But at the other end of the spectrum, the frost belt’s principal outsider winners–Minnesota Senator-elect Paul Wellstone, who was Jesse Jackson’s state cochairman in 1988. and Vermont independent Congressman-elect Bernard Sanders, the first socialist elected to Congress in 40 years–represent an old Northern radical tradition almost forgotten during the Reagan go-go years. “Pastrami populism” is more ideological than its country cousin.
Should national prosperity resurge in 1991, Wellstone and Sanders could become one-term caricatures from a Peter, Paul and Mary time warp. But it’s also possible that both new Democratic insurgencies draw on a larger phenomenon–the crumbling of 1980s smugness about recession proof prosperity into a renewed disillusionment in which two thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Ten years ago, no-confidence verdicts were registered against Jimmy Carter-era liberals, paving the way for Ronald Reagan. Now, dissatisfaction with Bush’s Brooks Brothers blandness may also be preparing to rescript American politics in 1992 or 1996.
As for Tuesday’s election data, Republicans can plausibly call their probable nine seat loss in the House and one-seat loss in the Senate typical, even mild, late-20th century midterm losses. Democrats, however, can point to the Potomac Two-Step that Republicans began choreographing last year. First they’d buck history in 1990 by gaining three to four Senate seats and maybe even two or three House seats, plus some state governorships and legislatures. Step Two would involve not just re-electing Bush in 1992 but also winning House and Senate control.
Ahem. Republicans dropped to 167 seats out of 435 in the House, their third straight decline. The most embarrassing defeats came in the 29 “open” seats with no entrenched incumbent: Republicans dropped from 18 to 12. With the GOP simultaneously losing the opportunity to control 1991 congressional redistricting in Florida and Texas, the Republicans have no chance to recapture the House in 1992–or 1994, or probably the rest of the decade.
Takeover prospects in the Senate are not much better. A year ago Republicans took their blueprint seriously enough to enlist five popular Republican representatives to tackle “vulnerable” Democratic senators in 1990. All five were sacrificed in vain; not a single Democratic Senate incumbent fell. The sole candidate to beat an incumbent, Minnesota’s Wellstone campaigned for taxing the wealthy–and had been arrested several years ago at a bank sit-in protesting farm foreclosures. Nobody had thought he had a chance.
Few big-name Democrats, in fact, had wanted to make 1990 Senate races in what was supposed to be a strong economy and a good GOP year. Potentially strong contenders in Virginia, Indiana, Idaho and Oregon sat out races several could have won. But even so, by picking up one seat, the Democrats effectively blocked any Republican hopes for 1992. when they’d need seven seats for a majority.
In short, Republican congressional prospects for the 1990s self-destructed last week–and the results would’ve been even worse a week earlier, just after the budget debacle, when the “fairness” issue had slashed GOP support by 10 points. Once Congress adjourned and Democratic congressmen had scattered to their districts, Bush was able to switch to his favorite script: “Desperately Seeking Saddam.” GOP pollsters estimate that Bush’s sudden emphasis on the gulf saved one to two Senate seats and a half dozen seats in the House.
Not that it matters too much. While White House press agents may deny reality, disgusted Republican strategists know their plans to become the majority party have collapsed. Frustration and factionalism will naturally come next, further weakening the party. None of this is good news for George Bush, who not only slumped 20 points overall in October but whose campaigning was a flop in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. His prestige on Capitol Hill and within his own party, never matching his strong ratings, now trails even his current mediocre public approval.
The economic cycle, too, threatens Republican hopes. Although voters were nervous, official data continued to say “no recession.” Since World War II the GOP’s pattern has been for economic downturns during midterm election years: full-fledged recessions in 1954, 1958, 1970, 1974 and 1982, and a severe farm-belt and oil-patch slump in 1986. Today’s economic thunder clouds, however, are the first in memory (at least since the post 1929 period) to portend their storms for the third year of a GOP presidency.
