Visualize No Liberals

...Second Thoughts VISUALIZE NO LIBERALS BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN LARRY is A high-school teacher who lives on the farm his family has owned for a century and a half in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia...

...It said VISUALIZE NO LIBERALS...

...1994 Isn't Forever," the Times headlined optimistically after the debacle...

...Nobody wants to share the fate of Tennessee Senator Jim Sasser, who lost despite a re-election campaign that emphasized his closeness to the Bush Administration and his disagreements with Clinton...

...In 1994 the presence of a weak, widely mistrusted Democratic President to whose agenda Democratic members owed presumptive (if not, as many of them emphasized, actual) allegiance upset their usual campaign strategy by "nationalizing" the election...

...It seems unlikely that Shelby will be the last Southern Democratto jump ship...

...By running Congressional campaigns according to the maxim that all politics is local, however, Democrats retained control of Congress for decades after their Presidential majority crumbled, since no single candidate had to appeal to all those incompatible groups...

...Because the Democrats have occupied the Oval Office for only six of the last 26 years, those on the Hill could generally avoid criticism for their incompatibilities, and also survive mediocre leadership in both Houses, while Republicans had to run everywhere on a national agenda set by their President...

...A "foul frame of mind," a "sharp contempt for incumbents'' was overtaking the country...

...This year, contrary to liberal expectations, 55 per cent of white women voted Republican...

...No doubt...

...As has often been pointed out, Democrats dominated Presidential elections during the period when they could count on Northern interest groups, such as organized labor, blacks and big-city "ethnic" voters, plus the more conservative "Solid South," which voted Democratic for historical reasons...

...After the 1992 election, despite decades of Republican Presidential victories in the former Confederate states, Southern Democrats still held 12 Senate seats to 10 for the Republicans...

...Yet it can be plausibly argued that in both elections many voters thought they were choosing a smaller, more open and responsive government, and that after two years of the Clinton Administration they see Republicans as their only hope...

...the GOP may botch its chances just as badly as the Democrats did...

...A few days later another editorial warned readers that if they "parried" with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, "The headache will be a big one, and it will last for a long time...

...Whether it is up to the task remains to be seen...

...AS THE New Republic's John Judis put it in one of the more perceptive postmortems, "The Democrats increasingly resemble a rump version of the old New Deal and Great Society coalition, supplemented by some upper-middle-class suburbanites offended by Republican ties to the religious Right...

...The same old coalition produced nominal majorities almost continuously from 1930 to 1994, though the price was an incongruity among Democrats that often made legislating impossible...

...Two weeks before the fatal Tuesday the Times editorial page, guessing at what was in store, prophesied bitterly: "The day will not be long in coming when the same voters who reject them will cry out for public officials who combine expertise and humane impulses...

...Nationally, as a result of the South's defection, Democratic nominees have won popular majorities in only two of the 12 Presidential elections since Roosevelt's death...

...People who hold them are not necessarily either stupid or nostalgic for the 1950s...

...Usually they were spared the worst political consequences of their failure to agree among themselves by the fact that legislative deadlock could be blamed on conflict between a Democratic Congress and a Republican President...

...To the extent that Shelby's statement is correct, the Democrats will be a smaller, perhaps more cohesive party of the Left, heavily clustered along the northern coasts, with more than a passing similarity to the British Labor Party...

...In 1992 Clinton's election was widely described as a vote for change, a meaningless phrase unless specific changes are identified...

...The incumbents the Times listed were invariably Democrats...

...Even without White House political ineptitude this situation would have caused huge difficulties for Democratic candidates everywhere, but especially in the South, where Democrats still held a disproportionate number of seats and Clinton was detested...

...The result was a disaster that had been building for many years...

...Many questions have been asked in the past few weeks about the future of the Republican Party...

...Oddly, there have been fewer questions about the future of what was until yesterday the majority...

...Nor, if they did grasp it, would they necessarily have either the will or (given the number of potential allies who are now gone) a promising opportunity to wrench their party back to reality...

...ALTHOUGH THE WAVE of Republican victories washed through every part of the country, the continuing shift below the Potomac is much worse news for the Democrats than the destiny of a Harris Wofford or even Mario Cuomo...

...Seldom in history was the removal of apolitical party from power more predictable or less understood by its adherents...

...Will it finally bring the Democrats salvation, as many of them have been hoping for years, by running aground on the extreme demands of Jesse Helms or the religious Right...

