Politics: The Winter of Our Discontent
Norquist, Grover G.
POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist The Winter of Our Discontent I t's worth recalling that last July's failed coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich came in the wake of more than six months of...
...Incidentally, the establishment press knows that it can't harm Gingrich and Republicans by attacking their conservative positions...
...One non-plotting sophomore called the rebels the congressional equivalent of "unaffiliated males outside the herd, who butt heads against each other because they don't have anything else to do...
...Clinton's confusion is classic among survivors...
...Democratic control of seventeen states in 1992 has fallen to five today...
...the legislation hadn't been introduced, not even written...
...It's worth noting that not one of the plotters was a committee or subcommittee chairman or a sponsor or mover of serious legislation...
...It's much easier to call a few friends and punch out an article on how two conservatives don't get along...
...Since Bill Clinton's election in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote, Republicans have gained nine Senate seats, fifty House seats, and twelve governorships...
...In Little Rock, though, when she was given a stuffed animal as a gift, and smilingly said it would be a great comfort to her in Washington, Andrea Mitchell asserted on NBC's "Nightly News" that it was obvious she was thinking of Vincent Foster...
...One rebel has apparently learned his lesson: In August he said he was trying to decide whether to spend the next six months attacking Gingrich or promoting the Wolf-Specter bill cutting foreign aid to nations that persecute religious minorities —and had opted for Wolf-Specter...
...The same largesse was accorded his wife...
...today, they control the executive and legislative branches in eleven states...
...Men Dick Armey in his matter-of-fact way said this spring that the votes weren't there to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, he was announcing his whip count, not his preference...
...Too often Republican congressional leaders have made public comments on tactics or vote counts that are better left unsaid or relegated to staff...
...Weld over the Mexico ambassadorship being merely the latest installment...
...They think he rose by attacking the old GOP leadership of Bob Michel, and so in criticizing Gingrich they think they are actually following in his path...
...Conservatives learned to assume that all their heroes and leaders are bound to feel the pull of Washington's left-leaning center of gravity...
...They're especially frustrated in Washington, where the Republican majorities in the House and Senate are not yet conservative majorities...
...Clinton vetoed it and the tax cut never became law...
...Surprisingly, there were no co-sponsors...
...Presidents are allowed the luxury of a press secretary and appointed White House staff to be the bearers of bad news...
...Even Ronald Reagan, whose presidency turned the economy around and broke the back of the Soviet Empire, came under harsh conservative attack in the 1980's...
...But he was attacked anyway by conservatives as if he'd declared he didn't want to abolish the NEA...
...No sooner did Gingrich propose this alternative strategy than conservative pundits from Maine to Hawaii denounced it as a "sellout...
...In the io4th Congress the tax cut and budget were wrapped up in one bill...
...Three hundred twenty-one elected Democrats have switched parties, including two senators, five House members, and fifty-nine state legislators...
...At best she was inscrutable...
...The wonder is how few Republicans succumb...
...Unfortunately, there were thousands of such issues and Reagan already had filled days...
...Since the fizzled coup, Congress has passed and the president signed the tax cut bill and the budget bill that reforms Medicare...
...58 October 1997 • The American Spectator ered to take the first steps to move his own legislation...
...He settled for a ceasefire on both fronts...
...GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...It's a truism that a conservative journalist who attacks Clinton is read by the usual suspects, but a conservative journalist who trashes Gingrich can expect to be lauded and hyped on the weekend talk shows and in the Washington Post...
...The most obvious reason is rising expectations...
...There are at least a half dozen reasons for this general unhappiness...
...What's more, some of these younger congressmen misunderstand the history of Gingrich's rise to power...
...Conservatives need thirty more House members to outvote moderate Republicans and ten more senators to gamer sixty conservative votes to end a filibuster...
...As it happens, the suggested strategy worked and Clinton signed both the tax cut and the Medicare reform bills...
...The appearance of flip-flopping and lack of principle has been unavoidable...
...The power of the fourteen derived only from their readiness to vote with the Democrats eager to destroy the Republican leadership...
...Conservative griping flows from a postwar history of disappointments...
...In 1992, Republicans controlled the governorship and both houses of the legislature in two states...
...Hence the focus on personality fights and intra-party rivalry?Helms vs...
...Those days are over, and the last thing the press wants is to actually strength-44 The whiner hadn't bothered to take the first steps to move his own legislation...
...Conservative unhappiness has a long history...
...The three who declined to attack him—Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Allen, and William Rusher—never lost sight of Reagan's strengths despite the fog of immediate political struggle...
...It takes a lot of work to write a serious piece of investigative journalism that draws blood from the left...
...Clinton was silent in the wake of Foster's death...
...Too often the conservative press helps create an atmosphere of whining and self-mutilation by conservatives and Republicans...
