Hold It

We here rigorously adhere to our now on eight month conviction that the Republicans will hold majorative serve come November 7th, but in the interest of full intellectual enclosure we will now preemptively analyze the post-elective ramifications of a supposed Donkey ascension.

We know what the Burros would believe such a victory to mean, and as is almost always the case these days (and years) it has very little or nothing to do with Reality.

When, in 1992, Bill Clinton achieved the first of his two Ross Perot-aided Presidential victories with a whopping 43% of the tally, we were immediately privy to his first official act of shamelessness when, in his Inaugural address, he uttered the utterly fatuous line “The vote was close, but the mandate was clear”.

Having run in large part on the need for amorphous “change” (“to what?” was never posited or addressed) and a middle-class tax cut (does not this slate ring any of today’s bells?), Clinton misrepresented and misinterpreted his “mandate”, wasting no time in dipping far too deeply into his imagined pool of political capital, instead increasing taxes substantially and delineating “change” by siccing his blushing bride Hilary on the nation’s health care system.

On the Way Out?

The results were hardly surprising, and now the stuff of electoral legend. The very next opportunity the populace had to head to the polls, they ensconced the Republicans at the head of both tables for the first time in forty years, where they have remained until at least Tuesday a week.

Bill Clinton learned his lesson, and never again braved Liberal legislative waters.

Should the Democrats take control of one or both Houses this go ‘round, we will undoubtedly be again privy to just this sort of pronounced legislative overreach. Despite the vast majority of Donkeys in competitive races running as Moderately as possible, and the current Burro leadership’s avowals to keep the post-elective agenda minimal, the fractious Liberal base will be quickly making victory margin calls on their entire panoply of single issue stock, and their purchased pols will have no choice but to again nattily come to heel.

Even on the signature issue of their discontent, the Iraq War, their passes at what would ostensibly be an alternative are just as, and in fact more unpopular than what the President and his compatriots prescribe us continuing to do.

I Wouldn't ...

(And do not procure the story being fed the Press that pseudo-Moderate Steny Hoyer will challenge Nancy “The Lift” Pelosi for the Speakership; this is but another duck of the real deal Liberal raft on which we will all be floating should the Burros rise; their Base will simply not stand for such a move towards Moderation.)

And just as Clinton had no room for the sort of legislative gymnastics in which he wished to engage then, so too now will the Democrats find their Capitol confines far too unspacious. Today’s Donkeys are running on even more “Not Them” nothingness than did the High-Chair President, and this does not lend itself to grand governmental schemes.

As we have seen with the repeated false starts and dry runs of Howard Dean’s Democrat National Committee with its promises of the unveiling of the Great Donkey Agenda for this year’s flight of electoral fancy. They will at any cost avoid demarcating that for which they stand, because they know it is light years removed from that for which the American constituency will vote.

Contrast that with on what Newt Gingrich and the Boys and Girls of House Prom ‘94 ran. Without hesitation, without reservation the Republicans codified with the Contract With America (CWA) the ten things they promised to bring to a vote within the subsequent session’s nascent one hundred days.

Elephantary Something, Rather Than Today's Donkey Nothing

Contained therein were substantive and specific rules and policy changes and legislative proposals, amongst them tax cuts galore, a balanced budget amendment, the line-item veto and tort reform. Once given the majority, Republicans had the platform on which they ran upon which to build going forward.

These same Republicans now face Minority re-banishment for deviations from the ideological policy positions that put them into power twelve years prior. This entire election, just like that of 1994, is being played on Conservative terms. The American people remain enamored with the tenets of the Contract, and seek now to punish the Party who once articulated but have now abandoned them.

Bereft of any like CWA-esque specificity, the Democrats will be frozen in Congressional amber, and they unveil any facet of their Liberal legislative litany to their own tremendous detriment.

The Ostensible Democrat Majority

And they know this. But there is no Bill Clinton Third Way-er in their midst; they have no choice, nor can they resist, simply being who they really are.

Thusly, the Democrat rise to power, should it indeed occur, will be very short lived.