GOP's Current Position Mirrors Democrats' Spot In 1993

[Purveyor]

By Steven Thomma

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Republicans are starting to find themselves in the same kind of political environment that Democrats faced in the summer of 1993 - the year before the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Reverse the party labels and the circumstances are strikingly similar.

Now, as then with the other party, Republicans' ethics are under assault. Their opposition denounces their vicelike control as "arrogant." Their ambitious agenda risks overreach and public backlash. Their popularity is sinking. A unified opposition party is holding off until closer to the next election before offering its own agenda - thus withholding any good target for counterattack.

There's one major difference. Both parties have redrawn House of Representatives district boundaries to make their members safer. That makes it much more difficult than in 1994 to sweep the ruling party out of power in a single wave of voter anger. Also, Republicans have more than a year to improve their standing, plenty of time in politics.

Still, Republicans have cause for concern, and Democrats for optimism.

Link to entire article

[wyldwolf]

1. yeah, that's what I've been trying to tell people on DU...

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.

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."

[RobertSeattle]

2. Blowback is the damndest thing!

Yet another reason is it is so stupid for the GOP to push the Fillibuster issue - somedya the DEMs WILL be in charge of the Senate again - any maybe a whole lot sooner than they can imagine.