Contract Hit!
Barnes, Fred
Contract Hit! How Newt Gingrich used the Contract With America to rub out the Democrats and put an end to forty years of mob rule. by Fred Barnes et's not exaggerate the significance of the...
...Clinton's popularity was plummeting...
...That would have kept House and Senate races as local affairs...
...It's L not the most important political manifesto since the Declaration of Independence...
...It obligated them to adopt sweeping reforms of Congress on the first day of the new session in January, then bring ten policy initiatives to a vote in the first 100 days: a balanced-budget amendment and line-item veto, a tough crime bill, welfare reform, parents' rights, a family tax cut, reversal of some Clinton defense cuts, an end to the Social Security earnings limit, deregulation, tort reform, and congressional term limits...
...Gingrich's answer was that Republicans would never become the majority party in Congress by being negative...
...It had given Republicans a good feeling, a sense of unity and purpose...
...And so on...
...Gingrich didn't want them included, insisting they divided rather than united Republicans...
...By dwelling on the contract, with its tax cuts and term limits, Democrats highlighted issues Republicans wanted to talk about, issues popular with voters...
...I felt school prayer was something that appealed to most Americans and didn't cost dollars," he says...
...What Democrats never imagined is that they might give Republicans a mandate...
...He'd participated in the 1980 gathering on the Capitol steps at which Ronald Reagan, then the Republican presidential nominee, and scores of Senate and House candidates endorsed GOP economic and national security plans...
...Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour agreed...
...Earlier attempts to nationalize House races had failed miserably...
...They became positive, Democrats negative...
...There wasn't a contract either...
...That event had little impact on the 1980 campaign, but Gingrich remembered it fondly...
...Paul Weyrich, who runs the Free Congress Foundation and National Empowerment Television, says Gingrich told him Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal would attack the contract if it included the prayer amendment...
...Are Senate GOP moderates ready to side with Democrats to block tax cuts and deregulation...
...But let's not exaggerate...
...He had an agenda, and he talked about it incessantly...
...E lection night in Georgia brought a second defining moment for the Contract With America...
...The contract is the most important distillation of the conservative agenda since Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative...
...0 ver the spring and early summer, Gingrich, Armey, and their aides began sorting through issues...
...The ideas in the contract were not only proposed, but were challenged—and they prevailed...
...It had identified them with a few simple conservative proposals: cut taxes, slash spending, build up the military...
...A positive message was required...
...His health care plan was collapsing...
...The contract was chock-full...
...The contract idea quickly caught on...
...That was an easy choice for voters...
...Ernest Istook of Oklahoma presented Gingrich with a petition signed by fifty House Republicans who wanted a constitutional amendment allowing prayer in school to be specifically endorsed...
...The American Spectator January 1995 21 On September 27, 367 GOP incumbents and challengers showed up to sign the contract...
...In 1992, Perotistas split their votes evenly between GOP and Democratic congressional candidates...
...But the fact is the attacks helped Republicans...
...Much of the contract will pass...
...First, it helped them nationalize the races for the House of Representatives, something the GOP had been trying to do for more than two decades without success...
...And Frank Luntz, Newt Gingrich's pollster, inflates the contract a bit when he gushes: "This document will never be forgotten...
...There were GOP detractors...
...Then, Clinton gets in the act...
...Kevin Vigilante, the Republican candidate against Teddy Kennedy's son Patrick in Rhode Island, canceled a campaign appearance by Gingrich...
...Legislation had already been drafted for every proposal in the contract...
...And it needs an enforcement clause...
...We were the naysayers...
...James Longley of Maine told a Republican consultant the contract cost him 10 percentage points...
...House Republicans will move quickly, forcing the hand of queasy Senate Republicans...
...It was a gamble not to include any of these [social] issues, but in retrospect maybe it was right," says Weyrich...
...Well, history books maybe...
...Gephardt chuckled...
...Armey, next in rank among House Republicans, was on board...
...Not likely...
...The idea was to pick out major ones around which Republicans would unite...
...The trouble was, it hardly sounded like a galvanizing event...
...Clinton made the contrast explicit: himself versus Reagan...
