November 11, 1998

Exit, Stage Right

At first glance, the billion-dollar elections of 1998 appeared more a market correction than a message. Then Newt jumped out the window--or was pushed.

Putting expectations aside, the election results were no disaster for Republicans. Sure, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, the ethics-challenged conservative Republican in New York, was corrected out of office after eighteen years of disgrace. Senator Russ Feingold, the Democratic campaign finance reform advocate in Wisconsin, survived a multimillion-dollar GOP carpetbombing, after he pledged to abide by strict campaign money limits. And the House Democrats gained five seats. But the Republicans, for the first time in 70 years, had won their third straight Congress, and they remained in control of the governor's office in 31 states (including the seven largest after California). With Governor George W. Bush's mega-win reelection in Texas, they also were in not too shabby a position for the next presidential race.

But the House Republicans wanted more. And if you're looking for the reason why House Speaker Newt Gingrich self-dethroned, it is this: conservative House Republicans assume that not only does a majority of America see the world precisely as they do, they believe that a super-majority of Americans share this vision; and these GOPers could not understand why, given this "reality," they did not command a greater share of the votes cast on Tuesday. Their thinking: it had to be Newt.

To be blunt: the conservative anti-Newties are nuts.

Hours before Newt popped his chute, in the face of a rising rebellion, Representative Steve Largent, an Oklahoma Republican, explained his challenge to Majority Leader Dick Armey by declaring that the Republican Party had struck an iceberg on election day and that it needed to toss overboard the crew of the Titanic. Iceberg? How melodramatic. The party was not sinking; it was treading water--but in a spot much preferable than where you find the Democrats.

The calls for Gingrich's head and his cowardly abdication comprise the biggest over-reaction in modern political history. It's as if the Republicans actually were convinced they were going to bag another 20 seats in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and that they are truly disappointed that did not come to pass. Perhaps Largent took too many tackles when he was in the NFL. He's a Christian conservative who's for outlawing abortion, and he wants his party to be as clearly pure right as he is. "Ideas, not polls," he said. But he's incredibly naive, out-of-touch, or silly, if he believes a party that does not shut up about banning abortion and bashing gays--that opposes raising the minimum wage and complains about environmental standards--can do much better than a narrow majority in the House and a commanding advantage in the Senate. Many of the views he wants his party to champion are not majority positions. Given that, he should be thankful the GOP is as strong as it is.

The Republican ingrates cannot agree on much beyond the source of their troubles: Gingrich. When Representative Bob Livingston, the clouty chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, announced he was going to run against Gingrich for Speaker--before Gingrich booked--he called for the party to adopt "reasonable" and "realistic" goals. He was not pushing a Largent-like die-hard line. (In smarmy fashion, he praised his "dear friend" Gingrich as a "man of Churchillian proportions," and pronounced. "I love him dearly." Talk about tough love.) With Gingrich bailing, the Republican caucus can be expected to turn into a snakepit, as all sorts of creepy crawlers wither and slide for advantage. In the next week, GOPers will be chewing each other up. A wide-open leadership race is usually difficult to handicap. Representatives and Senators are notorious for lying to their colleagues about who they will support. The vote, after all, is secret. The race could shape up to be a slugfest of spoilers.

So, future Trivial Pursuit players, who was the first victim of Monicagate? The answer: Newt Gingrich. Thank you, Kenneth Starr. When millions were poring over the juicy footnotes of the Starr report in September, who could have imagined that two months later Gingrich, the exploiter of the scandal Starr stirred up, would be gone, and Bill Clinton, the lying degenerate targeted by Starr, would remain? O. Henry could not have written a more ironic script. Gingrich's reliance on scandal politics left him vulnerable when no pay-off materialized. Since this was likely to be a status quo election--with the electorate not too riled up--he and his party could have counted on more or less holding their impressive gains of the 1990s. But, no. Like the dog with a bone in the old children's story, Gingrich gazed into the pond and saw what seemed to be another dog with what seemed to be a bigger bone. He lunged at the reflection and ended up wet and boneless. Ah, the siren call of Monica--she proved too tempting for Gingrich to resist. Now he's a fallen man.

