Our divided nation
Connolly, Peter
Peter Connolly Bill Clinton and the Two Nations THE CONGRESSIONAL election is now mercifully over and the daily barrage of negative ads a dimming memory. But it should be remembered that in...
...Democratic candidates occasionally talked about a "patient's bill of rights" but ignored those without sufficient money to attain the status of "patients...
...The Republicans, burned by their failed attempt to carry out their program in 1995 -1996, pursue symbolic "social issue" votes and hold Clinton judicial appointees hostage, while leaving the basic structures of government intact and indulging fully in the joys of pork-barrel constituency politics...
...In the summer and autumn the Asian economic crisis almost became a world crisis...
...This is not to say there DISSENT / Winter 1999 n 9 are not still some southern white liberals, black and Jewish conservatives, Massachusetts Irish Republicans, and even Mormon Democrats...
...Their leaders, such as Senator Ashcroft and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, are determined men who seek no approval from what used to be called the respectable media, unlike their predecessors such as Dole, Bush, Reagan and Nixon, who worried about what the eastern press and national networks thought and said about them...
...The main reason why politicians could and did ignore genocide in Kosovo this year, or Rwanda in 1994, or the grim continuing realities of race and class in this country, is that our media are happiest when they can cover politics like a sports event...
...But these deep divisions shape the nation's politics almost free of analysis by journalists, with the honorable exception of a few eccentrics like Kevin Phillips...
...However, the bad news for Democrats is that this moment may soon pass...
...Yet attitudes among the half of the voting age population that troubles to vote in presidential elections and the 36 percent of the eligible electorate that made it to the polls in November have not been so intractably divided since the heyday of intense party allegiance in the thirties and forties...
...Blacks the same age voted 91 percent to 9 percent Democratic...
...Thus none of those matters was given the attention it would have received if the media treated politics as if it were about things that mattered...
...The failed 1868 attempt by House and Senate Republicans to impeach Andrew Johnson was part of the deadly 1856-1876 struggle between the Republican Party and the white South over the DISSENT / Winter 1999 n II place of black Americans in the life of the nation, a struggle that had produced four years of actual war and a subsequent reshaping of the constitutional order...
...Similarly, the 1974 ouster of Richard Nixon might not have occurred if Nixon had not had a uniquely polarizing role in the momentous political struggles of the previous twenty-eight years...
...But the media missed what really underlies the conflict between the president and his adversaries, for that struggle is profoundly ideological, gendered, ethnic, racial, regional, 8 n DISSENT / Winter 1999 religious and, above all, partisan in nature...
...But the attempted impeachment of Johnson was an integral part of the most serious internal struggle in which this country has ever been engaged...
...Catholics and Jews...
...As the Republicans learned to their evident surprise this year, getting one's party members to the polls comes to matter as much or more than scattershot advertising, which may only serve to stir up the other party's core voters...
...And the Democratic left remains marginalized and ignored...
...It is precisely those partisan allegiances that have been replicated in the Congress and country in the impeachment debate...
...But it should be remembered that in a rational political system there would have been much to discuss this year...
...We might remember that millions of rural Americans were won for the New Deal not by its cultural style but by rural electrification and agricultural price supports...
...For activist conservatives determined to demonstrate that they are still a force to be reckoned with, the millennial year will be Armageddon...
...But they seldom mention that the parties are now largely made up of very different types of people, a fact corroborated by data from the last two elections...
...There was real and upredictable internal division only among electorally volatile independent voters, among whom close elections are decided...
...Questions of principle, such as those involved in the debate over abortion rights, are immediately reduced to disputes over tactics and political effects...
...In the immediate aftermath of the election it was generally believed that the Republicans lacked the stomach to go through with an impeachment resolution, and would settle for some kind of censure of the president...
...These were issues weighty enough to warrant mention in a national political campaign...
...He had sent out his vice president to assault liberals in the same terms...
...Ideologically flexible, tactically adept, possessed of a burning desire to win and of a campaign staff capable of exploiting every weakness shown by adversaries, Clinton was a candidate perfectly attuned to the media's coverage biases...
...Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass concluded that Johnson had to go because he had tried to obstruct every Reconstruction measure intended to help the newly freed slaves and protect the rights of southern Republicans, black and white...
