Politics / Take It or Leave It
Norquist, Grover G.
Take It or Leave It by Grover G. Norquist T he media-driven boomlet for retired General Colin Powell is the most recent confirmation of the Democratic Party's collapse as a contender for national...
...farmers and others who resent the government's assaults on their property rights in the name of endangered species...
...Each component of this coalition is shrinking...
...But a handful of House Dems have announced they are stepping down anyway, and California Rep...
...And unlike the old Republican coalition, which came largely from the North and Midwest, the "Leave Us Alone" group is national, comprised of people from, quite literally, all walks of life...
...The Christian Coalition now has 1.5 million members, and the National Rifle Association rolls have swelled to 3.2 million...
...Only 27 percent believe Republicans have gone too far in reducing spending...
...In an August 20 Times Mirror poll, 50 percent of Americans said they'd vote Republican in the 1996 congressional elections, while only 43 percent claimed they'd vote Democratic...
...The GOP also seems likely to capture the senate in Mississippi and at least one chamber in Virginia, and even score significant gains in both houses of the gambling scandal–riddled Louisiana legislature...
...LEXIS...
...There are the small businessmen and self-employed who oppose taxation and regulation...
...As Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, says, this is only "half right...
...Norman Mineta has already cashed out and gone to work for Lockheed Martin...
...And the big city machines are suffering from spending reductions, which are slashing the numbers of federal, state, and local government workers...
...their initial motivation came from the perceived hostility of the Carter administration to Christian private schools and radio stations...
...gun owners and hunters who believe in the Second Amendment...
...They also support making adoption easier...
...This disparate coalition has growing clout—and every sector of it is increasing in membership, organization, and political sophistication...
...Now they lead a chorus proclaiming that the electorate has turned away from both parties, and voters are "up for grabs...
...Establishment publications such as Time and Newsweek once predicted that Bill Clinton would re-create a stable and sturdy governing majority at the presidential and congressional level...
...The Religious Right and other social conservatives are a major part of the Leave Us Alone coalition...
...The GOP now controls 51 of the 99 partisan state legislative chambers...
...Forged by Franklin Roosevelt, the Depression, and World War II, the party's working majority comprised a mix of Southerners, union workers, northern immigrants, and big city machines—a bloc that held together at the congressional and state level for more than sixty years...
...State legislative seats will be contested in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as Louisiana and Mississippi, both of which will, along with Kentucky, elect new governors...
...In the Senate, meanwhile, seven Democrats have announced the end of their Capitol Hill careers, and Sam Nunn of Georgia is widely believed to be on his way out as well...
...The Times Mirror poll also found that 50 percent of the respondents were "happy" that the Republican Party controls Congress...
...For those Democrats choosing to remain, their traditional ruling coalition simply no longer exists...
...Take It or Leave It by Grover G. Norquist T he media-driven boomlet for retired General Colin Powell is the most recent confirmation of the Democratic Party's collapse as a contender for national power...
...It is the Democrats who are now most divided on abortion, as pro-choice extremists are forcing the party to defend partial birth abortions, in which the fetus emerges from the mother's body halfway before it is killed...
...The trial lawyers are meanwhile facing what amounts to a rebellion in each of the fifty states, as activist groups are working with the new congressional majority to reduce, if not eliminate, the "tort tax" of frivolous lawsuits...
...The unions now collect dues from just 12 percent of the workers in the private sector, and continue to struggle to attract today's younger workforce...
...And this month, five states will hold off-year elections...
...These include the radical utopians—feminists, homosexuals, pacifists, animal-rights activists, and environmentalists...
...Labor union membership has fallen from 33 percent in the 1950s to below 17 percent of the workforce today...
...These cutbacks are also affecting the cohesion of the Democratic bloc...
...These party-switchers are staking their careers on the belief that the Republican majority is real and permanent...
...and parents who no longer can bear the way that the teachers' unions are miseducating their children...
...LEXIS-NEXIS P.O...
...westerners and Alaskans who abhor federal policies that treat them like intruders on the King's land...
...Box 933, Dayton, OH 45342 800-227-4908 The American Spectator November 1995 65...
...What's most important for the GOP, however, is that the voters want what the party is offering...
...Today it stands more united, enjoys more popular support, and takes in more money, than at any time this century...
...NEXIS For Complete Access to Campaign '96 ************ The full text of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR® is available on-line as AMSPEC in the NEWS library of LEXIS-NEXIS...
...Their organizing principle is consistent with American history and tradition—that government should be limited, and the people should be free...
...Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Twelve percent of American parents are sending their children to private or parochial schools, with an additional one million parents educating their kids at home...
...Both parties, the argument goes, are equally distrusted by the American people...
...Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg makes a similar argument in his recent book Middle Class Dreams—that Republicans were repudiated in 1992, just as the Dems were in 1994 trying to become a permanent majority...
...They began organizing not in the wake of the Supreme Court's anti-school prayer decision, or even after Roe v. Wade...
...The numbers back him up...
...Just one year ago, that margin was 45-43...
...Republicans won a net gain of 52 House seats, eight Senate seats, eleven governorships, and 480 state legislators last November—and, as Barbour notes, another 89 elected Democrats have switched parties since then, including two senators and three congressmen...
...That Democratic majority has been displaced by a new GOP bloc best described as a coalition that shares one political goal—to be left alone by the government...
...The Democratic Party might be called the Takings Coalition, made up of groups that want the government to take from American citizens—usually cash—and keep it for itself...
...They can best be understood politically as a Parent Rights movement, concerned with opposing state intervention into the workings of the family...
...Republican demographer John Morgan predicts at least a dozen more retirement announcements by the end of the year...
...as federal funding dwindles, the various Takings constituents will begin to turn on one another in a battle royal for increasingly scarce taxpayer dollars...
...39 percent were "unhappy...
...E arlier this year the Democratic leadership in the House was begging members to delay all retirement announcements, in hopes ofkeeping alive the dream of recapturing it from Republican control...
...Every budget cut, every tax cut, and every regulatory cut strengthens the Leave Us Aloners at the expense of the Takers...
...Hardly an encouraging trend for the party of Bill Clinton, even though he has begun suggesting to voters that they only have a chance to elect someone like him "once every century...
...The Democratic Party is indeed in decline, but the Republican Party has never been healthier...
...There are now more than 1,000 state and local property rights groups and more than 1,500 taxpayer organizations...
...The Takings bloc includes government workers' unions, the National Education Association, federal contractors, corrupt big-city political machines, trial lawyers, the unfortunate souls locked into welfare dependency (as well as those who earn their handsome livings keeping them dependent), and those groups that vie for a piece of the $40 billion in federal grants each year...
...Perhaps most surprising, the number of independent businessmen has surpassed the number of union members...
...When two Democratic state senators in Tennessee switched parties on September 15, it gave Republicans control of the Tennessee state senate...
...39 percent say "not far enough...
...The debate over abortion is not the fatal divide hoped for by the left, because the entire Leave Us Alone coalition can unite in opposition to government funding for abortion...
...Republicans are favored to win all three governorships and expected to retain their majorities in both New Jersey houses...
...As to what concerns them most, 55 percent said they worry Republicans will back down from their promises to cut federal spending...
...motorcyclists who 64 The American Spectator November 1995 detest helmet laws...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
