Gingrich Out

...Gay marriage lost on the ballot, even in Hawaii, and equal-rights ordinances protecting sexual orientation lost almost everywhere...

...If the Senate will be a better place for Lauch Faircloth's (R-S.C...

...On the whole, Democrats had a slight but significant advantage in an electorate dominated by temperamental conservatives...

...Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers University and is a frequent contributor to Commonweal...

...Reports in the media suggest that Russia is on the verge of collapse and that a return to Soviet communism is a cause for Western concern...

...It's my guess that this strategy, when conceived, seemed terribly clever: it allowed Republicans to dodge any too-public emphasis on the agenda of social conservatives, concerns which put off many moderates and independents...

...Gross Domestic Product fell 10 percent in September following an 8 percent drop in August, and the grain harvest is about 50 percent below last year's...

...Yeltsin fired his government and engaged in prolonged political warfare with parliament before appointing a new administration...

...And in Illinois, African-American turnout let Carol Mosely-Braun make a decent race...

...for Gingrich will mean a more pragmatic leadership in the House, but Dick Armey's (R-Tex...

...In that much, they're right...

...defeat means that he--a senator who never let a principle stand in the way of a good deal--will be replaced as chair of the Banking Committee by Phil Gramm (R-Tex...

...The financial crisis had immediate political repercussions...

...Of course, there are limits...

...The president loves to quote from the Book of Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish...

...or in Maryland, where voters in Baltimore made an easy winner out of the otherwise embattled governor, Parris Glendening...

...The leaders of the religious right argue that Republicans suffered, not because they were conservative, but because they had nothing to say beyond a few declamations about lower taxes, offering no moral or principled version of the public good...

...Americans expect, probably correctly, that, at least where public institutions are concerned, the country will be confronting the next century flatfooted, without the running start that might give democracy the chance to shape or govern the direction of things...

...Russia's inability to pay its debts (it owed 109 billion rubles in short-term notes and could repay only 37 billion rubles) resulted in effectual devaluation, inflation (consumer prices rose 38 percent in September), and shortages...

...And in California, Democrats won the Big Casino, electing Gray Davis governor--including a titanic majority among Latino voters--with the likelihood of controlling that state's redistricting after the census in 2000...

...Thirty percent of the population is reported to be living in povert y - r a t e s are higher in the countryside than in the cities-and the figure is growing...

...The president's missteps gave the Republicans a chance to tip the balance decisively in their favor, especially since they had so much more money than their opponents ("I thought the money was going to kill us," Dick Gephardt admitted in an election postmortem), and back late August, most commentators--me included--thought they would...

...For the country, the election is pretty much a wash...

...It is to be hoped that he, and both parties, can find more than rhetorical space for that teaching, here on the edge of the millennium...

...Second, having staked so much of the attack on the president's misdeeds, the Republicans did not do much of anything else...

...Republicans, of course, can take comfort--about as satisfying as an extra bowl of gruel--in winning gubernatorial elections in the other big states, and with some attractive candidates like the Bush boys in Texas and Florida, George Pataki in New York, and Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania...

...They think that Clinton is doing a "good job," but as a person, they regard him as flawed, contemptible, or both, and they also say that his leadership is wounded almost beyond healing...

...They managed, too, to unseat Senator Carol Mosely-Braun (D-Ill...

...responsible for what they saw as the inaction or extremism of Congress...

...This backfiring effect was particularly evident in relation to black voters, who tend to be protective about the president for all his vacillations, the strongest voice for racial equality to occupy the White House since L.B.J...

...Occasionally too, Republicans didn't put enough distance between themselves and the Right: in California, it almost certainly hurt Matt Fong's promising and very moderate Senate campaign against Barbara Boxer to have contributed substantially to a virulently antigay, militantly rightist PAC...

...Jeffrey w. Hahn THE NEW RUSSIA A work in progress he problems in Russia which the media have focused on (mostly since the events of Augus0 are serious, especially in areas of finance...

...Most voters feel that things are going well, for the country if not for their own households...

...They don't see any immediate crisis, but they do dislike HMOs, worry about education and Social Security, and fret especially about the quality and ~ t y of jobs...

...Partly because they--and even more, their conservative supporters-wanted the president's blood, they allowed themselves to seem partisan and extreme, even though most voters have consistently wanted the mess to go away...

...And Oregon, in the hope of increasing the number of voters, approved a proposal to hold elections solely by mail ballot, an idea with good intentions that will further privatize politics, eliminating one of our few public rituals...

