WHAT DID THEY DO TO DESERVE THIS?
Mark Steyn says the Republicans will
make Congressional gains despite their Washington leaders
New Hampshire IT'S BEEN, as they say, 'politics as usual'. In New York, Republican Senator Al D'Amato called his opponent Chuck Schumer a `putzhead', prompting howls of outrage from aggrieved Democrats, with the exception of Ed Koch, who pointed out that, technically, being a `putt' isn't as bad as being a 'schmuck'. In South Carolina, Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings, invited by Republican Bob Inglis to sign a 'Con- tract for a Courteous Campaign', instead dismissed him as 'a goddamned skunk who can kiss my fanny'. In Michigan, Democrat Geoffrey Fieger asserted that Governor John Engler was `the product of miscegena- tion with barnyard animals'. In California, in the parking lot of Ralph's grocery store in Santa Ana, Republican Bob Doran gate- crashed a photo-op for congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, who, with an impressive forcefulness for such a perky Latin cutie, responded by whacking Battlin' Bob in the solar plexus.
And then there's Tennessee's Senate District 15, where, on Tuesday, voters will find just one candidate's name on the bal- lot. The dynamic of the race changed on Monday 19 October, when incumbent State Senator Tommy Burks was found dead with a single bullet-hole in his fore- head, in the cab of his truck, not far from the pumpkin patch on his hog farm in Dripping Springs. On Friday, his Republi- can opponent, Putnam County Tax Asses- sor Byron (Tow Tax') Looper, was arrested and charged with Senator Burks's murder. 'We feel real comfortable we've got the right person,' says Sheriff Butch Burgess. Under Tennessee law, a dead man cannot be listed on a ballot, but a man charged with a felony can. However, Mr Looper is unlikely to be giving any vic- tory speeches from his gaol cell. Republi- cans have urged citizens not to vote for their nominee, the Democrats are organis- ing a 'write-in' campaign for the State Sen- ator's widow — in other words, by writing her name on the ballot form, you can get her elected to her late husband's seat.
One State Senate race in Tennessee is not of any great significance and Low Tax Looper would seem to be an obvious fruit- cake. But then according to the main- stream media, so are most other Republi- cans (see Newt, Jesse, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who in an effort at sympathetic outreach to gays, suggested they just need treatment, 'like kleptomani- acs'). Indeed, it's tempting to see the sad end of Senator Burks and the incarcera- tion of the County Tax Assessor as a para- ble of Republican strategy: you think you've got the Democrats in your sights, you blast away, but, when the dust clears, you're the one in the dock and the Dems are a shoo-in for re-election. In the sixth year of a presidency, the non-White House party usually makes electoral gains. When that sixth-year president has done you the favour of confessing to oral sex with an intern barely out of her teens, lying under oath, lying on videotape to the American people and leaving his DNA on a cocktail dress for FBI crime-label analysis, any barely competent party should be able to clean up at the polls. Unfortunately, the Republican party rarely rises to the level of barely competent.
Earlier this month, it was the Democrats who were in trouble. During the House debate on impeachment they had to figure out a line that would neither demoralise core supporters nor turn off swing voters. So they came up with a hypocritical amendment solemnly proposing to restrict the inquiry to Monica matters and wrap it up before New Year. The GOP should have called their bluff. After all, unlike . with rings on her fingers and rings on her ears, nose, lips, and . . . Watergate, most of the investigating has already been done: everyone agrees on the facts, they just dispute whether they're impeachable. Besides, it's likely that Ken Starr will submit additional reports on the First Lady, Travelgate, Kathleen Willey and the mysterious disappearance of the cat, etc., and, when he does, the House can easily vote to extend the inquiry. In the meantime, by signing up to the Democratic amendment the Republicans would have dealt the President a body blow almost as powerful as Loretta's to Battlin' Bob: instead of splitting along party lines, the motion to subject Bill Clinton to only the third impeachment inquiry into a president in US history would have passed by 430 votes to 5 — 'non-partisan' enough even for the most portentous network anchor- man.
Better still, such a damning vote would have given the Republicans a stronger hand in the Federal budget negotiations. President Clinton made no secret of the fact that he was threatening to shut down the Federal government, as he did in 1995 negotiations. Conversely, the GOP leader- ship made no secret of the fact that they'd agree to anything rather than let him stick it to them again: Newt and the other jelly- fish were terrified of getting the blame for another government shutdown, as they did with the last one. But, after a 430-to-5 vote on the impeachment debate, it's Mr Clin- ton who'd have caved first, for fear he'd be seen as a petulant discredited president prepared to inflict paralysis on Washington as a last desperate 'partisan' act. Instead, predictably enough, he rolled all over Newt's wussies — a word the nearest equivalent of which would, I suppose, be something like `nellies' — in a 4,000-page, $520-billion pork bonanza of a budget 'deal' that nobody in Congress except the four guys who brokered it had a chance to read before they voted it through. Only after- wards did they discover that it contained, for example, a $750,000 appropriation for grasshopper research in Alaska and $6 mil- lion for the Robert J Dole Institute for Pub- lic Service and Public Policy at the University of Kansas. Is either a good idea? Who knows? Maybe the Bob Dole Centre for Senatorial Self-Aggrandisement could scrimp by on 750,000 bucks and the Alaskan grasshoppers could use the whole 6 million. As Mr Dole himself likes to say 'Whatever.' Even the modest Federal rollbacks of the 1994 Gingrich revolution were reversed. Thus, the mohair subsidy is back. The mohair subsidy originated in the early Fifties, when Congress worried that in future wars there might not be enough uni- forms to go round. True, even the snappily accoutred US military doesn't go off to wage war in mohair suits, but the subsidy was originally for wool and, well, mohair is also kinda warm and fuzzy, so what the hell, that got subsidised, too. Now, 110 years after it was triumphantly scrapped, the mohair subsidy has been quietly slipped back in, this time in the form of extrava- gant zero-interest loans.
