OK, everybody yuck it up. Laugh all you want. Get it out of your system. Bill Clinton won another four years. Just think; four more years of lying, tax hikes, waffling and scandals.
But before you think that our country is turning into a left-wing utopia, get a grip. When one gets out of San Francisco, one realizes that this nation is still inherently conservative and that Republican power is growing.
Clinton beat Bob Dole by 8 percentage points, not exactly the landslide expected. What's more, Clinton and the Democrats couldn't take back Congress. Republicans lost seats in the House, but held their majority. The Grand Old Party even gained a seat in the Senate. This trend seems to say that voters just didn't like Dole the campaigner. The people do like what the Republican Congress and Bob Dole stand for.
The election marked the first time in successive elections that the GOP captured both the House and the Senate since 1928. This development has been written off by spinsters and the media as the voter's desire not to give Clinton a blank check. This is spin doctoring at it's best. Look at history. From the end of the '20s until 1994, for all intents and purposes, Congress was a Democratic institution. Voters had no problem giving a blank check to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman for most of their 20 years in power. The same could be said of the eight years of Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. After watching the Democrats screw up the House year after year, voters have more confidence in a Republican House.
The GOP's triumph in the House and Senate is all the more remarkable given the obstacles they faced during a nasty campaign. The Democrats framed the House debate by saying, "You can vote for us or for the prince of darkness, Beelzebub himself, Satan incarnate, Newt Gingrich." The voters not only voted for Newt in Georgia but for his principles throughout the nation.
Then there was organized labor. The AFL-CIO spent a staggering $35 million in scare tactics and lies to defeat Republican congressional candidates. Voters didn't buy it.
Voters didn't reject the Republican revolution of 1994. Though the final results won't be in until, at best, the end of the week, well over a majority of the freshman class of the 104th Congress will return to Washington.
Despite the Clinton win, the GOP also held its ground in America's state legislatures. Republican governors still outnumber their Democratic counterparts 2-to-1.
Bill Clinton couldn't even help Democrats in his own state. Republican Tim Hutchinson defeated Democrat Winston Bryant for a Senate seat in the president's backyard.
This conservative movement is even happening here in California. Voters took a logical look at affirmative action and said enough, overwhelmingly passing Proposition 209.
And if you don't believe that the nation is turning right after all this, look at Clinton himself. He moved his policy right to get re-elected. Over the last year, he signed the Republican-sponsored Welfare Reform Act. He then signed the Defense of Marriage Act, banning same-sex marriages. He was even working his way toward certain tax cuts. One gets the feeling that if he could run for re-election in 2000, he just might become a supply-side economics advocate.
The sound you just heard is a bunch or Republicans getting a good laugh.
[ Golden Gater - November 7, 1996 ]
All Rights Reserved © 1996 HTML by Steve Thoemke (sthoemke@nermal.santarosa.edu)