We lost! We won!
the weekly Standard We Lost! We Won! The election results can be described and explained. Their practical effect can be logically predicted. But beyond that, it's difficult to make much of what...
...If America is to be conservative, it should become so by deliberate decision, not by endlessly delayed default...
...His brave "revolution" is now associated in the public imagination with an obstinate and frightening attempt at Medicare reform...
...But should nothing much change these next two years...
...So they didn't make one...
...They remain near parity in the state legislatures...
...At some point soon, if their majority-party status is to be secured, congressional Republicans will have to recover their post-1994 confidence and go back to full-scale work...
...Under such circumstances, it is a tribute to the inexorable tidal pattern of partisan realignment that the Republican party in 1996 should have consolidat-ed—and in some cases expanded—its historic 1994 mid-term gains...
...The GOP's House and Senate finishes were better than average for a year in which an opposing party's president is reelected...
...It rings most hollow, and comes predictably loudest, from President Clinton...
...After four years in office, the Clinton administration has produced what is arguably the most conservative domestic politics since the age of Eisenhower...
...The president believes himself to be a quality historical personality...
...I was born in a summer storm to a widowed mother in a small town," the president said in his ridiculously self-dramatizing victory speech, and there is "no person in America tonight who feels more humble in the face of this victory than I do...
...Only this time, better...
...But beyond that, it's difficult to make much of what happened last week...
...The "vital center" of American politics (his phrase) remains, by bipartisan understanding, a few degrees to the right of current federal reality...
...Its House freshmen, overcoming the targeted demagoguery of an AFL-CIO advertising campaign, were returned to office at a betafter a status quo election, all talk of "mandates" rings hollow...
...Why not also let them stew a while in their own partisan juices...
...The Republican party has had a remarkably bad year in 1996, half or more of its wounds self-inflicted...
...A tempting prospect, no doubt...
...Bill Clinton cannot afford explicitly to acknowledge this truth, even as he is taking career-burnishing advantage of it...
...They will have precious little in the way of policy announcements to feed an irritable White House press corps...
...ik ter than average rate...
...Somehow, along the way, no one managed clearly to ask American voters for a direct and important decision about anything...
...For two years now, Clinton has offered to beat any ideological price on whatever the nation might desire, and having so devalued himself—and his party's creed—to make the sale, he now ful-somely praises his customers' wisdom...
...And an unsatisfactory one if it lasts much longer than that, in our view—unsatisfactory on more than aesthetic grounds...
...This year will melt seamlessly into next, most of the major players still in place—and in almost exactly the same relative positions...
...Introducing him Election Eve, Vice President Gore mentioned Clinton, absent apparent embarrassment, in the same breath with Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Wilson, and FDR...
...Speaker Gingrich is the most unpopular politician in America...
...Should the GOP, having more than survived the near-death experience of 1996, now bank its advances and sit quietly still while American politics flies a slow, semi-conscious path to conservatism...
...And the entire Republican enterprise has suffered for months under the public-relations weight of the Dole campaign, which managed to win just 41 percent of the popular vote...
...The rope-a-dope is a smart and appropriate tactical posture for the GOP the next six months or so...
...By the way, Mr...
...President, what about Medicare...
...But he is in no way humble...
...Such debates require the articulate, organized leadership of national political parties...
...it rings MOsT hollow, though, when it comes from clinton...
...Indisputably, Bill Clinton is a man with an eye for the main chance...
...We don't have to live in a world of confrontation," Speaker Gingrich observed, rather spiritlessly, after the election...
...Just as noisily...
...All year long, the two parties struggled mightily for control of the best-polling buzzwords...
...And for Clinton's reelection win, Gore announced with astonishing and unseemly cheek, "America is not just better off, it's better...
...No one is more responsible than he for our current politics of unmeaning...
...They will have no substantive agenda to guide them...
...Clinton, Gore said, carries "burdens of unimaginable weight...
...The president stays up "well after midnight" in the People's cause, "however difficult the challenge, however towering the obstacles, however long the odds...
...So the very goodness of the nation is certified by this election, the Clintonistas believe, and had Bob Dole become president, by logical corollary, our goodness would have been impeached...
...And the gaseous, souffle mandate Clinton claims for himself ("It is time to put politics aside, join together, and get the job done for America's future") is a barely disguised prescription for more of the same...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...As a revenge fantasy, this is undeniably delicious...
...Such decisions require debate...
...They will have burgeoning scandals and criminal investigations to worry about...
...Credit for the 104th Congress's most notable achievements—welfare reform and domestic-spending reductions, for example—has been partly stolen, infuriatingly enough, by the president...
...His new staff will be learning difficult jobs from scratch...
...Every child in America, he oozed, "deserves the main chance that I was given...
...Newt Gingrich, the antipode foil of the Clinton campaign, will return as speaker of a Republican House...
...Next year's Republican Senate majority will be larger...
...Bill Clinton is ostentatiously reshuffling his administration...
...Republicans retain 32 of the 50 governorships...
...Any significant near-term move to the left, no matter what, seems scarcely imaginable...
...Let's see what [the president] has to say and see what he proposes," Majority Leader Trent Lott proposed, on behalf of an incoming Senate that appears even more conservative in makeup than the House...
...All talk of "mandates" rings hollow...
...The products of self-government are supposed to be purposeful, not automatic...
...How, then, to explain the reelection, at the very same moment, by the very same voters, of what just yesterday Democrats called Bob Dole's brothers in darkness...
...And all things being equal, if nothing much changes, the normal electoral pattern, six years into a presidency, will produce a still more Republican America in 1998...
...And the Republican party, chastened by recent experience, unsure how to manage its ideological base, and thinly populated with attractive national spokesmen, now seems similarly inclined to lower its voice...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 10