One of the best moments of election night was when Gingrich decried the media for having "fixated" on Monicagate, while he and his Republicans had been busy toiling away on legislative matters, He maintained that his only miscalculation had been not foreseeing that the public would become fed up with the scandal in response to the constant regurgitation offered by the cable news channels. So much for his mea culpa. The exit polls showed Monica was a wash in the elections--in terms of motivating voters to vote one way or another--but it's possible that all the scandalmongering encouraged by the GOP and enjoyed by the media kept Washington and politics front and center on the nation's screen throughout this year and accounted for the fact that turn-out, as low as it was at 37 percent, was four points higher than anticipated. Had there been no scandal, interest in the elections could well have hit the expected low--which would have helped the GOP, which does better when fewer people vote.

Impeachment fans have to be feeling a bit let down by all this. The House Republicans are a captain-less junk (to warp Largent's maritime metaphors). It's a good guess that Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is fully in control of the impeachment helm, and his hunger for impeachment seems to be waning. Two days after the elections, he announced a new-and-improved schedule aimed at meeting his wishful end-of-year deadline. He proposed to resolve the question of impeachment without any evidentiary hearings, noting that "most relevant witnesses have already testified at length." That is true, but they did so without benefit of cross-examination. There will be one public session with Starr--and not much else for public consumption. That's a bit absurd. Let's race through the most serious responsibility granted the House? Why not just vote the issue tomorrow and get it over with? Hyde might be hearing the ticking of the clock. Come next year, there will be a new Congress, and the impeachment inquiry resolution will have expired. The new Congress would have to reauthorize the inquiry, if it is not completed by then. The Democrats, if they can woo six Republicans, could conceivably shut it down.

The Republican Party's impeachment strategy has already cost it one member. How far down this path is the GOP willing to tread? Each day is one closer to the next election, and it's not too early for House Republicans to feel edgy about the year 2000. In presidential years, turn-out rises--which means the House Democrats are well within striking distance. George W. looks strong now, but who knows how much cover he or any other nominee will be able to offer the House Republican if they tar themselves further with impeachment? Impeachment politics has backfired. Nevertheless, are the conservatives willing to ease up on the anti-Clinton throttle? As Hyde last week was fumbling for an exit strategy, Representative Bill McCollum, a Florida Republican on the Judiciary Committee, was urging his party not to turn gun- shy. That was before Gingrich hailed his cab. Once the Speaker hit the lonesome highway, the assumption in Washington was that Hyde was in the driver's seat on impeachment. But that doesn't mean he can easily return the GOP yahoos, who yearn for Clinton's scalp, to their cages.

Gingrich survived numerous ethics imbroglios, a government shutdown for which he was blamed by most of the public, and a coup. Which was all quite impressive because he was never well-liked by most Republicans. They respected him for guiding them into the majority. But the band he led into the promised land had had enough. What will he do next? For years, Gingrich has maintained a clutch of hard-right funders over whom he has held Svengali-like sway. It's sort of a cult. Perhaps they'll kick in for a think tank of his own. With an unfavorable rating of 58 percent, it's not likely he'll go network, unless Rupert Murdoch feels particularly helpful. ("The Next Century With Newt"?) How about a presidential bid? GOP pollster Frank Luntz says, "You can't rule it out." Huh? How can Gingrich argue he has the fortitude to run for president and lead the country, when he can't even deal with his own caucus?

So farewell, Mr. Republican Revolution. It's not that we hardly knew ye. We knew ye too well. The campaign finance shenanigans. The backroom dealing. The attacks on health and safety standards. The favors for special-interest pals. The from-the-gutter attack-politics. The lies told to the ethics committee. The unrelenting hubris and self-promotion. The bullshit revolutionary rhetoric. The pimping for big tobacco and the gun lobby. In the end, your colleagues--your comrades-in-arm--decided this election was not about Clinton's bizarre sexcapades and lies, it was about you. And you lost. You couldn't beat a lying reprobate. So much for the power of your ideas.

