THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 24, 1996 TAG: 9604240009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
If a week is a lifetime in politics, a year must be an eternity. How else to explain the topsy-turvy shift of the past 12 months?
In April 1995, President Bill Clinton was deep in the doldrums. His administration was drifting. His clout with Congress' Republican revolutionaries was nil. His political nemesis, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was soaring.
In 100 days, Gingrich and his troops in the 104th Congress had pushed through the House every item in the Contract With America save term limits. Gingrich's promise to ``break up the Washington logjam, shift power back to the 50 states, break up all the liberal national organizations'' was looking less like conjecture and more like fact.
As New Yorker writer Elizabeth Drew chronicles in Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House, a recently released book, Clinton proved to be as adaptable as Hillary's hairdos, Gingrich proved to be as grating as a buzz saw, and Americans proved to be not yet ready for revolution.
Fast forward to mid-April 1996. Clinton, enjoying a comfortable opinion-poll lead, looks presidential as he circles the globe. Sen. Bob Dole, the presumptive GOP opponent in November, looks bumbling as he miscalculates in Senate action on the minimum wage and health care.
All of which, Showdown should remind us, may say nothing at all about what will happen when the voters go to the polls in November.
Gingrich-esque excesses aside, Republicans still enter the election cycle with a marketable philosophy. Most Americans have come to believe, partially at the speaker's prodding, that we are mortgaging our childrens' futures if we do not find a way to balance the federal budget. The sense that Americans are overregulated also runs deep.
However, what the past year has proved is that there is a limit to the change Americans desire. Women in particular, who disapproved Gingrich's performance by 2 to 1 in recent New York Times/CBS polling, are not ready to trade government safety nets for the whims of a sometimes-ruthless marketplace. Programs such as Medicare and Social Security mean much to women whose economic status is more precarious than that of men.
How Clinton and Dole balance the desires for smaller government and economic security may dictate who will be the next president. Six months remain - long enough for a politician to rise or fall, several times over. by CNB