...The quadrennial presidential "horse race" is the classic instance of this tendency...
...The media scorn ideas, preferring instead to focus on personality and campaign quality...
...The media occasionally note that Democrats and Republicans see this matter and other political issues through different eyes...
...T]heir [Great Society liberals] arrogant programs have failed, their corrupt values are bankrupt and their days are numbered...
...Clinton held 84 percent of Democrats, Dole 80 percent of Republicans...
...This may, however, underestimate once again the partisan imperative...
...Peter Connolly Bill Clinton and the Two Nations THE CONGRESSIONAL election is now mercifully over and the daily barrage of negative ads a dimming memory...
...It is also instructive that of the thirty-one Democrats in the full House who voted with the Republicans on opening the impeachment inquiry on October 8, fourteen were southern whites, almost half of the thirty-two southern white Democrats left in the House...
...If the House Judiciary Committee majority defies expediency and votes for one or more articles of impeachment, it will suddenly become extraordinarily difficult for other Republican members of Congress not to do the same thing and Democrats will also feel renewed pressure to state their positions once and for all about the constitutional dimensions, if any, of the evidence gathered by the independent counsel...
...They also came to the correct conclusion that it would be better for the party last November to fight the Republicans on impeachment rather than to surrender to them...
...However, among "likely voters," 56 percent of the Republicans believed strongly that the president should be impeached, while of the Democrats, 77 percent "felt strongly" that the president should not be impeached...
...In 1998, the Christian right sought, unsuccessfully, to increase the Republican majorities in Congress, while providing special help to Republican candidates, such as defeated Senate candidate Rep...
...Voters with family incomes between $15,000 and $30,000 cast 53 percent of their votes for the Democratic candidate...
...Democrats (37 percent of voters) stayed with their party by 89 percent to 11 percent...
...White Protestants...
...In the present Congress, all psychological pressures conduce toward party solidarity...
...And, my friends, the sun is setting on the last son of the 60s, Bill Clinton," Ashcroft declared, bringing the cheering audience to their feet...
...Since 1992, the Democrats have lost 56 House seats, going from 267 to 211, and 12 Senate seats, going from 57 to 45...
...The pro- and anti-Clinton alignments almost perfectly replicate the fissures in the "political nation" that have been growing wider for the past twenty years...
...However, other than taking account of the drama of Senator Russ Feingold's re-election battle, made difficult by his refusal of PAC money, candidates and the press ignored the issue...
...In 1974, it was of huge importance to the ultimate outcome that House Judiciary Committee Republicans such as Caldwell Butler, Larry Hogan, and Tom Railsback voted for one or more articles of impeachment against President Nixon...
...The ostensible grounds for impeachment, Johnson's alleged violation of a law forbidding the dismissal of congressional appointees, including military officers, was relatively unimportant, though hardly trivial when the South was under military occupation...
...Their votes made impeachment thinkable...
...Hardly...
...L IBERALS SHOULD hardly be complacent in the wake of the 1998 election...
...And politicians did give them occasional perfunctory notice...
...Of the sixteen Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, five are black, six are Jewish, and virtually all are liberals with safe seats...
...Consciously or unconsciously, the Democrats imitated Republicans during the Iran -Contra wars of 1986-1992...
...W ITH A sharply divided electorate, voter turnout takes on a new and disproportionate significance...
...It may also be the case that Democrats benefited from a strong turnout among pro-choice women horrified by the murder of Dr...
...In a sense, the Lewinsky affair, with its inverse ratio of passion to content, has been well suited to this cultural and political moment...
...Crucial to Bill Clinton's stunning ascent in national politics was his pitch-perfect understanding of this...
...The contrast with past presidential impeachment controversies is striking...
...The militantly anti-Clinton twenty-one-member Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee is (with one exception, recent addition Mary Bono) made up entirely of white Christian men, ten of whom are from the states of the Old Confederacy...
...Only two House Democrats—retiring Rep...
...In such an atmosphere even moralistic moderates like Joseph Lieberman thought long and hard before taking any action that would further empower the Republican leadership...
...Again, the Republicans managed to hold the House because of their narrow edge (52 percent to 48 percent) among independents...
