THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 9, 1996 TAG: 9610090001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 95 lines
Less than two years ago, the consensus was that William Jefferson Clinton would not - repeat, not - be re-elected to the presidency. He was, just about everyone (including me) agreed, dead, dead, dead politically.
Hadn't the electorate - that is, far fewer Americans who could have voted in 1994 but a whopping majority of those who did vote - evicted Democrats wholesale from Congress?
Hadn't the electorate installed a slew of Republicans in governors' mansions and state legislatures?
Hoo, boy, hadn't a new day come?
And not a moment too soon. We Americans had watched crime rates soar, schools turn out armies of illiterates, out-of-wedlock birth rates skyrocket, infrastructure disintegrate - just what were we getting for our tax dollars?
Blue-collar jobs had been disappearing since the 1960s, devastating central cities. Then in the 1980s, droves of white-collar Americans lost jobs, health insurance and pensions. Unease spread among survivors.
All the while, the local, state and federal tax burden on middle Americans got heavier. The income gap and the wealth gap between the bottom 80 percent of Americans and the top 1 percent, top 10 percent and top 20 percent kept widening. Middle Americans no less than the poor lost ground.
Middle America is where the votes are. And as the 1980s slid toward the 1990s, middle America had identified the enemy: government. Expanding, self-aggrandizing, avaricious government. Since government was the Democrats' favorite thing, goodbye Democrats.
Government had kicked God out of the schools and invited in sex education. Government had slain the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and Randy Weaver's wife and offspring while trying to take away their guns - proving, once and for all, that real Americans needed all the guns they could get. When the feds burst through the door, talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy advised, shoot `em in the head. The National Rifle Association called federal agents ``jackbooted'' thugs.
The hated feds were on the run in 1994. So were the hated Democrats - all those liberal/welfarist/socialist/communist free-love, free-spending, homosexual-defending, criminal-befriending, legal-abortion-championing, reverse-discrimination-pushing, godless ``enemies of normal Americans'' (as Newt Gingrich said). The electorate routed congressional Democrats, whom Republicans and conservative intellectuals and talk-show hosts blamed for countless ills.
Whoopee!
Besides, there was the drip, drip, drip of Whitewater on the Clinton stonewall. Having captured Capitol Hill, the Republican 104th Congress dispatched congressional committees to dig with a will into the fetid Arkansas political swamp while a second Republican independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, sought evidence of lawbreaking by the Clintons with a zeal lacking in his sacked predecessor, Edward Fiske. Fiske had failed to discern wrongdoing by either the philandering, draft-dodging, dissembling, waffling, tax-increasing, wanna-be pot smoker Bill Clinton or his take-charge, lawyer wife who, back in Little Rock, had - wonder of wonders! - reaped a bonanza in the commodities-trading crapshoot and, in Washington, garnered scorn and ridicule for designing a bewildering, bureaucracy-burdened plan that purportedly would assure adequate, affordable health care for all.
On top of that were the administration's atrocious and seemingly unmerited booting and prosecution of White House Travel Office personnel, former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy's acceptance of favors from poultry magnates, the aggrieved Paula Jones' civil lawsuit charging the then governor of Arkansas with indecently exposing himself to her, and assorted other embarrassments real, exaggerated and cooked up.
Yes, Clinton was dead politically, as any fool could see, and a Dole-Colin Powell GOP ticket could count on a landslide win in 1996.
But like the decapitated chicken running around the barnyard, bloody Clinton had yet to keel over.
So how come opinion poll after opinion poll reports Clinton to be 20 points ahead of Bob Dole, the Republican contender for the presidency?
How come Republicans may lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives (though not the U.S. Senate) to the Democrats?
Well, if a year is a lifetime in politics, two years is eternity, and many who had looked to a Republican Congress in 1994 to shape up Washington reacted with alarm to GOP enthusiasm for eliminating, whittling or restraining the growth of federal programs seen as helpful to ordinary Americans and to the equal GOP enthusiasm for tax relief that promised to benefit the well-off more than everybody else.
Meanwhile, the economy - though not producing enough well-paying jobs - was creeping upward, brightening Clinton's re-election prospects. The Clinton shift to the center as the Republicans tilted more and more rightward (a tilt enshrined in the GOP campaign platform) breathed yet more life into the president's re-election bid. And a re-energized labor movement - private-sector, government and teacher unions - swung forcefully to the side of Clinton and congressional Democrats.
A Clinton triumph and some congressional gains by Democrats on Nov. 5 seem certain. But there is scant affection for Clinton or his party. The only decisive poll is on Election Day, and a 20-point win seems inconceivable. But these are interesting days because so many Americans apparently have concluded that Republican rule could be hazardous to their health and their pocketbooks. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB