Reply #5: Easy

[wyldwolf]

Bill Clinton squeaked into the White House in 1992 with 43% of the popular vote.

But won with an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, which is how presidents are elected.



Clinton was a proud member of the Democratic Leadership Committee, a group of Democrats whose strategy was to embrace traditional right-wing causes

No, the DLC's strategy was to move the party back to the center to make it viable. Like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo said, most people on the left get their information about the DLC from other people on the left. Your post is a shining example of that.

Since that time, have the Democrats continued to control the Presidency and both houses of Congress?

What you are attempting here is a fallacy of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, something is assumed to be the cause of an event merely because it happened before that event.

Your implication is, as has been repeated on DU many times, that the DLC caused the Democrats to lost both houses and the presidency. But no study has ever concluded that. On the contrary, evidence points away from that conclusion.

Three things were at play in 1994 that caused the losses:

1. The Democratic party of the 70s and 80s and grown corrupt. The House Banking scandal is a fine example.
2. Americans were increasingly distrustful of the Government in general, and, most importantly,
3. The Democratic party had moved left out of the mainstream and became the party of special interests.

The House Banking Scandal is a prime example of the corruption that was running rampant in Washington in the 70s and 80s, culminating with the Democrat’s losses in 1994.

An article in the Boston Globe took up the issue of Democratic losses a week before the last presidential election. When a party holds power for too long, Adrian Wooldridge, reporter for The Economist, said in the article, “it grows fat and happy, it also grows corrupt.” The classic example, he pointed out, is the Democratic Party of the 1970s and `80s, which, spoiled by generations of congressional power, “became a party of insiders and deal makers without any sense of the principles they stood for and eventually collapsed” when they were turned out in 1994.

Philip A. Klinkner, author of “Court and Country in American Politics: The Democratic Party and the 1994 Election,” presents a very interesting and expansive theory concerning the major Democratic losses in 1994 that Wooldridge touched on. Klinkner explains the circumstances surrounding the 1992 election provided ample evidence of a radically changed political environment. Several observers have commented on the growing volatility of the electorate since the late 1980s (Greider 1992; Phillips 1990, 1993, and 1994; Germond and Witcover 1993; Greenberg 1995). By most accounts, this phenomenon reached a new high in 1992, as voters expressed growing disgust with the federal government, elected officials, special interests, and politics in general, and a greater willingness to support outsider candidacies, even such diverse figures as Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot.

By the early 1990s, distrust of the government, especially the entrenched power (that would be the Democrats) was evident among much of the public. In 1964, over 70 percent of the public said that they could trust Washington to do what was right most or all of the time; by early 1994, only 19 percent expressed similar confidence (Phillips 1994: 7). In 1964, when asked, “Would you say the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all people,” nearly 40 percent more people agreed with the latter than with the former. In 1992 that sentiment had reversed itself, with 60 percent more people believing that the government was run for the benefit of special interests than those who believed it was run for the benefit of all. (Stanley and Niemi: 169).

As the party of governmental activism, the Democrats were bound to suffer from the rise of popular cynicism toward government. At the same time that Bill Clinton was winning the White House, voters preferred having “government cost less in taxes but provide fewer services” to having “government provide more services but cost more in taxes” by 54 to 38 percent (Milkis and Nelson 1994: 395).

The more common explanation for the 1994 Republican Revolution, though, is that liberal Democratic ideals — or at least the way they were presented — no longer resonated with the majority of Americans. According to Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Century Foundation, the danger for the dominant party isn’t ideological bankruptcy but ideological drift. “Certainly you can make the argument that, if a party’s far enough away from the mainstream, if they don’t lose they don’t get enough impetus to correct their behavior.”

This was no better exemplified than by Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan, a liberal policy, which support for collapsed, which set back his presidency and figured in the Democrats’ loss of control of the House of Representatives in 1994.

Soon after Clinton took office in 1993, he promised health insurance for millions of Americans who had no coverage. But before long, the plan was a shambles, derailed by concerns that it would cost too much and create a huge new bureaucracy. “People have not gotten over 1994 yet,” Karen Pollitz, the project director for the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, said of the Clinton plan. “President Clinton tried to fix everything at once. It was not well received. And not only that — the Democrats got turned out at the next election.”

Another example was the assault weapons ban - another liberal piece of legislation passed by the Democrats against the advice of many. Some in Washington even warned that it could cost the Democrats the House in 1994.

Now, just for the record, I’m a supporter of both universal healthcare and keeping assault weapons off the streets. But just as a matter of fact, those are two issues thought by the public to be left/liberal issues

So, technically speaking, Clinton’s attempt to enact left-liberal policies in his first two terms, along with the already existing dustrust and corruption, partially contributed to the Democrat’s downfall in 1994. A two decade long move to the left by the Democratic party - capped off by the failed healthcare plan and an unpopular healthcare plan - brought us down, not your assumption that that DLC policies did it. Clinton didn't enact DLC policies until AFTER 1994. It was Clinton’s centrist/moderate policies that got him re-elected in 1996 and gave the Democrats gains in the House in 1998.

In 1938, Republicans gained 81 House seats running against Franklin Roosevelt. Again In the mid-term election of 1942, the Democrats lost 44 seats in the House of Representatives. Did we lose for being too liberal?

George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis suffered huge defeats in their 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 presidential runs. Where was the DLC?

In contrast, the Republicans won control of the Senate in 1981 and retained it for six years - until the midterm elections of 1986 when the Democratic party picked up 5 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate to regain power. Interestingly, this was the first election cycle after the DLC was formed in 1985. The Democratic Senators elected and who gave the Senate back to the Democrats included moderates Barbara Mikulski (a participant in the DLC's National Service Tour), Harry Reid (who recently said Democrats have to "swallow their pride" and move toward the middle), Conservative Democrat Richard Shelby, DLCer Bob Graham, DLCer Kent Conrad, and DLCer Tom Daschle.

If the Democrats gain seats in this November's election, will it be because voters love Democratic ideas? Or because the Republicans have self-destructed? What will this mean when a fresh group of Republicans runs in 2008?

It will be both, but mainly because Republicans have self destructed. Elections are always referendums on those in power.

(Extra credit question: what exactly did Harry Truman mean when he said that "Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time?"

He was referring to the Dixiecrats, who broke from the Democratic party on racial issues. He also had some choice words about the leftwing of the Democratic party, who abandoned him for Henry Wallace. He said he was glad to have one without the extreme leftwing bloc of the party. (Truman: Years of Trial and Hope)