Politics / GOP Hat Trick
Norquist, Grover G.
GOP Hat Trick by Grover G. Norquist H aley Barbour campaigned for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee promising to spend $3 million on a "National Policy Forum," a series of...
...The measure would also double the sentence for a second offense and triple it for a third...
...Then thousands of low-income students will be able to have real choice—public, private, and parochial—in education, and all within a ten-minute train ride from the major media market of New York City...
...But the initiatives that passed in Cincinnati, Ohio, Lewiston, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 3 (and in the Oregon towns of Oregon City and Keiser on November 9) won handily with the political slogan "Equal rights, not special rights...
...Victims' rights groups in California are now circulating an initiative petition that would reduce potential time off for good behavior for violent criminals to 20 percent of a sentence rather than the present 50 percent...
...R epublicans have convinced the public that crime is a critical issue and that their solution—longer real sentences for repeat offenders—is the answer...
...In Maine, term limits on state legislators passed 70-30...
...only 26 percent preferred gun control...
...In New Jersey, Whitman gave an object lesson in how to mishandle the crime issue...
...Exit polls in New Jersey and Virginia showed Republicans overwhelmingly carrying the 1992 Perot vote, this on the heels of Kay Bailey Hutchison winning 85 percent of the Perot vote...
...It also masked GOP progress in winning black votes: Whitman got 25 percent of them in New Jersey, and Allen took 17 percent in Virginia...
...Mayor Bret Schundler walked door to door for Whitman with a single message: a vote for Whitman is a vote for school choice in Jersey City...
...Recent Republican victories in cities strip Democrats of the opportunity to use city employees for campaign purposes and make voter fraud much more difficult...
...Polling in Virginia by Fabrizio, McLaughlin confirmed that Allen was right to dismiss opponent Mary Sue Terry's call for waiting periods for gun purchases and bans on "assault" rifles as simply her refusal to discuss real anti-crime measures such as abolishing parole and stiffer sentences...
...It may have been a good idea at the time, but the message of Election Day 1993 was that the party should save its money and stop acting as if last year's presidential election were a repudiation of conservatism—rather than of one politician who abandoned it...
...Voters have given Republicans more than just victories...
...Asked how best to fight crime, 67 percent of Virginia voters said abolish parole...
...GOP Hat Trick by Grover G. Norquist H aley Barbour campaigned for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee promising to spend $3 million on a "National Policy Forum," a series of public hearings to shape what the Republican Party would stand for in the future...
...Looking ahead to 1996, this leaves New York state competitive and New Jersey leaning Republican...
...In California, Proposition 170, an effort by public-employee unions to weaken the Proposition 13 requirement of two-thirds approval for local tax hikes, was defeated 69-31...
...And don't forget Mike Huckabee's election as lieutenant governor in Arkansas...
...Christie Todd Whitman's narrow victory in New Jersey, George Allen's landslide win in Virginia, and Rudy Giuliani's close win in New York—along with successful initiatives in Washington state, California, Maine, and Texas—extend a string of GOP victories that started right after the 1992 presidential election with Paul Coverdell's runoff win in Georgia and continued with Kay Bailey Hutchison and Richard Riordan's victories in Texas and Los Angeles respectively...
...In 1992, Oregon voters defeated a proposition that would have required the state government to promote anti-homosexual propaganda...
...The idea that voters should have the final say over any possible tax increase or new tax is a growing trend that builds upon constitutional amendments enacted in Oklahoma in 1990 and Colorado in 1992...
...Whitman successfully attacked incumbent Jim Florio's $2.8 billion 1990 tax hike, Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Perot endorsed Hutchison only after his polls showed that his supporters were already behind the pro-term limit and anti-tax and anti-Washington message of Hutchison...
...Whitman's credibility on tax cuts was bolstered during the campaign by Republican governors Weld of Massachusetts, Engler of Michigan, Thompson of Wisconsin, Merrill of New Hampshire, and Symington of Arizona, who broke informal precedent to issue strong endorsements of the Whitman plan...
...Bret Schundler's victory in June was followed in November by the victory of Tom Felzer over Bill Clinton's former state chairman, Barlow Herger, for the mayoralty of Raleigh, North Carolina...
...Whitman adviser Lawrence Kudlow thinks that her campaign was the beginning of the redefinition of the 1980s...
...Fear of crime defeated David Dinkins and muted conservative unhap50 The American Spectator January 1994 piness with Rudy Giuliani...
...But even then, there's a silver lining for Republicans: if the Rollins debacle highlights the way corrupt get-out-the-vote efforts work in big cities, then it is the Democrats who stand to suffer most...
...not simply because he—like George Bush—had lied about his taxing plans, but also because she was able to link his tax hike to 280,000 lost jobs during his administration...
...Today, nine state initiatives are in the works for the 1994 ballot to require that any tax hikes be put to popular vote...
...Democrats had hoped the lesson of 1993 would be that gun control can replace "toughness on crime" as a winning issue...
...She opposed mandatory minimum sentences for carjackers and endorsed the Brady Bill and assault weapons bans...
