Class of '94: The Morning After

...Thanks to the good sense of the American voters, the worst have been weeded out...

...Mark Souder, one of the True Believers...

...As a former beat reporter, my hat is off to IOllian for a prodigious reporting job...

...The marriage was viewed as the official kickoff for Enid’s second and ultimately successful campaign for Congress...

...Ask anybody with any common sense and they will tell you that shutting down the government for three weeks in 1995 was a mistake, a big mistake...

...Maybe that’s why I welcomed the “Enid and Joe” and “We Got You Babe” chapters recounting the experiences of two of the more colorful members of the freshman class...

...Reliving the infighting over term limits and such arcana as “the Istook amendment” requires a special fortitude...

...Yet they are not immune to the gamesmanship of politics, and to the visceral need to win re-election...

...What makes these salacious details relevant is the common denominator of excessive and, as it turned out, illegally gotten money...

...We learn that Enid’s mother, whom Joe called the “Reich chancellor,” slept in her daughter’s bedroom during Enid’s first unsuccessful campaign for Congress to guard against any possibility that Joe might make an inappropriate advance...

...They flouted the old adage, followed by President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill, that political warfare ends at dusk when the cocktail hour begins...

...During the summer leading up to the ’96 presidential election, the GOP-controlled House passed a measure largely along party lines that declared English the official language of the U.S...

...The House also had to pass an exemption to allow certain Latin phrases to be used...

...It’s a little like being stranded on a desert island with two years’ worth of Roll Call, the earnest Capitol Hill biweekly that tracks the inner workings of Congress...

...Van Hilleary of Tennessee, an unmemorable legislator who is Killian’s main character, her “Everyman,” runs negative ads that accuse his Democratic opponent, a former defense attorney and prosecutor, of representing child molesters, drunk drivers, and “even a man accused of attempted murder...

...Ask one of the hard-core GOP freshmen, and you’ll get a different answer: It was their proudest moment...

...Enid Greene Waldholtz’s political career ended in a five-hour flood of tears after it was revealed that she had spent $2 million of her father’s money to win her congressional seat - a blatant violation of campaign funding laws...

...Dubbed by the media “Newt’s ninnies,” the freshmen were supposed to serve as Gingrich‘s shock troops...

...Songster Sonny Bono didn’t take the endless debates all that seriously, and he delighted in shocking his more sanctimonious colleagues...

...This is pure soap opera...

...Gingrich created me...

...They even said they would be happy to do it again,” Killian writes...

...Chief among them: “E Pluribus Unuml’ The irony was no doubt lost on the tone-deaf freshmen...

...Well, yes, Killian notes, that’s what defense attorneys do, represent people charged with committing crimes...

...Linda Kdlian, in her exhaustively reported book, The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?, observes that this class of lawmakers took “perverse pride in being called Visigoths...

...For the freshmen, it was big government and anything that smacked of foreign influence...

...Waldholtz suffers from grandiosity and proceeds to help Greene ruin her life...

...Class of '94 The Morning After Why the Republican Revolution didn't pan out By Eleanor Clift POLLS SHOWED THE WORDS most associated with them were “mean,” “extreme,” and “arrogant...

...Maybe it’s unfair to focus on a few bad apples in a freshman class as large as this one...

...He had done more than any single human being to create the Republican wave that captured Congress in 1994, but like a modernday Dr...

...they stayed to shake it down...

...Many of the freshmen had never traveled outside of the U.S., and they arrived in Washington with a rather provincial worldview...

...The freshmen blamed Newt Gingrich for losing his nerve, and the Speaker in turn threatened no fewer than four times to resign during those rocky months if the unruly freshmen did not fall into line...

...Talk about bad luck...

...Killian accomplishes her goal “to get inside their heads...

...The couple reveled in their extravagant lifestyle...

...Republican women House members complained to Gingrich about the anti-abortion agenda of the conservative freshmen, which had forced numerous votes in their ongoing attempt to curtail abortion rights...

...We are him,” said Indiana Rep...

...But what she finds there does nothing to alter the collective image of the ’94 GOP freshmen as a bunch of narrow-minded, partisan prigs...

...Killian intended her book to be a rounded and sympathetic portrait of a group of people swept into politics, almost accidentally, by the strength of their beliefs...

...Many of the freshmen refused to attend the White House Christmas party because of their intense dislike of President Clinton...

...New York Rep...

...Republican moderates took a lot of heat while the freshmen were riding high...

...I thought that reading this inside account of the freshmen, their hopes and dreams, would kindle some sympathy within me, if not for their cause, for their sincerity...

...But the government shutdown proved to be the turning point that derailed the vaunted Republican Revolution...

...Poor people aren’t our constituency,” one freshman nonchalantly explained as the Republicans axed programs affecting the poor while leaving corporate subsidies and tax breaks virtually untouched...

...But they were even more lethal because they were Gingrich with much less to lose,” says Killian...

...It is clear this is no longer about term limits,” Killian writes...

...He stiffed his own supporters at an election-night party, abandoned his congressional office during the transition, and ordered his staff to throw away all mail from constituents...

...The freshmen also tended toward isolationism, another trait that set them apart from their GOP elders...

...The freshmen she writes about are the antithesis of the calculating, compromising politicians who dominate the Washington establishment...

...Sherwood Boehlert was ostracized for standing and applauding in several places during Clinton’s State of the Union speech...

...An early debate to fulfill a campaign promise disintegrates into a power struggle...

...This is about pride and ambition, about coming out on top, about winning...

...When the couple married a year later, Utah’s political and religious elite turned out for the ceremony, which featured the same music used by Princess Diana and Prince Charles...

...Frisa was the sorest of losers...

...Even their pet boxer drank Perrier...

...And Joe Frisa of New York, who voted to repeal the assault weapons ban, was upset by a political novice, Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband had lost his life in a shooting...

...Living through their antics was bad enough...

...Wes Cooley of Oregon, who lied about his military service during the Korean War, was photographed giving the finger to members of the Sierra Club, a salute that didn’t go over well in the environmentally conscious state...

...After a particularly contentious all-nighter about foreign aid, Killian reports that a bleary-eyed Bono approached a small group of members on the House floor and declared, “I’ve never been up this late unless I was getting pussy.’’ Then there’s Enid Greene, a devout Mormon and rising star in Republican politics who hooks up with Joe Waldholtz, a political operative from Pittsburgh...

...But that didn’t deter the 73 Republicans elected in 1994 from their kamikaze mission to end government as we have known it...

...This is politics...

...It’s not her fault that what she found behind the scenes mostly amplifies what we already knew about the freshmen...

...Frankenstein, Gingrich‘s experiment had gone wildly awry...

...Rewarded by the special interests they protected, the freshmen raised so much money for their re-election that Ann McBride, president of Common Cause, remarked that they had “come to shake Washington up,” but instead ELEANOR CLIFT is a contributing editor of Newsweek and a panelist with "The McLaughlin Group...

...But with the Soviet Union no longer a threat, the search began for a new enemy...

...The freshmen made politics more partisan and more viciously personal...

...The abuse heaped upon them by the voters, the media, and their own leadership in Congress served only to spur them on to greater excesses...

...Foreign entanglements were regarded as a waste of money...

...Man cannot live by facts alone...