Politics

...Initiative campaigns across the country went well for conservatives...

...In Virginia, Republican Jim Gilmore won the governorship with 57 percent of the vote by promising to abolish the state's onerous personal property tax on the first $20p00 of each automobile...

...Had she campaigned on a second tax cut she would have won by a Gilmore-like margin...

...Louis, Missouri, turned down a sales tax hike for a light rail system...

...Dick GROVER G. NoRQuisT is president of Americans for Tax Reform...

...Orange County, Florida voters defeated a sales tax hike that would have raised $z billion over ten years for schools and roads...

...Jerry Weller and Indiana Rep...

...Conservatives had many reasons to be pleased by Whitman's narrow win...

...John Carlson, a KVI radio talk show host and founder of the Washington Policy Institute, points out that both initiatives were written to win in Washington state by activists prepared to replicate them nationwide...

...54 January r 99 8 • The American Spectator At an election-eve rally for Beyer, Clinton said taxpayers who wanted their car taxes cut were "selfish...

...New York Rep...

...It means redistricting in the year z000 will take place under a Republican governor, and it deprives the New York Times of an opportunity to pronounce the GOP dead in the Northeast...

...Tax reform advocates point out that eliminating the marriage penalty moves the country closer to a single-rate tax...

...But she prepared no second act...

...But unlike Vitaliano, Fossella signed the pledge against raising taxes and reminded voters that Assemblyman Vitaliano had voted twenty times to raise a total of $8 billion in new taxes...

...Charles Grassley sailed through the House and will pass the Senate this spring...

...Forced to go along with last summer's tax cut, Bill Clinton balked atattacking the IRS, scrapping the tax code, or eliminating the marriage penalty...

...Y7 become the Northeast's Jesse Helms: a fine regional GOP leader with no ability to run nationally...

...Next day, party activists stood outside northern Virginia polling places silently holding up the Washington Times's front-page headline: "Clinton Labels Tax Cuts 'Selfish...

...Denver citizens voted down a tax increase on phones, 70-27...

...He broke even among the other 89 percent of Virginians...

...In keeping with the House leadership's promise to offer a tax cut every year the GOP controlled Congress, Illinois Rep...

...David McIntosh introduced legislation to abolish the Marriage Penalty Tax...

...Republicans also introduced legislation to abolish the entire IRS code by 2002—forcing Congress to come up with a replacement—and GOP Reps...

...E lection Day 1997 saw Republicans win all four big races, victories that bode well for the GOP in 1998 because of the way they were won...

...Whitman won nothing by betraying her promise to support school choice in Bret Schundler's Jersey City, or by refusing to pledge not to increase taxes in her next term, or by trashing property rights in the name of greenness, or by moving to Dick Gephardt's left on abortion...

...Tax-cutting Republicans left the Democrats in the dust because the Democratic Party's special interest infrastructure—teachers unions, government workers, big city machines, welfare recipients and managers —will never allow the Democrats to cut taxes as much as Republicans can...

...What went unremarked is that Democrats could no longer attack Republicans as the despoilers of Medicare —their central attack message of 1996...

...They lost on issues...

...George Pataki and Sen...

...Polls seemed to back them up, showing that voters saw the Democrats as equally good on taxes...

...Colorado taxpayers voted down a proposed five-cent tax increase on gasoline by 6o-4o...

...Instead she lost 6 percent of the electorate to Libertarian and Conservative candidates...

...The party picked up seats in the lower house as well, leaving it three short of majority control...

...Why 1998 is going to be a Republican year...

...Within two weeks he backed down from his veto threat...

...Gilmore united the entire Republican coalition...

...Senate hearings highlighted IRS abuses...

...In a letter to donors last September zo, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Martin Frost made it clear his party was treating the Staten Island race as a dress rehearsal for 1998...

...Fully 33 percent of self-identified conservatives voted against Whitman...

...Speaker Gingrich became the 218th co-sponsor, guaranteeing majority support in the House...

...Your immediate support [for Vitaliano] will bring us one seat closer to giving President Clinton a Democratic House," Frost wrote...

...The tax issue is the soft underbelly of the welfare state...

...Charlie Rangel said on October 8, 'We have decided this is not Staten Island's race, this is not New York City's race ...this is a national contest...

...November ended with fewer than zo percent of House Democrats willing to back their president on free trade...

...Armey of Texas and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana began a series of debates across the country on the flat tax and retails sales tax...

...Yet pro-life, pro-gun Republican Vito Fossella won with 62 percent of the vote, in a district where one of three households has a union member...

...Attacked by Beyer for being pro-life, Gilmore won 51 percent of all women and 57 percent of white women...

...For Republicans, the lessons of Election '97 come down to three: the national GOP retains strength in the northeast, taxes remain a powerful issue Democrats can't compete with, and the Reagan coalition is alive when a candidate respects all parts of the coalition...

...Instead, she's44 Whitman's become another Jesse Helms: a fine regional leader who can't run nationally...