...They have, without cost or tedious public hearings, drafted a winning Republican platform for 1994 and charted a strategic road map for 1996—if the party is willing to learn from its victories...
...By running on a choice-in-education and anti-crime platform, former Helms aide Felzer took 22 percent of the black vote, and won in a city Jesse Helms has never carried...
...On election day, Whitman received 27 percent of the black vote in Jersey City—four times the black vote won there by Republican Jim Courter four years ago...
...Whitman will cut marginal tax rates by 10 percent a year for three years and will reduce state spending by 5 percent...
...It is up to Republicans to remind taxpayers that the left will use crime as an excuse to raise taxes, just as it did with education in the 1980s, and that new prisons can be paid for by cutting other spending, rather than by raising taxes to fund general revenues...
...The brouhaha over Whitman campaign manager Ed Rollins's bizarre statements that he used "walking around money" to counter-bribe black ministers not to get the vote out for Jim Florio has helped Democrats drown out the message of New Jersey—the power of the tax issue...
...Taxpayer groups, however, point out a danger that surfaced in California with the victory of Proposition 172, a measure to make permanent a heretofore temporary half-cent sales tax increase, ostensibly to pay for "public safety services...
...Whitman and Schundler are working together to enact choice in time for next fall's school year...
...The flip-side of "tax hikes kill jobs" was her own tax cut proposal, a carbon copy of the 1981 Roth-Kemp tax cut...
...And state legislators nationwide will note that 49 percent of California voters would be more likely to support a candidate who supported choice in education and only 28 percent would be less likely...
...This will guarantee life imprisonment without parole to a person convicted three times of a violent felony...
...An exit poll run by former Perot pollster Frank Luntz suggests that choice nonetheless remains popular...
...Finally, in Oregon (on November 9), an attempt to impose a sales tax to prevent cuts from schools and government services went down 7525...
...The anti-establishment, anti-corruption impulse remains strong...
...In North Carolina, a measure to allow the general assembly to issue bonds without a popular referendum was defeated...
...Voters, Carville told every national reporter, would forgive tax increases and never again believe in Republicans bearing tax cuts...
...George Allen's strong stand against parole for violent criminals helped turn around a race he had been losing by 29 points...
...Haley Barbour, take note...
...In New Jersey, Whitman promised to pass enabling legislation to give education choice to...
...And Florio further undermined Carville's grand strategy by admitting his loss stemmed from voter support of the Whitman tax cut agenda...
...Previous choice programs have been smaller and far from the mass media's eye...
...Republican Ronald Lauder funded the pro-limits campaign, singlehandedly defeating the entire New York establishment...
...The second lesson from November 3 was the potency of crime as a political issue...
...Moreover, opposition to special privileges for homosexuals is a winner...
...El The American Spectator January 1994 51...
...The $3 million Republicans were planning to spend on reacquainting voters with the party's agenda can now be better spent supporting the anti-tax, anti-crime, and term-limit initiatives on the 1994 ballot...
...E lsewhere, voters in Washington passed Initiative 601 (though only by a margin of 51-49 percent), which limits total state spending and requires tax increases to be put to a popular vote...
...Republicans also won the mayoralties in Syracuse, Binghamton, and Elmira, New York, and Dayton, Ohio...
...Similarly, Texas voters overwhelmingly passed (68-32) a referendum requiring that any attempt to impose a state income tax be placed before the people for a vote...
...The Virginia and New Jersey races showed just the opposite...
...New Jersey voters by 7525 gave themselves the right to recall elected officials after one year in office...
...As Schundler puts it, the left opposes choice not because theyknow it will fail, but because they know it will succeed—success with choice in Jersey City would strengthen the movement in all fifty states...
...The party would then communicate this new message to an electorate that had just rejected four more years of George Bush...
...Despite the smashing (70-30) defeatof Proposition 174 in California, choice in education remains popular with voters and is central to winning black urban voters...
...In Washington state, voters passed a "Three Strikes You're Out" law by a whopping 75-25 margin...
...By agreeing that gun control was "part of the solution," she could not focus on the popular idea of more time in prison for violent felons...
...The California Teachers Association outspent pro-choice forces by more than 10-1, pouring in some $20 million from teachers dues into a media blitz...
...T he most important lesson of campaign '93 was the power of supply-side economics, as demonstrated in the New Jersey governor's race...
...By margins of 53-39, California voters said they "support the right of parents to use vouchers to choose what schools their children attend...
...Jersey City residents...
...Voters in New York City voted 60-40 to enact term limits...
...Seventy percent said they would vote for a future school choice effort "if there were adequate and effective safeguards against extremists setting up schools...
...Another lesson is that Perot voters are Republican voters who couldn't stomach George Bush...
...George Bush's betrayal, Carville argued, had destroyed the tax issue for all Republicans for all time...
...Finally, the conservative message can help Republicans in cities...
...In September and October, when Florio was running high in the polls, his campaign manager James Carville openly bragged that a victory for his man would be the death of supply-side economics...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
