The Big Sleep: Politics 1990

...The S&L issue will play in districts where a member has a problem," said Richard Bates, the DCC's executive director...

...Worse, the White House created a crisis atmosphere in which a tax increase was supposed to be necessary for saving the economy...

...Michael Barone of US...

...If Democrats pick up a few House seats this year and seriously challenge President Bush in 1992—both are possible—it won't be for any of the reasons now popular in Washington...

...That's traditional campaign fare, for sure...

...Not surprisingly, Martin trails Simon...

...In 1988, only eight House members won with 52 percent of the vote or less...

...You'd say, hey, that's a good idea but that's not what they're talking about [in the budget summit...

...But tax hikes rarely hit only the rich...

...Nope, she admitted...

...asked Charles Cook...

...Practically all of them have rejected Phillips's notion that the country is ripe for a populist tax increase that hits the wealthy heavily...

...Democrats quickly positioned themselves as defenders of the middle class against Republican tax-raisers...

...That won't put many of them out of work...

...The 1992 scenario is probably unrealistic anyway...

...He appeared to operate under the assumption that Republicans weren't badly losing the issue...

...Harkin might as well come from California, "where he gets most of his [campaign] money," 'Pauke said...

...On taxes, one of the cleverest Democratic candidates is Rosa DeLauro, running for the open House seat in New Haven, Connecticut...

...Chiles nicked Nelson for missing House votes, arguing he should return a portion of his congressional salary...

...My guess is that the 1990 electionwill be one of the most uneventful of the century...

...Still, Representative Vin Weber (R-Minn...

...And Bush's jettisoning of his no-new-taxes pledge played right into their hands...

...Bill Bradley, the premier California political analyst (not the New Jersey senator), toured the political community in Washington last July and found that the inside-the-Beltway crowd had already figured out the 1990 and even the 1992 elections...

...But nothing clicked, least of all the populist, taxthe-rich scenario laid out by Kevin Phillips in The Politics of Rich and Poor...

...Before Bush's deployment of US...

...The good news is that it's not hurting them much...

...Barone is correct on both counts, but there's a larger reason why a recession won't obliterate Republicans...

...Democrats like Moran have grasped that what most people want is not a tax hike but protection from new taxes...

...A few weeks later, Deputy Treasury Secretary John Robson invited a half-dozen journalists to a briefing on the S&L issue...

...On a larger issue, "Red Ink Harkin" is "the biggest-spending senator ever elected in Iowa history," according to 'Pauke...

...is worried that the S&L issue, coupled with the abandonment of tax, social, and foreign policy issues by Bush, will discourage marginal voters from going to the polls...

...The press hyped each new development (I played along with a few myself...

...LI or Republicans, the bad news is that they're losing the S&L issue...

...So her pledge isn't open-ended...

...Then came "fairness," followed by the debacle in Lebanon, the gender gap, Ronald Reagan's detached presidency, Bitburg, Iran-contra, the gender gap again, the simple fact that George Bush would never, ever be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, abortion, and Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...

...In a TV interview in July, she watered down her anti-tax stand...

...The courts and state legislatures are...

...It helps Bush, but his new glow won't rub off on GOP candidates...

...Besides, if Cuomo's alter ego, Florio, doesn't recover from taxitis, Democrats may cool on a Cuomo-style nominee...

...The savings and loan mess is a national talking point, not an issue with mass appeal, at least not yet...

...Should Republican officials underline Democratic culpability...

...Martin, a smart politician herself, was instantly put on the defensive...

...This wouldn't be the case if the Bush Administration had handled it nimbly...

...Why it takes a guy from Sacramento to explain Washington's latest spell of dizziness, I don't know...

...This, in turn, wipes out the Democratic dream scenario for 1992: divided Republicans versus Democrats united behind Cuomo, who announces early and scares off challengers for the nomination...

...She declared she won't support "new taxes on working- and middle-class Americans" or "political games that raise their taxes via the back door...

...It doesn't take much to keep these folks, who tend to vote Republican, away from the ballot boxes in non-presidential years...

...They haven't...

...My favorite campaign issue cropped up in Rhode Island, where Republican Representative Claudine Schneider is challenging Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell...

...Are they holding it back as the last-second silver bullet...

...We don't need to raise taxes," said Mayor James Moran of Alexandria, Virginia, the Democratic challenger of GOP Representative Stan Parris...

...Democrats ought to pick up five to ten seats in the House and a few governorships...

...If it's sweeping the nation in 1990, there was little evidence in the primaries...

...They cut deep into the middle and lower-middle classes for the simple reason that that's where the money is...

...troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Sad-dam Hussein, there wasn't the faintest sound of a foreign policy in the campaign...

...There are sharp limits on how well Democrats can do...

...I don't think so...

...Weber himself nearly lost in 1986 because of low turnout...