...And Whitman won only 46 percent of women in New Jersey (five percent fewer than pro-life white male Jim Gilmore...

...Voters in eleven western Pennsylvania counties rejected a sales tax hike to pay for football and baseball stadiums...

...Washington also turned down a "gay rights" initiative 6o-40...

...Robert Portman and Iowa Sen...

...Unlike the ungainly budget deal, Weller-McIntosh is welcomed by both supply-siders who recognize it as a cut in marginal tax rates on middle-class families and pro-family activists who oppose the present tax on matrimony...

...Al D'Amato when they run for re-election next fall...

...Clinton publicly said that "fast track" would win in a secret ballot—meaning Democratic congressmen support free trade but fear reprisals from Big Labor...

...Only a few months earlier, many were saying that Republicans had surrendered the tax issue in striking a budget deal with Clinton...

...Bill Clinton raised $600,000 for Beyer at one event, and Al Gore raised $500,000 at another...

...In 1993 Giuliani ran on the Liberal ticket as well...

...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Happy Days Are Here set events of November '97 have set the stage for Republicans to win enough House, Senate, and gubernatorial races in November '98 to secure majority status for a generation...

...At present, two single people earning $30,00o each and living together pay less in taxes than a married couple paying higher rates on $6o,000...

...Three years before the end of his second term he campaigned for four candidates as a popular president and all four lost...

...They agreed to a smaller tax cut in return for Democratic support for the sort of Medicare reforms they had denounced in 1995 and 1996...

...As Bill Clinton signed the tax cut, gleeful Democrats thought they'd robbed the Republicans of their silver-bullet issue...

...The American Spectator January 1998 55...

...Reminder number 317: Selling out to the left will leave you distrusted by your former friends—and still get you kicked in the teeth by your enemies...

...In New York, Rudy Giuliani was reelected mayor by 57-41, the first such Republican since Fiorello LaGuardia in 1941 and the first to be elected outright as a Republican...

...Reform legislation co-sponsored by Ohio Rep...

...When the Democratic candidate Don Beyer ran ads attacking Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, Gilmore did not flinch...

...He went head to head with the union bosses and lost 161-41 in his own caucus of House Democrats...

...Clinton won as a new Democrat in 1996, but he is apparently alone...

...Democrats ran Eric Vitaliano, a pro-life, pro-gun self-described conservative assemblyman...

...Whitman had two strengths...

...The labor union bosses have taken over his shrinking party...

...Add in Beyer's personal wealth, and it's clear the Democrats were well funded...

...The contest for Susan Molinari's Staten Island seat was particularly instructive...

...She wasn't a machine Democrat and she kept her promise to cut income taxes...

...Christie Todd Whitman won re-election in New Jersey with only 47 percent of the vote, besting an unknown local Democrat by only 7,000 votes...

...A Republican New York mayor, by the way, will make it much more difficult for Democrats to steal votes against Gov...

...His crime-fighting was important, but note that much of Giuliani's advertising highlighted his success in cutting taxes...

...Republicans who think they can neutralize a Democratic plan by agreeing to spend $1 billion, say, on education soon learn the Democrats have upped the ante to $2 billion...

...Murray Sabin, a pro-life libertarian, won five percent, and Conservative Rich Pezzullo one percent...

...As a result, religious conservatives, who make up ii percent of Virginia voters, went on to vote ten to one for Gilmore...

...Both Republicans who feared the budget deal tax cut was a loser and Democrats who hoped it was a winner overlooked one fundamental truth: Democrats can never be outbid on spending and Republicans can never be outbid on tax cuts...

...Republicans were also elected attorney general and lieutenant governor, giving the GOP the tie-breaking vote in the state senate...

...In a union district, in New York City, the Democratic Party and the unions couldn't win...

...The Democratic Governors Association kicked in another $25o,000...

...It keeps an estimated 4,000 patronage jobs out of the hands of the state's Democratic machine...

...Her veto of a ban on partial birth abortions outraged Catholics—but didn't keep local feminist and pro-abortion activists from endorsing her opponent...

...By a resounding 71-29, Washington state voters defeated a "reasonable" gun control bill that would have mandated trigger locks and gun safety courses...

...On October 19, Vitaliano adviser James McMahon said in the Washington Post, "Like what Gettysburg was to the Civil War, what happens in Eric's district is going to be a sign of what will happen in next year's elections...

...And the Virginia state house seat once held by Thomas Jefferson was won by a young conservative black Republican, Paul Harris...

...The Whitman race stands as an indictment of moderate Republicanism as a political strategy...

...By early November the Republicans had reclaimed the tax issue with a vengeance...

...Not only did the GOP win all the major off-year elections and recapture the all-powerful tax issue, but it saw the other party further weakened when House Democrats denied "fast track" trade authority to their own president...

...The usually adept Bill Clinton was caught off guard and began defending the IRS and threatening to veto PortmanGrassley...