If this alone weren’t enough to frighten Bush’s re-election strategists, there’s also growing speculation that financial pressure (ranging from tumbling real-estate values to dangerous corporate-debt loads and spreading bank insolvencies) could make the 1991 downturn feed on itself, deepening into a severe recession. Democrats have already found that attacking Bush and the Republicans for favoring the rich is a potent political weapon. But it has also been my thesis that the 1980s, like the Roaring Twenties and the late-19th-century Gilded Age, represented a once-a-generation bubble of debt and speculation with the unnerving potential to implode and trigger a populist reaction. Some of that implosion-and-populist-reaction is underway. Will it intensify? That is an all-important question, to be answered over the next year or so.
Moreover, the Republicans have reason to worry that President Bush will have to confront accelerating domestic and international problems at a time when he has depleted prestige and little congressional clout (like that which hobbled Jimmy Carter in 1979-80). Since Election Day, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, already self-centered and unruly, have also become scared and fearful–scared by 1990s voter surliness, fearful that grass-roots retribution could escalate in 1992 when many representatives will be running in partly new and unfamiliar (and potentially unfriendly) districts. Anarchy is too strong a term, but legislators’ parochialism and self-entrenchment are sure to deepen. Cooperating with the White House is not likely to be a heartfelt priority.
Democrats, for their part, are already planning a January offensive including calls for higher taxes on the rich–the return of the millionaire’s surtax–to fund tax relief for the middle class. If collapsing debt and speculative bubbles stir memories of 1929, the Democrats’ political opportunities will expand further. The race for the Democratic 1992 presidential nomination will begin in earnest, even if there’s no unifying candidate to match the unifying issues now beginning to emerge.
President Bush, meanwhile, has to deal with an incipient Republican and conservative civil war. By 1992, the GOP presidential coalition shaped in the late 1960s will have held the presidency for 20 of the last 24 years, and its cohesive forces are breaking down. Frustrated conservatives, convinced that Bush blew the tax issue, the elections and probably the future, are seething at the return of bland party moderates to the White House and to the governorships of California, Illinois, Ohio and Massachusetts. The right’s counterattack could include a 1992 primary challenge to George Bush, possibly by former Reagan communications director Patrick Buchanan. The ultimate, ironic damage would be if such a challenge made it impossible for the White House to consider dumping Vice President Dan Quayle from the ticket–perhaps, as a result, undercutting the president’s own ability to win against a strong Democrat (if there is such an animal).
The Republicans’ situation is serious. Indeed, one big story of the early 1990s is that as the old GOP coalition unravels, the Republicans are more splintered on important issues than the Democrats are. This decade’s Republicans are starting to look like 1960s Democrats. The tax battle, for example, is sure to be bitter in 1992, and the divided state-by-state verdicts last week on abortion all but guarantee a painful 1992 Republican convention fight. Further, too few politicians realize how divisive the wealth issue is within the GOP. Pre-election CBS polling found fully 71 percent of Republicans saying government is pretty much run by a few big interests, while 51 percent of GOP respondents complained that the budget agreement favored the rich. It’s the old schism–Main Street versus Wall Street, Peoria versus Palm Beach. Other cleavages are cultural, with largely Jewish “neoconservatives” squaring off against fundamentalist-tinged Christian “paleo-conservatives.” And international questions have widened two more splits: one between economic nationalists and free traders and another between neo-isolationists and global interventionists. If, as many now expect, the Bush administration moves to attack Iraq, any number of political scenarios could develop. The American public will probably support a war–at first. But if the economy continues to worsen, producing what could be the 20th century’s first wartime recession even as body bags start coming home to Dover Air Force Base, the politics could sour, too.
All in all, George Bush could well be the last president of the Republican White House cycle that began 22 years ago with Richard Nixon. And this raises a caution. Final presidents of party cycles are especially prone to be remembered for failure–Herbert Hoover for the Great Crash, Lyndon Johnson for Vietnam and urban riots. So while one conservative critic recently suggested that Bush could be Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter rolled into one, there’s an even more disturbing analogy to contemplate–the chance that he could combine Herbert Hoover’s economics and Lyndon Johnson’s military misjudgment. It’s no more than a one-in-10 prospect, but perhaps even noting it can help keep it from becoming a fact.