...Luntz gives Gingrich credit for suggesting a contract...
...Too true...
...All hail the contract that's bound to change America...
...They didn't like the balanced-budget amendment as much either...
...by Fred Barnes et's not exaggerate the significance of the Contract With America...
...As Democratic pollster Mark Mellman pointed out: In the absence of the contract, Republicans would spend the first 100 days debating what to do in the first 100 days...
...Moreover, an astonishingly high percentage of voters (44 percent) said they voted on the basis of ideology, while an unusually low percentage (21 percent) said they voted on party affiliation...
...Republicans also won the independent vote handily...
...And they absolutely loathed the idea of a national referendum...
...If they enact enough of the contract, says new House Majority Leader Dick Armey, voters will reward them "for doing what they said they would...
...Gingrich had picked the date...
...Now listento this," he said in Philadelphia a week before the election...
...The strongest argument against the contract was that it was unnecessary...
...Before the contract, they had an agenda," says Armey...
...The bottom line...
...By making the contract the focus of the campaign, Democrats caused three other things to happen, all harmful to them...
...Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, who headed the House Republican campaign committee in the 1970s and 1980s, predicted a gain of "76 in '76...
...Will they believe a contract...
...It'll find its way into history books and government manuals...
...He should have stayed in the Middle East...
...Gingrich believed Republicans could pick up forty seats easily and capture the House, but only if national issues overrode local concerns in these districts...
...Why not...
...He found that incumbent Republicans, unsurprisingly, weren't as keen on term limits as challengers were...
...After the contract, we had an agenda and they were the naysayers...
...House Republicans would be ready on day one...
...He encountered little dissent on abortion, but a lot on school prayer...
...Considering the flap that erupted when Gingrich announced he'd schedule a House vote on a prayer amendment by July 4, it was probably essential...
...The Democratic incumbents stressed their local ties, constituent service, experience—anything except national issues...
...W by was this such an extraordinary blunder...
...In those districts, including several dozen in the South, voters preferred Republicans for president and for many state and local offices...
...They got diverted from their path of survival," adds Bell...
...Better yet, Republicans won Perot voters by better than 2-1...
...For years, sixty to seventy Democrats had been winning in districts that John Morgan, a Republican consultant, told Gingrich were "Republican seats...
...But not for Congress...
...It was almost uniformly negative...
...Gingrich said no...
...They should have used their resources on demonizing individual Republicans," says GOP consultant Jeffrey Bell...
...Taking on the contract proved to be a tactical success for the White House, but it was a strategic blunder of enormous magnitude...
...Luntz responded, "Depends on what's in it...
...A defining moment for the contract was not the photo opportunity at the Capitol, but rather when the White House and Democrats began assaulting the document...
...It lacked a hook, one that would help Republican candidates attract the target voting bloc—Perot voters and independents, roughly a quarter of the electorate...
...But Luntz insists that it alone appealed to hard-core Perot voters in a focus group he conducted in Denver in late summer...
...Gingrich envisioned a Capitol event at which Republican candidates would declare their support for a set of conservative proposals...
...He assuaged social conservatives by promising to bring a prayer amendment to the House floor for a vote in 1995...
...Once the GOP had captured the House, Gingrich didn't have to talk lamely about finding consensus among Republicans...
...He set up a special Contract With America office in July that pumped out news releases and faxes...
...Among the 30 percent, Republicans had a 17 percentage point advantage, compared to a 10 point edge among those who hadn't heard of it...
...True, the attacks on the contract made some Republicans jittery...
...How much the contract helped is anybody's guess...
...But by making the contract the point of conflict in the campaign, they did just that...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...He shouldn't waste his time fretting about it...
...Does that sound familiar to you...
...Even before September 27, the White House held backgrounders for the press to cast the contract as irresponsible and guaranteed to bloat the budget deficit...
...Why give Democrats a target...
...But I'd give a slightly different spin...
...His health care plan was collapsing...
...Worse for Clinton, his hysterical campaign style reminded them of everything they don't like about him...
...And fourth, it may allow Republicans to consolidate their control of Washington—holding the Senate and House, winning the White House—in 1996 and beyond...
