Can Republicans govern?

...Beyond this negative message, however, the electorate's voice was inarticulate or incoherent...

...Differences in turnout certainly defeated Mario Cuomo, for example...

...After 1994, the Democrats have compelling reasons to reaffirm their commitment to what Chesterton called America's "romance," the belief that no one must aspire to be more, or endure to be less, than a citizen WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers University...

...This year, Democrats lost across the electorate, Jews and African-Americans excepted...

...Diane Feinstein beat Michael Huffmgton...

...above all, as Democrats everywhere reminded each other, Oliver North lost in Virginia...

...The voters chose divided government as a remedy for unproductive government and effectively asked formore ideological posturing, although that is probably the last thing they had in mind...

...Democrats suffered major losses among voters at middle levels of age, education, and income...

...A very high percentage of the citizenry holds that government doesn't work and can't be trusted, but this hostility—especially toward Washington—does not bespeak any particular confidence in market forces or the dynamics of private life...

...A good deal of the turn to the right in 1994 is also a rebuke to relativism and to cultural elites, and to that extend, Newt Gingrich is right: the results of the election are an affirmation of the decencies that Democrats will ignore at their peril...

...Immigration—an issue that helped reelect Republican Governor Pete Wilson in California and Democrat Lawton Chiles in Florida—typifies the more general truth that Americans, as Michael Sandel observes, are "haunted by the fear that we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives...

...In recent years, however, the party has often seemed less interested in upholding majority rule than in limiting it in favor of the rights of minorities and other favored constituencies— no different, in this respect, from Republicans, the apologists for the rights of property...

...Both parties will certainly advocate and try to take credit for some form of welfare reform, but insistence on "workfare," for example, entails providing the work as well as the daycare and other services needed to make it feasible...

...Voters expect government to be responsible for the economic and social future, and they cast their votes, above all, for policies that can reduce their sense of vulnerability...

...upward of 70 percent of the voters, the polls tell us, have never even heard of the Republicans' "Contract with America...

...But Gingrich and his allies will have to take care not to overplay their hand: the decencies, for most Americans, include broad tolerance, and the voters in Idaho, sweeping the Democrats out of the statehouse, also appear to have rejected a measure limiting gay rights...

...Both parties, in this sense, have developed an elitist strain, which explains why so many Americans are attracted by the doomed allure of a possible third party...

...And attending to the malaise of the culture presumes a government with considerable responsibility for the reconstruction of the moral order...

...Bill Clinton, to a substantial number of Americans, is less a boy from Hope than a man from Yale...

...6 The falling off was serious among men, but Democrats also lost some support from women, and Hispanic defections were also notable...

...Yet the Democrats did not lose ground to the Republicans as a party...

...Even his reduction in the deficit was successfully distorted by Republicans, so that most Americans believe that the deficit has increased...

...Quality jobs are scarce, and some 25 percent of us expect a relative or close friend to become unemployed over the next few years...

...I don't know where they are going," former Republican senator Howard Baker said sensibly, "and I don't think they know where either...

...the Clinton administration's happy-talk about those statistics only made it seem out of touch...

...As I read the data, Republican gains in Middle America offer the best explanation for the debacle of 1994...

...But...if we do not address their feelings, they may develop a tendency to savage our institutions...

...The election of 1994, however, is more mood than mandate, and the political future is uncomfortably up for grabs...

...Voting was a tad higher than expected, about 39 percent of those eligible, and Republicans got more of their supporters to the polls...

...The voters indicated some willingness to try Republican policies, particularly as a check-and-balance to Clinton's, but Republicans will get it wrong if they read the returns as an endorsement of laissez-faire...

...Americans think that something is fundamentally wrong with the economy, all the good numbers to the contrary...

...Resentment was the order of the day, at least among the part of the electorate that tipped the scales...

...International competition is a constant threat, while pell-mell, we are being asked to reshape ourselves to the measure of half-mysterious technologies...

...Similarly, the voters' desire for effective measures against crime or to strengthen families point toward government and not away from it...

...For Democrats, 1994 should be a "call to arms," just as Doris Kearns says, but they will need a clearer recognition of their real strengths and weaknesses...

...There were scattered consolations: some Republican newcomers, like Olympia Snowe in Maine, have real quality...

...And by championing NAFTA, Clinton allied himself, however wisely, with forces threatening the social world of Middle America...

...But even Chicago voters, who used to know better, turned away from Dan Rostenkowski, and too many first-rate public servants, like David Price in North Carolina, were rewarded with defeat...

...Since Clinton's neoliberalism plays down any appeal to class conflict and cultivates corporate support, it is not entirely surprising—though it is certainly arresting—that half of the respondents in one poll identified the Democrats as the party of "the rich...

...GOP ideologues like Bill Archer of Texas cherish dreams of doing away with the income tax, but the same Montana electorate that sent Republican Conrad Burns back to the Senate also rejected a proposal to limit the state's graduated income tax...

...And Democrats did relatively well with younger voters, confirming a shift away from the trend of the Reagan years...

...For a long time, most Americans have been working more and getting less...

...Issues played a remarkably minor role in the election...

...Diane Feinstein led Huffington among voters at the bottom, but also the top of the income scale...

...Over the next two years, the Republican majorities in Congress will jockey for position against Clinton and the Democrats in the hope of turning this year's gain into a permanent majority...

...Democrats, the targets of anger, also suffered from the disappointment and indifference of many potential supporters, and the one clear verdict in 1994 was against the party's stewardship since President Bill Clinton took office...

...69 percent of upstate registered voters, but only 46 percent of those in New York City made it to the voting booth...

...And such perceptions are magnified by the belief that Clinton's vacillations, his verbal affirmations to the contrary, reflect the relativist-to-nihilist strain of the cultural elite...

...the balance of party preferences remained about even...

...President Clinton's policies, the crime bill partially excepted, have not done much to address the concerns of Middle Americans directly...

...Historically, the Democrats have been the American party of equality, devoted to the belief that the majority has the right, within the limits of nature, to control its own political destiny...