and gave the Democrats greater hope
of taking back everything next time.
Where did it all go wrong?
In 1994, we swept to power on a well-crafted platform of popular
national issues: welfare reform, a balanced budget, return of power
to the states, elimination of waste and bureaucracy, strong
national defense  and most importantly, lower taxes and less
spending. In 1998, the Republicans passed a budget full of pork and
complete lack of fiscal restraint. All talk of tax cuts has been
abandoned.
Then, in the last week before the elections, the party chose to
invest its money on ads trying to exploit the Clinton scandal. This
convinced the people that the party is preoccupied with Clinton
instead of "doing the business of the country" than by trying to
make the scandal a campaign issue.
It would seem that the candidate who did the best job as running
on Republican issues was Jesse "The Body" Ventura, the reform party
governor-elect in Minnesota. His campaign centered more
successfully on pro-freedom and limited government positions than
any Republican since ’94. This may be because the voters still
believe that an independent candidate like Ventura will do a better
job of sticking to the policies he runs on after he’s been in power
for a few years.
In California, only the two incumbent Republicans won statewide
office.
Throughout their campaigns, Gray Davis and the other Democrats
framed the debate and defined the opposing party on their own
terms.
Davis did an excellent job of claiming moderate voters by
focusing on consistent themes of education and crime, and by
portraying Lungren as an extreme conservative. Lungren had few
consistent themes and was not convincing in portraying Davis as a
liberal.
The same was true of Matt Fong. He probably would have won the
election had it not been for the barrage of ads by Barbara Boxer,
who is the biggest liberal idealogue in the Senate. These ads
portray the very moderate Fong as some kind of scary,
pollution-loving extremist who wants to poison children and
distribute automatic weapons to them. In its search for the
moderate status quo, the voting public just elected the most
partisan, and in many cases liberal, state government in
decades.
It can only be a testament to Republican success in the past
that Democrats must run as moderates to win today. Now that they
completely control the state, the myriad groups on the left who
support the Democrats will push for policy that is not likely to be
popular with many. The only consolation for Republicans can be that
if the Democrats give in to this temptation, they will not be
re-elected.
The voters didn’t vote to choose liberalism over conservatism;
all polling indicates that, although they want moderate reforms,
voters primarily seek the status quo. Had Republicans had more
incumbents, those incumbents would have won.
As the leadership of the national Republican Party has stressed
after the election the GOP still holds most of the political power
in the country.
This has been true since 1994. But if the party doesn’t quickly
do what voters expect Republicans to do, it will not be in power
much longer.
When I sent this article to press Friday morning, I argued that
the GOP’s losses in the election were a clear indication of the
failure of the Republican leadership, most especially Newt
Gingrich, to successfully promote a political agenda after 1995. I
called for the entire leadership to step down and allow a new batch
to take over and renew the Republican party.
Since that time Gingrich has stepped down. The Republicans in
the House will decide on new leadership in a week. If that
leadership recognizes the problems of the last three years and
enacts an agenda that is again focused on the issues that gave the
GOP control of the Congress in 1994 this election will have served
as a wake-up call instead of a death knell.
The Republican party must show that it has the ability to enact
policy  otherwise someone else will get the job.
If this isn’t the case, Republicans should not despair. The
example of Ventura shows that the electorate can still find a way
to elect leaders when the two major parties fail them.
If the GOP doesn’t take full advantage of this second chance to
prove itself, it deserves to lose.
Comments, feedback, problems?
© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]