...DISSENT / Winter 1999 n 13...
...Mobilizing their adversaries and countering their appeal are still the most urgent political tasks liberals face...
...voters with family incomes over $100,000 voted 54-38-6 for Dole, despite his sometime pose as an embittered populist...
...As of January 1999, the Demo crats will hold seventeen governorships, and there are no national figures among Democratic governors...
...The upshot...
...If liberals can't talk to people in the exurban "edge cities" now transforming American life about what will improve their lives, then we have and deserve no political future...
...John Ashcroft (R-Mo...
...A GAINST THAT background, how ultimately weightless current party conflict is...
...Cautious congressional Democrats, even those with no love for Clinton, may have remembered the fate of Richard Nixon and the Republicans in 1974 and 1976...
...Hispanics, in reaction to Republican-backed anti-immigrant ballot initiatives in California, gave 72 percent of their votes to Clinton...
...All politically sentient Americans, whether they live in Boston or Boise or Birmingham, have access to the same television and cable networks, Internet magazines and other informational Web sites, and national print media...
...In such a mix, what the historian Joel Silbey has called (in the nineteenth-century context) the "partisan imperative" counts for much more than arguments over constitutional law...
...Whites over sixty voted 60 percent to 40 percent Republican...
...Linda Smith in Washington State, who were drawn from their ranks...
...Many of the greatgrandchildren of those who marveled when the lights went on sixty years ago now need health insurance and cannot purchase it for an affordable price...
...The causes and remedies of Asia's shocking drop in living standards, its continuing effects in countries such as Indonesia, and the threat it still poses to the rest of the world are critically important political topics...
...In the dark times of the Lewinsky war, Bill Clinton was spared the death of a thousand cuts that would have come from repeated calls for resignation or impeachment from congressional 10 n DISSENT / Winter 1999 Democrats...
...They believe, however, that Republican setbacks in November were not due to voter rejection of their ideas but rather to betrayals of conservative principle by an accommodating Republican congressional leadership...
...The huge floating blocs of ticket-splitting centrists that gave Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan their landslide victories (while in the latter two cases electing at least one House of Congress of the opposite party) may now be gone...
...To choose one example of many: on September 30, as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to vote on whether formally to commence an impeachment investigation, a vote later decided on strict party lines, the Washington Post reported that among the general public 52 percent of those polled felt "strongly" that the president should not be impeached and an additional 14 percent also believed that he shouldn't, albeit less strongly...
...This was immensely helpful to both Clinton and the Democratic party, which was able plausibly to brand the drive for impeachment a partisan effort...
...If the Republicans do go forward with impeachment, one would also hope that finally the political struggle between (and to a lesser extent, within) the parties would be where the media focus would be, and not on rehashes of the Lewinsky-Tripp relationship and the other mad ephemera of the Monica and Bill story...
...In political terms, we are now indeed two nations, whose composition can be read in the nation's congressional alignments...
...There is now a spreading agricultural depression, alleviated by a bipartisan congressional retreat from strict freemarket principles...
...Tip O'Neill and Robert Michel could have a drink or play a round of golf together...
...I T is AN authentic paradox that at a time when the national media are more numer ous, influential, and pervasive than ever they are also essentially powerless to influence the political allegiances and attitudes of most Americans...
...At present, if Minority Whip David Bonior and former Speaker Newt Gingrich are in the same room together it is wise to hide all sharp objects...
...Union households voted for Clinton by 59-30-9...
...Both parties, though locked in mutual antagonism, actually pursue a politics of caution and temporary advantage...
...who has already been endorsed [for president] by five promi nent leaders of the religious right and has re ceived financial support from coalition chair man Pat Robertson-launched a vigorous as sault on President Clinton...
...government, the Korean War, and finally Vietnam...
...Very interesting,except that it might have been happening on Mars for all the attention it got...
...On September 25, the New York Times reported that 43.4 million Americans still lack health insurance after six years of prosperity—and the number is increasing...
...The results were similarly revealing in their polarized clarity...
...They have not gotten the message that impeachment is passe, would deem Bill Clinton's forced exit from the the presidency to be their first great victory on the national stage, and will pursue it ardently...