...I n the face of such temptations and pressures, the amazing thing is that the willingness of fourteen GOP rebels to vote with Democrats to remove Gingrich didn't cause a bigger explosion...
...Newt Gingrich and China's Christians will be thankful for that decision...
...Ronald Reagan steered clear of this problem by staying at the vision level —taxes will be cut—and having his chief of staff James Baker do the negotiating and compromising...
...Just ask David Brock, who has put in the hard and long hours in his writing on Bill Clinton...
...After four months of such complaints, one activist finally asked how many co-sponsors he had for his legislation and offered to help find more...
...they've added 376 state representatives and 197 state senators...
...This year, for example, a conservative congressman who shall remain nameless went to activists and reporters to complain that the only thing holding up the success of his pet issue was Gingrich's indifference...
...Reagan remained the visionary who held true to principle...
...The leadership has learned that it needs to work with individual members on getting them to push their own agendas...
...It was as if reporters did not want to explore further, worried about what they might find out, or perhaps even think, about the president...
...Another source of conservative angst is that Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott have acted both as spokesmen for the party and its positions and as chief negotiators and legislators working out compromises with the president on such issues as the budget...
...4} BOY CLINTON FOUR YEARS AGO ABC's "World News Tonight" reported on the family and friends of suicides, and said that "Mr...
...One saw a similar haste to suspect the worst when Gingrich proposed dividing the tax cut package from the budget legislation in order to pass them separately and force Clinton to sign or veto each on its merit...
...Representatives have now spent the August break back in their districts taking credit for the tax cut and they've watched their approval numbers hit historic highs compared with past Congresses...
...Conservatives sent Eisenhower to Washington to roll back the Red Army in Europe and the New Deal at home...
...77 en the GOP...
...Through its press praetorian guard, this establishment offers every sort of blandishment to any and all Republicans willing to trash Gingrich...
...The Gingrich model calls for the hard work of picking fights with liberals, not backbiting your own leader...
...Younger conservatives who wanted more confrontation with Clinton and the liberals will get their wish as the agenda moves to reforming the IRS, promoting school choice, fighting tort lawyers, banning partial-birth abortions, and preparing a tax cut bill for 1998...
...Congressmen and senators usually must speak for themselves...
...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist The Winter of Our Discontent I t's worth recalling that last July's failed coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich came in the wake of more than six months of conservative criticism of Republican leadership in both the House and Senate...
...In the 1980's, conservatives would wait for directives from Reagan rather than move on their own to organize political support for their goals...
...Conservative activists and backbencher congressmen are repeating with Gingrich an error made with Reagan —acting as if he were a monarch...
...Fourteen votes out of a Republican majority of 228 wasn't much of a revolutionary cadre...
...When the tax cut of 1981 settled at 25 percent across the board rather than the 33 percent Reagan wanted, the perfidy was Baker's...
...Conservatives understandably wonder why electoral success hasn't brought about more rapid policy change...
...If only Reagan would focus on their issue for five minutes and make a key phone call or sign a letter or call a cabinet member, they'd lament, the issue could be won...
...In August many members were reminded of Gingrich's fundraising prowess when he hosted events in their districts...
...The 1983-84 winter issue of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review ran comments from eleven leading conservatives, eight of whom trashed Reagan for betraying conservative principles...
...John Corry "Killing the Foster Story" TAS, OCTOBER 1993 The American Spectator ?October 1997 59...
...Republicans have won mayoral races in New York City, Los Angeles, and Jersey City...
...Whining is no substitute for hard work...
...These gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in free media publicity to such critics are not prohibited by the gift ban...
...Though they should know better, conservatives forget just how unlevel a playing field the establishment press creates in Washington...
...In fact, the early Gingrich and this band of Conservative Opportunity Society activists attacked Democrats such as Speaker Jim Wright and through their activism displaced older Republicans unwilling to fight...
...The Gingrich-led GOP capture of the House poses a much greater threat to the Washington establishment than any Republican president or Republican-controlled Senate with fewer than sixty GOP seats...
...They could work themselves into a frenzy because they weren't spending time getting co-sponsors for their legislation or writing the appropriations bills or shaping the first tax cut in sixteen years...
...Too many freshman and sophomore congressmen expect Gingrich and the GOP leadership to organize their issues for them rather than do the initial work themselves and let the leadership catch up with them...
...The whiner hadn't bothCheer up...
...And to have laws enacted, rather than vetoed, conservatives must await a new president...
...But what would have happened then...
...Richard Nixon, liberal bete noir and anti-Communist pursuer of Alger Hiss, went to Washington and settled for détente, wage and price controls, and more Great Society...
...Instead, their plot fizzled as soon as it saw the light of day...
Vol. 30 • October 1997 • No. 10