...She called for restoring IRAs for the middle class and for "tax impact statements" forcing the federal government "to assess the effects of its actions on tax rates at the local and state level...

...Pell asked viewers to help out by sending in examples of what he'd done for Rhode Island recently...

...For a decade now, Democrats have been discovering new issues and trends guaranteed to restore them to full power...

...Their anti-Communism was always politically helpful in a way Democrats never understood...

...Say you're a pro-choice Democrat...

...Democrats whipped thirteen Republican incumbents...

...In the DCC's bulletin last May, candidates were urged to characterize Republicans as high taxers...

...Charles Cook, an expert on congressional elections, says the accumulation of scandals in Congress may chop one to three percent off the vote incumbents receive this year...

...Net gain: fifteen to twenty...

...Democrats, in contrast, "are justified in demanding the repeal of the unfair taxes that are breaking the backs of the middle class and the poor...

...In her bid to oust Democratic Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, Martin made no new taxes the centerpiece...

...How excited can you be about an issue that, for every five votes you pick up, you lose three...

...M ost Democrats have learned from hard experience that plugging for higher taxes, even while insisting the rich should be hit the hardest, doesn't pay politically...

...Those who hadn't learned got a vivid lesson this year in New Jersey, where newly elected Governor Jim Florio jacked up taxes by $2.8 billion (the state had a deficit of $500 million...

...In fact, it's an almost never-told tale...

...A populist tax revolt erupted and Florio's popularity fell through the floor...

...There is a new wave of populism sweeping America, the mushrooming savings and loan crisis is a winning issue for the Democrats, and New York Governor Mario Cuomo—and his supposedly likely 1992 presidential campaign—is the political beneficiary...

...He didn't...

...The savings and loan issue, while hardly a Watergate-sized scandal, holds more promise for Democrats than pressing for higher taxes...

...First there was the recession, but that ended in 1982...

...In a speech last June, Democratic national chairman Ron Brown summarized the S&L issue this way: "The crisis was largely created by deliberate cutbacks in the supervision of the S&L industry under Republican economic philosophy under two successive Republican administrations...

...When your position gets that mushy, it's hard to use taxes to go on the offensive...

...The inevitable happened, and it wasn't a wave of gratitude...

...I don't think Republicans get anything out of the Persian Gulf showdown, which has broad bipartisan support...

...I don't think this is the sort of eat-the-rich populism Phillips has in mind...

...This isn't a record that indicates Republicans are on the brink of congressional realignment...

...Your temptation would be to look elsewhere for more productive issues...

...And she didn't propose a big tax increase...

...My memory is not as good as it should be...

...But Bradley's right, Washington's wrong...

...In truth, Democrats should get most of the blame for the scandal...

...Trouble was, she'd issued a statement weeks earlier opposing all tax hikes, period...

...I would hope you would want me to reexamine and if there were a gas tax, for instance, Illinois'd get $1.65 back for every dollar...

...News and World Report, who is also a former Democratic pollster, says "the historical rule that recessions help Democrats probably doesn't apply here...

...Florio insisted his tax increase was targeted chiefly at the wealthy...

...No, he said, that's an "oft-told tale...

...On the other hand, DeLauro is likely to win...

...A full-blown recession would change everything, but not that much...

...Few Democratic candidates give it top priority...

...Nor has populism reached critical mass...

...But the Republican party's handpicked candidate, pro-choice Barbara Hafer, nearly lost to an underfunded, no-name primary foe opposed to abortion...

...Republican challengers for the House and Senate who'd embraced the pledge were faced with a dilemma—whether to go with Bush or stick with no new taxes...

...That pledge, and it is real and it is true, is made for the whole budget discussions that we are . . ." The interviewer pressed for a firm answer...

...Most voters, male and female, aren't willing to make it the sole determinant of whom they support...

...S of a recession in 1990, there's l a no big national issue that would galvanize support for the Democrats...

...In the race for the Democratic governor's nomination in Florida, Representative Bill Nelson played up former senator Lawton Chiles's use of a drug called Prozac, a strong anti-depressant...

...Not bad, but not a devastating rejection of the GOP either...

...It helps Bush, but his new glow won't rub off on GOP candidates...

...Voters don't believe Democratic policies will crank up the economy, Barone insists, and they know the chief villain in a recession this year is Saddam Hussein, not President Bush...

...Republicans have their own dream issues, ones that will give them control of Congress and thus total power in Washington...

...now a burst of populism...

...Conservatives rally behind interventionism, not isolationism (Patrick Buchanan and Evans & Novak are lonely exceptions...

...This is because anti-communism was never simply an issue—it was (and is) a basic American value," wrote Norman Ornstein and Mark Schmitt in Foreign Policy...

