Tuesday, November 16, 2004

 Just Around the Corner?

 

The networks had barely called Ohio for George Bush before political junkies started talking about 2008. Hillary or Edwards? Sunbelt or Midwest? A governor or another Senator? Would Bush’s second term be just the beginning of a generation of Republican sway?

Before either party gets too engrossed in where they’re going, it might be good to look around and see where they are, and where they’ve been. Starting a trip without knowing your coordinates is a good way to wind up going in circles.

From close up, the election looks like a near replay of four years ago: one candidate with a narrow popular vote lead, the other an eyelash away in the electoral college. Last time it was the Republican candidate who finished a close second in the popular vote but first by an eyelash in the Electoral College. This time the Republican won the popular vote, while the Democratic candidate won in the Electoral College–almost. A few votes’ change in Ohio, and it could be John Kerry picking his cabinet.

So wait till next time, right? A different candidate, props to people of faith, ask gays to soft-pedal same-sex marriage, and ‘08 could be the year the Democrats return to the head of the government and the Republicans return to the minority.

It could well happen that way. The Republicans could lose. The Democrats could win back the White House.

But history suggests that winning back the country will be a lot harder.

Of the last seven presidential elections, the Republicans have won five. Of the last ten, they’ve won seven. And one of the Democrats’ three victories, Jimmy Carter’s win in 1976, hardly counts. Weighed down by the burden of Watergate, the Nixon resignation and pardon, the Agnew resignation, an unelected president Gerald Ford still got forty-nine percent of the popular vote. Bill Clinton’s two victories were legitimate, but his accomplishments in office–like the booming economy, the elimination of the budget deficit, tough-love welfare reform, and the proclamation (premature, as it turned out) of the end of the era of big government–fulfilled campaign promises that Republicans had been making for years.

The Republicans’ run of the past thirty-six years looks a lot like the Democrats’ run of the thirty-six years before that. In the elections following Roosevelt’s defeat of Hoover, the Republicans mounted a breathtaking variety of presidential candidacies: a Midwestern governor, a wealthy former Democratic industrialist, a crime-fighting New York prosecutor, a sitting Vice President from a hugely popular two-term Republican administration, and an ideologically pure, choice-not-an-echo conservative.

Sometimes they came close–Nixon lost to Kennedy in ‘60 by less than a percentage point–and sometimes they were swamped, as Kansas governor Alf Landon was by FDR. But they all lost. And even the single Republican hiatus, Eisenhower’s two terms in the ‘fifties, were marked by such liberal grails as public school desegregation and the most liberal Supreme Court in history.

That Democratic run was in turn preceded by a period of more than seventy years and eighteen elections of which Republicans won all but four–twice to a minority president and once by less than a single percentage point.

These epochs are clear enough in historical retrospect. But at any point within their duration, their beginning and ending points are far from predictable. Herbert Hoover’s landslide victory in 1928 extended an era of Republican domination that had started with Lincoln. Four years later the Depression brought the Republican epoch to an abrupt end.

After LBJ’s victory in 1964, the second largest in history, it looked like the Democratic train could roll on forever. Just four years later, the Democrats were out and a new Republican epoch had begun.

So predicting the end of one of these epochs, including the one we’re in, is like the problem faced by religious fanatics predicting the end of the world: There’s no knowing when it’ll come, so you’d better be ready.

Nixon’s victory in ‘68, for example, was based in large part on relative ephemera, like the turmoil at the Democratic convention and the damage inflicted on Hubert Humphrey’s reputation by his term as Vice President. But it started a new Republican epoch because the Republicans were ready with a philosophy–law and order and a promise to cut spending on federal social welfare programs--that responded to (or exploited, depending on which side you were on) widespread insecurity. That small-government, tough-on-crime philosophy has sustained the Republicans ever since. Not just kept them in the White House, but in power: effective domination of public policy–setting the agenda and calling the shots.

The Republican epoch turns forty at the end of George W. Bush’s term, four years past the age at which the FDR-LBJ era breathed its last. Suppose the Democrats come up with the right candidate in ‘08, and the Republicans come up with the wrong one. Suppose that the other stars and planets are in alignment.

Will the Democrats be ready to take back not only the White House but the country?


4:54:33 PM    comment []