...similarly, voters in Washington approved an annual inflation-adjusted increase in the minimum wage...

...The mood of the electorate made Gray Davis, who raises colorlessness to the level of an art form, into an easy winner...

...It was a major contributor to the Democrats' comparative success that union members made up 22 percent of the voters this year, as opposed to 14 percent in the disaster of 1994...

...How accurate is this picture...

...In Minnesota, "Skip" Humphrey, worthy but deadly dull, lost to Jesse Ventura, who is neither a dolt--the media aside--nor a statesman, but is certainly entertaining...

...There are plenty of reasons for Democratic celebration, of course: for the first time since the high tide of the New Deal, the party controlling the White House made off-year gains in the House of Representatives and Newt Gingrich, having set out to dethrone the president, ending by losing the speakership, although he may--Democrats hope--have presidential ambitions himself...

...absence, A1 D'Arnato's (R-N.Y...

...Since the president is always so plausible a talker, giving him a naCommonweal 9 November20,1998 tional forum was almost necessarily a bad calculation...

...Specifically, we need to see Russia as a work in progress, a society in transition...

...But the Republicans, especially because their constituency features ideological conservatives, made two crucial mistakes...

...Wall Street, after all, implicitly has been voting Democratic in presidential politics all year, applauding any turn of events in Clinton's favor...

...The problem, obviously, is that it left the Republicans looking empty--and worse, unpredictable-especially since a great many voters, with admirable good sense, did not hold Democrats responsible for Clinton's personal conduct and did hold the G.O.P...

...The impeachment hearings will be shuffled offstage as soon as Republicans can find some face-saving formula for doing so...

...Even more important, the dramaturgy of the videotape presented the president as the only human face, alone and beleaguered, defending himself against an intrusive, relentless, impersonal voice: it was a scene out of Kafka, making the president into a stand-in for Everyman facing power that is both invisible and malign, the dark nightmare of mass society...

...an ideological zealot so unattractive that it is said even his friends dislike him...

...In general, however, the year ended as it began, as a good election for incumbents...

...In the electorate's estimation, in other words, there won't be any bridges to the next century, particularly none that call for sacrifice...

...Most Americans are at least mildly comfortable, but they aren't happy...

...After all, conservatives had their successes in 1998: in Washington, one of the more liberal states, voters passed an initiative against affirmative action and defeated Grethe Cammermeyer, a highly visible, openly lesbian candidate for Congress...

...In the first place, although they knew the Lewinsky scandal was dangerous, they overplayed their hand...

...Turnout among African-Americans was critical in many states, notably in Georgia where they are 24 percent of registered voters but this year made up 29 percent of the electorate...

...Senator Russell Feingold's (D-Wis...

...They ran, essentially, as the anti-Clinton party, with no other visible issues...

...Their state of mind isn't quite the "contented apathy" that Mervin Field, the California pollster, suggests: in fact, their comparative prosperity only emphasizes the voters' sense that things could easily get worse...

...We need to put these difficulties, serious as they are, in a larger context...

...Contrary to their own expectations, Democrats did not suffer a net loss of seats in the Senate...

...At the same time, the Republicans' last-minute anti-Clinton blitz helped energize Clinton supporters who, even if they can't stand the president, like his enemies even less...

...challengers for the post of majority leader--Steve Largent (R-Okla...

...To help do this, it may be Commonweal | 0 November 20, 1998...

...And the Right can point to the victory of some of its champions, like the egregious Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho...

...But the religious right has an appropriate rejoinder...

...and they did hold onto the House, though in both cases by very small majorities...

...Moderate Republicans, beyond blaming their leaders, are already assigning responsibility to what they see as the party's too-close commitment to social conservatism...

...Substituting Robert Livingston (R-La...

...close call, after his principled refusal to accept outside contributions, is bad news for campaign reform, but Massachusetts and Arizona did vote for public funding...

...Republicans still got a large majority of religious conservatives, of course, but the Democratic percentage among such voters went up sharply, and sometimes decisively...

...is currently the most visible--are also conservative zealots, although more telegenic than Armey...

...Moreover, it was the wrong year to cold-shoulder the social conservatives, since Democrats, especially in the South, had been particularly active in recruiting candidates who champion a good many conservative values...

...But whatever their discontents, voters do not have, and surely are not hearing, any ~sion of change for the better, so that they get the shivers from any talk of rocking the boat...

...And probably influenced by wishful thinking, they badly miscalculated the effect of releasing the president's videotaped testimony...