There has been a lot of argument over whether passing health care reform or letting it die would offer the most attractive strategy for Democrats. Norman Ornstein and Tom Mann really move the ball down the field by looking more closely at what happened in 1994:
Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party.
When I studied the results of my national surveys of public opinion one week before the Massachusetts special election, I felt a wave of panic--a strangely familiar feeling. The results showed that the public’s hope had given way to disillusionment; that Democrats had come to embody political gridlock and big spending; that conservatives were energized and Democrats demoralized; that the country was in revolt against elites. It was beginning to look like, gulp, 1994 all over again.
But Mrs. Clinton is the designated canary who brings the bad news. Or, rather, the good news... at least to the mullahs. She has now told everyone who will listen that the U.S. has no plans for a military strike against Iran. And, given the president's deeply ideological commitment to peaceful engagement with Tehran, there is no reason to doubt her.
It was Halloween 2001, and Kennesaw State freshman Nick Ayers was sitting anxiously in an Atlanta airplane hangar. A friend had recommended him for a campaign position with Republican state senator Sonny Perdue, who was mounting a long-shot gubernatorial run against Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes. The portly, middle-aged politician disembarked his Bellanca Super Viking and, as Ayers recounts the story, walked down the stairs holding a lid-less cup of coffee. Eager to make a good first impression, the nervous blonde teenager extended his hand for a firm shake.
WASHINGTON--Is there room in the Republican Party for genuine moderates? Truth to tell, the GOP can't decide. More precisely, it's deeply divided over whether it should allow any divisions in the party at all.
That's why the brawl in a single congressional district in far upstate New York is drawing the eyes of the nation. Conservatives are determined to use the race to prove that there is no place in the party for heretics, dissidents or independents.
Newt Gingrich, who in 2007 called bilingual education "the language of living in the ghetto" and in 1995 argued that bilingualism poses "long-term dangers to the fabric of our nation," has now launched a bilingual website, The Americano, to attract Hispanic voters to the GOP.
Republicans have a message for America’s senior citizens: President Barack Obama and the Democrats want to take away your health care. And if the polls are right, America’s seniors believe it.
In the latest attempt to prove that, while they might be at a nasty impasse on issues like health care, liberals and conservatives can find common ground on education policy, odd couple Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton will be hitting the road this fall, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to promote school reform.
Sometime after the release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, environmentalism crossed from political movement to cultural moment. Fortune 500 companies pledged to go carbon neutral. Seemingly every magazine in the country, including Sports Illustrated, released a special green issue. Paris dimmed the lights on the Eiffel Tower. Solar investments became hot, even for oil companies. Evangelical ministers preached the gospel of "creation care." Even archconservative Newt Gingrich published a book demanding action on global warming.
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95)
Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22)
Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95)
"Who's that gray-haired guy in there with the monkeys and the Kennedy?"
In early 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to President George W. Bush from the heart. The war in Afghanistan had been an astonishing display of U.S. strength. Instead of the bloody quagmire many predicted, CIA paramilitary agents, Special Forces, and U.S. air power had teamed with Northern Alliance guerrillas to run the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of their strongholds. As a new interim government took power in Kabul, Cheney was telling Bush that the next phase in the war on terrorism was toppling Saddam Hussein.
As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.
When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.