What a melancholy week. Once the polls closed it was clear we would no longer would have Al D'Amato to kick around--and I do mean kick. (But with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan resigning in two years, maybe D'Amato will try a comeback.) That's why I was rooting for Gingrich. How could we lose both D'Amato and Gingrich at the same time? That's about as much trauma as the Democratic Party can stand. Democrats are running out of demons to campaign against. They may have to resort to ideas. But until that happens, I say full- heartedly, Tom DeLay for Speaker.

Lucky Man

Clinton and the Democrats don't deserve such luck. (Yes, it would better for them if Gingrich stuck around, but they were feeling pretty gleeful after hearing the news.) The incumbent-friendly, special-interest money-drenched elections was a defeat for Republicans and conservatives--who giddily anticipated victory--rather than a win for Democrats and progressives.

D'Amato did finally succumbed, but to a Democrat, Chuck Schumer, who practically matched him dollar-for-dollar in squeezing money out of corporate interests. Feingold's narrow escape was cast by election-night analysts as an example that will prompt others not to emulate his walk-it-like-he-talks-it politics. Trial attorney/millionaire John Edwards likened himself favorably to Helms in his successful campaign against Lauch Faircloth, the North Carolina conservative Republican. Labor unions and the African-American and Latino communities were able to spur their people to vote against the right, and, consequently, they diluted the impact of Christian conservative voters. But too often Democratic loyalists confronted Democratic candidates with bland, centrist, I'm-not-a-Republican line. Will Bill Clinton, whose pitch to black audiences has moved from slamming Sister Souljah to save my ass, be as loyal to black voters as they were to him? Ask Lani Guinier.

This was supposed to be prime-time for the GOP, and Newt and the Gang blew it. They were surfing a 64 year-old trend that favors the party out of the White House in off-year elections. They had a mighty advantage in money. They had a President as target who had behaved reprehensibly and then lied about it. And the best minds of the GOP couldn't figure out how to exploit effectively the Monica madness. The ballyhooed Republican Revolution is done, despite Largent's delusional fantasies. The Republican governors--dubbed the more "pragmatic" wing of the party--are hailed as the GOP's future, not the ideologues of the House.

But happy Democrats ought not to revel too much in the election results or Newt's self-beheading. For Democrats, the hole in which they reside merely has stopped deepening. Neither party has an agenda to fuel a breakthrough. This fall, the Republicans sat on their issues--such as tax cuts for the well-to- do--and the Democrats could not generate compelling enough themes to return to the majority. (That's why we should keep an eye on anti-politician Jesse Ventura, the newly elected Reform Party governor of Minnesota. If this former professional wrestler can elude Ross Perot's hammerlock on the party, he may be in the ring in 2000, when the Reform Party will have access to about $20 million in federal matching funds. Ponder a presidential debate between him and Perot. Saturday Night Live, take note.) As one exit poll noted, voters who said their financial situation has improved voted Democratic 57-42 percent. An economic downturn would separate these voters damn quick from the Democrats. Today, the Democratic Party is little more than the party of prosperity (real or imagined)--and that is hardly a secure spot in this global economy.

It is amusing how so much is read into the elections. Mandate for impeachment? A middle-finger for the GOP? A sign of future Democratic successes? In the Senate 90 percent of the incumbents won. In the House, 98.3 percent of the already-there-gang were reelected. The House shifted 1 percent. It's like the Politburo of old. There isn't much change going on. (That's not a surprise, when in 60 percent of the House races there is a ten-to-one funding advantage.) Two of the three Senate incumbents who lost--D'Amato and Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun were burdened with ethics baggage. And all three were defeated by money-bag candidates. U.S. politics is a pond of brackish water, not a river of motion.

Earth to Pundits

Even before Gingrich's self-ouster, there was much to enjoy last week. All the pundits were as far from the planet Earth as John Glenn. Do we want to rub it in? Yes. (Thankfully--if not presciently--I eschewed all invitations to predict. It just didn't feel right. After this desultory year in politics, I was less inclined to treat the elections as a game. That only seemed to further trivialize the whole sad and trivial mess.) MSNBC's Laura Ingraham foresaw a thirteen-seat gain for the GOP in the House; The Standard's Bill Kristol, fifteen big ones for his side; Group-leader John McLaughlin was in sync with Ingraham; Hardballer Chris Matthews, eleven for the Repubs; Ralph Reed, fourteen for God's party. A special prize goes to podiatral consultant/pollster Dick Morris; his future included the Republicans adding 20 to 30 seats to its majority. Three dozen brand-name pundits, according to The Hotline, showed less pronosticative skill than a 10th grade class at Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, which came closest by daringly guessing there would be no change in the House.