...The contract, says Republican strategist William Kristol, "is even more useful as a governing document than as a campaign document...
...Gingrich, poised to replace Bob Michel as House GOP leader in the next Congress, persisted...
...Clinton aides—Leon Panetta, Robert Rubin, Gene Sperling—managed to shape media coverage of the contract from Washington...
...Gingrich was advised by consultant Edward Rollins and former Rep...
...Or at least their proponents had, which was enough to claim a mandate...
...Doing what you promised—Armey says, "Those are magic words in politics...
...And, as incumbents, they had plenty of money, most of it from business or labor political action committees...
...Others probably had as well, but weren't aware of the Contract With America per se...
...Republicans were suddenly able to pull off what Armey calls the equivalent of "a reversal in wrestling...
...Third, it gives Republicans a blueprint to follow in the early months of the new Congress, as they seek to establish themselves as responsible, popular leaders...
...Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma that House races just couldn't be nationalized...
...Luntz was brought in to poll incumbent House members and challengers...
...The contract gave him talking points...
...Not likely...
...Clinton's popularity was plummeting...
...Clinton meant these to sound unappealing...
...Hunt attacked it anyway...
...In effect, Democrats agreed to nationalize the election...
...And it has led to a lot more success...
...As it turned out, Republicans lost one House seat overall in 1976...
...If not for the contract, Clinton might never have thrown himself into the campaign, crisscrossing the country the final ten days...
...The more voters heard about the plan, the more they liked it...
...We've heard that before, haven't we...
...Why go out on a limb...
...He wanted to impose national issues on local House races, thus removing a key advantage of incumbent Democrats...
...The biggest fight came over social and cultural issues...
...Depending on how much of the contract is enacted, the first Republican Congress in forty years may be one of the most important of the century...
...Why give Democrats a target...
...The strongest argument against the contract was that it was unnecessary...
...Until mid-summer, the gathering on the Capitol steps was known to GOP staffers as "the September 27 event...
...Democrats were bound to demand, "Where's the beef...
...Why go out on a limb...
...He won 52-48 percent...
...The contract, consisting of a promise to reform Congress and ten broad conservative themes from term limits to tax cuts to a balanced-budget amendment, produced three striking results for Republicans in the midterm election and perhaps a fourth...
...Not only did Clinton denounce the contract in speech after speech, the Democratic National Committee put four different ads on TV attacking it...
...My guess is Republicans wouldn't have won fifty-two House seats by relying on the anti-Clinton mood alone...
...Does he want to wage another...
...He quotes Gingrich as asking, "You say voters are cynical...
...Democrats committed the same mistake in the 1993 New Jersey governor's race, when they relentlessly criticized Republican candidate Christine Whitman's tax cut scheme...
...Gingrich had bigger goals for 1994...
...In January, riding back to Capitol Hill from a bipartisan meeting with President Clinton at the White House, Armey was asked by then-Majority Leader Richard Gephardt why he wasn't running for whip, the post Gingrich would vacate...
...I'm running for majority leader," Armey responded...
...Media coverage was concentrated on Gingrich at his campaign headquarters in Marietta...
...Many challengers loved it, but not enough to shoehorn the idea into the contract...
...We'd be in total disarray if we didn't have a roadmap to the first 100 days...
...He's lost one battle over the contract—the campaign...
...20 The American Spectator January 1995 W hen Gingrich broached the idea of the contract in early 1994, there wasn't much magic in the idea...
...He's right...
...Barbour also committed more than $250,000 for a two-page ad in TV Guide on election week...
...Campaign rhetoric and TV spots were insufficient...
...Task forces were assigned...
...D 22 The American Spectator January 1995...
...This was important...
...We had to show how a Republican Congress would be different from a Democratic Congress," says Armey...
...He lost 54-46 percent...
...Armey agreed...
...Second, by suckering President Clinton and Democrats into a campaign debate on the proposals in the contract, it created a mandate once Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate...
...Actually, Luntz's post-election surveys found that only 30 percent of voters had heard of the contract...
...Democrats had engaged...
...Big tax breaks, mostly 'for the wealthy, billions more on defense, revive Star Wars, balance the budget...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