...In 1974, when Republicans sealed Nixon's fate, interparty comity to some extent still existed...
...White Protestants, however, cast 53 percent of their votes for Dole, and Michael Barone estimates that among evangelical white Protestants Dole beat Clinton by three to one...
...He had called Sam Rayburn and Harry Truman "traitors," though ostensibly only to the "high principles of the Democratic Party...
...In 2000, the presidency, both houses of a closely divided Congress, and the power to shape reapportionment in the state legislatures, will be at stake...
...For example, among all men, Dole won a plurality with 44 percent to Clinton's 43 percent and Perot's 10 percent...
...In 1992, there were 29 Democratic governors, including such formidable politicians as Mario Cuomo in New York and Robert Casey in Pennsylvania...
...It is, in short, ultimately about something serious...
...Had he not been in the race, the presidential outcome would also have been agonizingly close...
...Was the GOP rewarded for those acts of courage...
...Senate Republicans smothered the campaignspending reform bill, which had passed the House as the consequence of a stunning and unexpected bipartisan rebellion against our system of legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions...
...Jewish voters gave Clinton 78 percent of their votes and Catholics 53 percent...
...Abroad, 1998 witnessed the Yugoslav army engaged in mass murder in the province of Kosovo, and the probable development of atomic and chemical weapons by North Korea and Iraq...
...But the national media were governed on most days by "all Monica all the time" considerations...
...The intelligent and affluent young attending elite colleges today might also be impressed by comparable moral seriousness...
...The Clinton-Dole-Perot "independent" breakdown was 43-35-17, while among all voters the breakdown was 49-41-8...
...However, the likelihood is we will once again hear much more about Lucianne Goldberg than Tom Daschle...
...Republicans (36 percent of all voters) voted for their own party's House candidates by 91 percent to 9 percent...
...It suffered crippling losses in the 1974 election largely because of abstentions among GOP voters and lost the presidency in 1976, four years after Nixon's forty-nine-state 1972 sweep...
...During the 1987 hearings, and during subsequent court proceedings and years of controversy, Republicans generally stood by Presidents Reagan and Bush, and denounced Lawrence Walsh as Democrats now denounce Kenneth Starr...
...It is no accident that there are still no Republicans in the Massachusetts congressional delegation and no white Democrats in the Georgia House delegation...
...In any case, we have no choice...
...Committee Democrats did not support the president because they independently concluded that his tangled web of deceit did not constitute a "high crime" or "misdemeanor...
...A President Ashcroft backed by a Republican Congress with veto-proof majorities would attempt to undo the American political order shaped between 1932 and 1980, as no other Republican president has ever done...
...The Democrats decline to challenge the new laissez-faire orthodoxy except where their omnipresent pollsters tell them that the industry targeted by a given piece of reform legislation is unpopular (tobacco and HMOs for example...
...But it is to say that there are too few people in those anomalous categories to matter much politically for the foreseeable future...
...If, however, senior and respected Democrats had called for the president's resignation, they would probably have forced that outcome and gravely damaged their party last November and for the next few elections...
...In political terms, for Democrats 1998 was a stay of execution, not a real comeback...
...For liberals, who detested him, the forced resignation of Nixon was a victory and a repudiation of everything he had stood for, and not just the Watergate break-in and cover-up...
...Their current focus is the presidential campaign in 2000 in which they plan to I2 n DISSENT / Winter 1999 be a dominant force in the GOP...
...In the meantime, we may still have to argue that Bill Clinton should not be impeached, which will seem an infuriating distraction...
...They quoted George Mason and Alexander Hamilton on impeachment as much as was politically useful, but they stuck with the president because, for mutually reinforcing cultural and political reasons, they preferred him to his adversaries...
...In its October adjournment frenzy Congress appropriated $18 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help avert future economic collapses in countries deemed to be in difficulty...
...This fundamental partisan division persisted throughout the campaign and shaped its outcome...
...What response to this challenge might be offered by an American left determined to matter in the political struggles of the future...
...In state after state, traditional Republican elites have had to accommodate politicized evangelical Christians or face the loss of their positions...
...But, as the Democrats learned in 1998, if we lose that argument we won't win the other ones either...
...On November 9, 1998, the Times again summarized the invaluable exit poll data, this time for 1998 House races...