...So long as he stands firm against Iraq, he's unlikely to have a conservative challenger for the GOP presidential nomination...

...In a Republican era, this mess has taken place on their watch...

...This hurts Republicans...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 15...

...A trillion is enough to pay for the government...

...In the House, there are at most forty seats, half Republican, half Democrat, that are vulnerable...

...In Iowa, Republican Representative Tom Tauke has zinged Senator Tom Harkin for having a home in the Bahamas, but not in Iowa...

...I couldn't get you a specific answer," said the senator, who is seventy-one and is known in Washington as Stillborn Pell...

...Stangeland is married, but not to Jarvis...

...That's perfectly natural for the party that doesn't hold the White House...

...Her approach, by the way, is in line with what the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee advises all Democratic candidates to say...

...Democrats ignored him, pointing to Neil Bush, the President's son, as the poster child of the scandal and to rising estimates since Bush became President of what the scandal will cost...

...The chief impact would be to put the kibosh on Republican hopes of pulling within ten or fifteen seats of House control in 1992, then trolling for enough Democratic switchers to form a Republican-conservative Democratic majority...

...People at that income level hardly think of themselves asplutocrats...

...Under Florio's hike, anyone making more than $35,000 a year pays more in taxes...

...Otherwise, pro-life Democratic Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania might have had trouble in the primary...

...Democrats have a cherished issue that isn't cutting as they'd expected in 1990—the "choice" position on abortion...

...That's it exactly...

...How long was that pledge supposed to last...

...In Minnesota, Democrats are playing up the hundreds of phone calls made by GOP Representative Arlan Stangeland to a woman named Eve Jarvis, who worked for a Washington lobbyist...

...Then came the Bush switch...

...This year, at least...

...Should a recession strike hard and fast, Democrats should hold their own and win most of the Republican seats...

...Few races are competitive, due to incumbent power and gerrymandering...

...Bradley, publisher of the political newsletter New West Notes, wasn't buying...

...Most were charged to Stangeland's congressional credit card...

...Democratic strategists believe the issue is useful mainly against Republicans who've had direct involvement with the savings and loan industry, such as Representatives Denny Smith of Oregon and Charles Pashayan of California, the top two DCC targets...

...In the Senate, Republicans beat three Democrats seeking reelection (Howard Cannon in Nevada, Dee Huddleston in Kentucky, John Melcher in Montana...

...Folks in Washington were thunderstruck by the Phillips book, but Democratic candidates responded more calmly...

...You'd think Bush officials would make a major effort to put the blame on Democrats...

...They allowed S&Ls to invest in risky schemes...

...Now that—and not a populist rant about S&Ls—is my idea of a defining moment in a campaign...

...The Reagan and Bush administrations were left to pay the tab...

...Only one incumbent in Congress lost, Representative Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and he'd been convicted of having sex with a teenage girl...

...For 1992, the Gulf crisis helps Bush more than he knows...

...The only one to have done so is Ed Rollins, the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee...

...She vigorously opposed a gasoline tax hike...

...She denounced the tax cuts of the 1980s as favoring the rich...

...They pushed through the hike in the federal guarantee from $40,000 to $100,000 per deposit (not per depositor) in 1980...

...The latest is anti-Washington, anti-incumbent fever...

...Republicans might gain a seat or two in the Senate...

...It's tough to make a case against an incumbent in Florida on the basis of Neil Bush in Colorado...

...They were forced to do some explaining, and their campaigns were thrown off balance...

...In congressional races, abortion isn't an overriding issue because Congress isn't where the issue will be decided...

...She'd backed a gas tax before and might again, she said...

...Make no mistake about it...

...The only tax boost she favored was elimina14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 tion of "the tax loophole that allows the top income earners to pay a lower tax rate than the middle class...

...In the past four election cycles, Republicans defeated only nineteen Democratic incumbents, while Democrats kicked out thirty-eight Republicans...

...They lobbied federal regulators to give failing S&Ls more breathing room...

...Brown's speech got considerable media attention...

...Sorry, Mario...

...I don't think Republicans get anything out of the Persian Gulf showdown, which has broad bipartisan support...

...Compare DeLauro's composed handling of taxes with Republican Representative Lynn Martin's...

...But now the issue is all but gone...

...The result: Democrats make substantial gains in congressional races this year and have a solid shot at the presidency in 1992...

...It's basically three ideas wrapped into a neat little package...

...At a joint TV news conference in August, Pell was asked to name the last piece of legislation he'd sponsored that directly affected the state...

...Candidates are looking where they always look when there's no world-class issue dominating the campaign—to the personal foibles of their opponents...

...He dismissed the "new wave" as the latest fad spawned by "the hopesprings-eternal, bring-on-that-oldtime-religion views of Washington's Democratic establishment and the start-a-wave/catch-a-wave thinking of many journalists...