Submitted by Seton Motley on November 12, 2006 - 8:50am.
Presented with a GOP ideological vacuum, the Democrats fill it with one of their own; or 2006 is not 1994
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The Opposition |
Republicans have seen the enemy, and it is them.
The Elephants have spent the last six years gift wrapping Majority status for their Donkey counterparts by behaving in a decidedly unConservative manner; now that electoral Christmas morning has come and gone, ‘tis time to analyze the ramifications of the looming Donkey ascension.
We know what the Burros believe this victory to mean, and as is almost always the case these days (and years) it has very little or nothing to do with Reality.
The just transpired election, like that of 1994, was played almost entirely on Conservative terms. |
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.
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What Have We Unwrought? |
The results were hardly surprising, and now the stuff of ballotory 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 remained until this just passed Tuesday.
Bill Clinton learned his lesson, and never again braved Liberal legislative waters.
When the Democrats take control of 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 who ran as Moderately (nay Conservatively) 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.
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I Wouldn't ... |
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 ran on even more “Not Them” nothingness than did the High-Chair President, and this does not lend itself to grand governmental schemes.
As we saw with the repeated false starts and dry runs of Howard Dean’s Democrat National Committee with its never-fulfilled promises of the unveiling of the Great Donkey Agenda for this year’s flight of electoral fancy. They at any cost avoided demarcating that for which they stand, because they know it is light years removed from that for which the American constituency would 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.
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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 are now returned to Minority exile for deviations from the ideological policy positions that put them into power twelve years before. The just transpired election, like that of 1994, was played almost entirely on Conservative terms. The American people remain enamored with the tenets of the Contract, and seek now to punish the Party that 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.
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The 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 be, thankfully, very short lived.