...As November approached and things looked increasingly bleak, the news and editorial columns of the New York Times grew testier day by day...

...Coming to terms with what happened is now a matter of life and death, not for the Larrys who lost a battle but for the side that lost the war...

...The other was more sophisticated in its phrasing...

...Now, for the first time since Reconstruction, there are more Southern Republicans than Democrats in both chambers-14 to eight in the Senate, 64 to 61 in the House...

...After doomsday, many commentators continued to echo the Democratic line that the electorate was motivated by nothing more than cynicism, negativism, gullibility, anger at Washington incumbents, or (the most threadbare excuse of all) a failure of Democrats to communicate their achievements effectively...

...it illustrated better than anything else the bizarre world some prominent Democrats now inhabit...

...To White House strategists and their media supporters the Contract meant a return to Reaganomics, whose self-evident wickedness was an article of faith...

...But in 1992 Clinton, another Southern governor, carried a mere four Southern states in a three-way split and won a majority only in Arkansas...

...Last summer his pickup truck began sporting a pair of bumper stickers...

...Those voters' wishes may not be altogether clear or consistent with each other, but they represent an intelligible set of political attitudes...

...The same assertion has been repeated since this year's balloting, with many commentators wondering whether voters who could elect a Democratic President and then choose a Republican Congress two years later aren't hopelessly fickle...

...In parts of the country that are ideologically less consistent, Democrats may regain some of their strength in a few years, but it will be a cold day in Dixie before they reverse the trend there...

...One of them read simply OLLIE...

...In September Thomas Byrne Edsall wrote in the New York Review of Books, "It is not an exaggeration to say that Limbaugh, by making himself the favorite spokesman for the [Republican Party], has become the principal adversary of the President of the United States.'' Such explanations for the Administration's difficulties were on a par with Richard Nixon's dark fantasies of the early 1970s about a Jewish media conspiracy against him...

...Clinton ran in 1992 on a promise to expand rather than contract the Democratic center, but there seems no reason to think he or his intimates fully grasp the reasons for their party's rejection by so many voters...

...Encouraged by the White House, some sympathetic writers began claiming months before the campaign that Rush Limbaugh and other radio talk-show hosts, allied with the sinister forces of the Christian Right, were conspiring to destroy the well-meaning Bill and Hillary Clinton...

...From September on, the belief was that the Congressional Republicans' "Contract with America" was a blunder and would boomerang...

...Jimmy Carter briefly restored an almost-Solid South in 1976...

...This unstable Presidential majority took shape with Franklin D. Roosevelt's first election in 1932 and barely outlasted him...

...Without them and a powerful union movement in the North, he would have lost...

...When Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama announced the day after the election that he was switching to the Republicans, he declared that his old party no longer had room for a "conservative Southern Democrat...

...The possibility that much of the electorate thought these were issues, let alone that it really did not want the bigger, more intrusive and expensive government Clinton had run against in 1992 and spent the next two years trying to enact, never penetrated...

...Even with House Speaker Tom Foley's office furniture on its way back to the other Washington, many Democratic observers could not bring themselves to understand a loss that seemed an offense against the natural order...

...The Solid South began cracking in 1948, though President Harry S. Truman still carried seven of the 11 Southern states that year...

...To make the situation worse, much of the press complained, there were no issues, just sound bites about matters like crime, welfare, taxes, illegal immigration, and-a concept whose popularity drove many liberals blind with rage-Congressional term limits...

...Suggesting that voters compare Clinton with the Gipper was the political equivalent of playing Russian roulette with a machine gun...

...By squandering his opportunity as a self-proclaimed New Democrat to demonstrate that the Demo crats were capable of changing themselves-by failing to redefine liberalism away from a Great Society model that long ago lost its appeal-Clinton became a historic misfortune for his party, particularly in the region that used to furnish its most reliable support...

...in the House there were 77 Democrats and only 48 Republicans...

...Still, those pesky polls could be ignored only up to a point...

...But a long siege of Democratic denial, punctuated by hopeful noises about Truman in '48, will only compound the difficulties of learning how to count to 51 again...

...As all the world knows, American voters on November 8 denied Larry his first wish yet went a long way toward granting the second...

...The Democratic National Committee mailed out a fund-raising letter that insisted, "Despite the election outcome, polls show the President with a positive approval rating, and support for his policies remains high...

...Never mind that polls and referendums had for years found overwhelming public support for its main features...

...Having lost its traditional base, the party now depends on a much smaller base of urban minorities...