But, unless you belong to the apparently all-powerful mohair lobby, why vote for these guys? If this is what it means to have a Republican Congress, what's the point? It's time for Lott and Gingrich to 80,'declared the Boston Herald — and who can argue? The Republican leadership has sat around waiting for the so-called 'other shoe' to drop in the Clinton scandals, but in the meantime the only shoes dropping round Washington have Republicans' feet of clay in them. The latest conventional wisdom is that on Tuesday the GOP will Pick up maybe a couple of Senate seats and perhaps a handful of House seats less than any self-respecting political party would expect to get facing a normal lame- duck, second-term president, never mind a compulsive pants-dropping perjurer. Needless to say, Mr Clinton and the Democrats will be able to spin such a mod- est Republican victory into a humiliating defeat and a sign that the county wants to move on'.
But hold up: we're not just electing a Congress on Tuesday. Go back to the late Tommy Burks, a Democrat and five-term State Senator in Tennessee. Mr Burks believed in tougher sentences, harsher Prisons and victims' rights. He was °PPosed to abortion. Two years ago, he sponsored a bill mandating the dismissal of schoolteachers who present the theory of evolution as fact. I'm aware that in Britain evolution is generally accepted as fact, but over here it's just one of several competing theories: according to a recent poll, 58 per cent of Americans want schools to be required to teach Biblical creationism alongside Darwinian evolution. I can't say I disagree: the rise to the top of Clinton, Lott and Gingrich would surely demolish any faith in the theories of natural selec- lblon• Anyway, in the Tennessee Senate, Mr Turks prospered as a tough-on-crime, anti- abortion creationist: that's what it means to be a Democrat in rural Tennessee. The political reality outside Washington is that the vast bulk of the country elects Republicans of various stripes or conserva- tive southern Democrats like the late Tommy Burks. Seventy per cent of Ameri- cans now live under Republican governors: °ft Wednesday morning, they'll be in charge of seven of the eight most populous states. The exception is California, where, barring a last-minute upset, Democrat e Davis seems likely to win. In the Sev- attes he was chief of staff to 'Governor Moonbeam' Jerry Brown, ditzy New Age trailblazer and Linda Ronstadt's boyfriend; today, Mr Davis trumpets his 1,etnam record in every speech and, on drinte, has outflanked his opponent by hnee. taring 'Singapore is a good starting what it terms of law and order.' That's n at it means to be a Democrat in La-La t „&-and days. To compensate the oss • mthese California, the Republicansfor could take the Governor's mansion in Maryland for the first time since Spiro Agnew, and Georgia for the first time since 1872.
A president can bomb Sudanese aspirin factories and sell out Balkan peasants, but his impact on the lives of Pennsylvanians or Texans is far more circumscribed. When it comes to electing politicians who affect how you actually live, Americans overwhelmingly prefer Republicans. There are now two dominant forces in US government: on the one hand, in Washing- ton, there's a Democrat-led national movement, dragging feeble Republicans along in its wake, that specialises in pork- barrel pandering and some pointless ges- ture politics; on the other hand, out in the real world, there's a Republican-led locally based movement, dragging Democrats along in its wake, that produces all the genuine innovations on crime, education and health care. Come Tuesday, these are the guys with the coat-tails: Republican governors in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Okla- homa and Texas have an average lead over their opponents of 40 per cent. In tight Congressional races in those states, that may be enough to propel a few more Republicans to Washington. In any case, the Republican Governors loathe the Republican national leadership as much as anyone: they've demanded a meeting with them after the election to press for a more coherent message and they're determined, after the Dole/Kemp Beltway-loser ticket of 1996, that in 2000 the Republican nomi- nee will come from their ranks.
So I disagree with current predictions of a 'status quo' election. In 1996, the polls consistently underestimated Republican support: Mr Clinton was supposed to have an 'unassailable' 20-point lead; in the end, he scraped by with a minority of a minority (the only poll that came close to getting the result right was a British one, Reuter's). This time, refusal-to-respond rates have gone as high as 67 per cent (the pollsters are loathe to discuss this: it's the one subject on which they refuse to respond), which could mean several things but, if nothing else, that we should pay less heed to them. Ross Perot has recently declared his belief that the President is on drugs, and he still has a few motivated Per- otistas out there. Combine those with local factors and I foresee the following: a GOP gain of maybe ten states legislatures, 15 House seats, and Senate seats in Wiscon- sin, Kentucky, Illinois, Nevada, California and Washington, offset by possible losses in North Carolina and New York.
Hey, what do I know? Only this: that, whatever the outcome on Tuesday and, regardless of whether or not they deserve it, there'll still be more Republicans in the House and Senate than at any time since Coolidge.
Previous page