...This fall, the Republican advance was unexpectedly halted, perhaps temporarily, by an appeal to Democratic Party allegiance and also to a lingering cultural nostalgia that partly underlies the refusal of many younger and middle-aged Democrats to condemn Bill Clinton too absolutely...
...53 percent to 47 percent and 79 percent to 21 percent Democratic...
...An election in which they out-organize the right is unlikely to be replicated any time soon...
...So it was for the Democrats in 1998...
...The uneasy centrism which this Congress reflects and which the 1998 election has ratified does not emerge from consensus, but rather from stalemate—and stalemates sometimes end...
...He had been in the thick of the political wars over the cold war, alleged communist subversion of the U.S...
...The Democrats also benefited from a truly astonishing degree of solidarity among normally factious members of Congress...
...The Democrats managed to surprise their adversaries by arousing in their voters a sense of antagonism toward Republicans comparable to what is usually found only in the Republican conservative base...
...It is thus fitting that his struggle during most of 1998 to escape the fate of Richard Nixon was covered as his last campaign...
...But there is perhaps one legitimate reason why the media have not thus far covered the Lewinsky affair as part of an ongoing conflict among politically antagonistic groups...
...As for the Republicans, they too were driven by the partisan imperative, sustained by a true moralistic hatred of the president on the part of their Christian conservative shock troops...
...The party that devises an intelligent, humane, and nonbureaucratic means of bringing it to them might win their allegiance too...
...Barnett Slepian and determined to vote against the enemies of legal abortion— such as Alphonse D'Amato...
...There are also millions of affluent baby boomers who still vote Democratic today against their strictly economic interests because they became persuaded as young adults that the Democratic party, with all its faults, was still the party of civil rights and civil liberties, of environmental protection and a restrained foreign policy...
...PETER CONNOLLY practices telecommunications law in Washington, D.C...
...UAW retirees and subscribers to Dissent and the Nation are not the most promising demographic cohorts upon which to build a political future...
...One factor other than political shrewdness may also have helped the Democrats to stay together during the past year...
...It is that the larger conflict, while undoubtedly intensely real and invigorating to those engaged in it, is more a debate about cultural symbolism than substantive political choices...
...While a few individuals (Oliver North, Elliott Abrams) were seriously inconvenienced by criminal prosecutions, neither president got impeached and the GOP sustained no serious political damage...
...Blacks were for the Democratic candidate by 84-12-4...
...Since the premature candidacy of Pat Robertson in 1988, the Christian right has been engaged in a long march through one institution, the Republican Party...
...Nixon was ultimately forced from office by the collapse of support for him among Senate Republicans such as Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater...
...That outcome certainly seems less likely than it did several months ago, but a few narrow liberal victories do not alter the fact that the Christian right has become a formidable force, which will now make every effort to learn from its tactical mistakes...
...On November 10, 1996, the New York Times summarized election day exit poll data that revealed an electorate divided along racial, gender, ethnic, regional, religious, and class lines...
...But virtually no candidate of either major party so much as mentioned the furious controversy over how best to deal with these rolling crises of world capitalism...
...65 percent to 35 percent Republican...
...Women swung the election to Clinton, giving him a 54-38-7 advantage...
...At this writing, the battle is far from over...
...There are angry Americans determined to bring this period of compromise to an end and take back what they consider to be their country...
...However, in the 1996 congressional vote, Republican candidates won 48.4 million votes and Democratic candidates won 48 million votes, which translated into the 228-206-1 edge the GOP held in the House until last November, when the Democrats picked up five additional seats.The Perot candidacy masked the basic fact that the 1996 electorate was evenly divided...
...Thomas Edsall, in the Washington Post, reports the following expression of good fellowship from the convention of the Christian Coalition: Sen...
...And it should not be forgotten that many liberal bastions have been lost and not regained in this decade...
...Southern whites voted for Dole by 56-36-8, while "eastern" white voters gave Clinton a 51-37-10 edge...
...Paul McHale of Pennsylvania and Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a Republican in all but name—called for resignation...
...The network analysts and other talking heads love arguing about winners and losers, media "buys," strategic successes and failures...
...Until this year, their success had been astonishing...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