Will this kill predictive punditry? I predict not. There is so much air to fill, so many column-inches to cover with words. Predictions are a cheap means for doing so. Anyone--or so it seems--is qualified to peer ahead. (Shortly before the election, I saw Ingraham on MSNBC interviewing a professional dog- walker. Guess she was taking a break from the on-the-ground reporting she conducts in congressional districts across the country in order to faithfully arrive at a well-founded, reality-based prediction.) And prediction-journalism is entertaining and allows politico-geeks to feel as if they're Jimmy the Greek. Only the guys who spend hours tracking the races should be taken serious in political predicting--analysts like Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg--and this time around they got it wrong, too.

Newt's Unfriendly Air

The following item was written and filed before Gingrich resigned. In retrospect, it serves as fitting tribute to the man and his legacy. Let's roll the tape:

On election night, when TV journalists kept pestering Gingrich about his reliance on Monicagate and the party's last-minute scandal-based ads, it would have been refreshing for one to have asked, "Hey, why did you kill rules that would have led to lower air fares for consumers?" According to a confidential memo written by the chief lobbyist for the airline industry, Gingrich promised the airline lobby that the GOP would smother rules that would allow the Department of Transportation to fine major airlines that engage in predatory pricing to drive low-fare competitors out of business. And the House Republicans made good on that vow. Yet even some Republicans were not happy with Gingrich's win on this front. "This kind of collusion borders on the illegal," said Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, a center of low-cost air travel. And Representative Greg Ganske, an Iowa Republican, told the Des Moines Register, "This is another example of why we need campaign- finance reform. The airlines give great big sums of money." The airlines pay off Republican leaders; the Republican leaders work their back-room magic, and--poof--consumers pay more for air travel. Another reminder of the wonders of the Republican Revolution.

Springsteen's Run

There's been a healthy amount of copy in this paper and other publications devoted to the new Bob Dylan release, the 1966 misnamed "Royal Albert Hall" concert. As dozens of commentators have noted, that show freeze-framed a historic cultural moment, as Dylan confronted a ready-for-a-shoot-out audience in Manchester, England, and leaped from social-oriented folkie to rocker-as- artist pop modernist. (Much of the recent yapping about Dylan's victory ignored the fact that most of Dylan's studio time this decade was devoted to two albums of traditional folk songs : Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong.) Perhaps there's a touch of synchronicity in this week's release of Bruce Springsteen's Tracks, a four CD set of songs that never found a home on his official albums. (Many are old bootleg standards.) The material spans his recording career, and it suggests that Springsteen--once declared the "new Dylan," as if one were needed--followed a trajectory somewhat opposite to Dylan. Springsteen started out in the 1970s picking up on Dylan's lyrical embullition. His "Madman drummers bummers/And Indians in the summer/With the teenage diplomat"--from "Blinded by the Light" on his first album--was reminiscent of Dylan's free-wheelings. (Tracks' highlights include tunes from Springsteen's youthful, rambunctious word-playing days.) But Springsteen's world was grittier than Dylan's, even as he romantically glamorized Jersey and the boardwalk. In Dylan's non-Euclidian universe, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot squared off amidst chaos and absurdity in a place called Desolation Row--wherever that was. In Springsteen's neighborhood, gangs armed with electric guitars and power chords scuffled with each other in street operas. But, as the years passed, Springsteen became more attuned to folk and traditional stylings, and he ventured, slowly and cautiously, toward social commentary (after going through his it's-time-to-grow-up-and-face-the-music period, which produced Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River.)

Springsteen's journey, hardly linear or one-dimensional, culminated in The Ghost of Tom Joad, the folkish album of 1995, which worried aloud, albeit quietly, about those cut out of the globalizing economy of the 1990s. It was a direct poke in the snout of Newt Gingrich. In fact, during a solo tour supporting the album, a somber Springsteen dedicated the title track to the newly-in-power "Gingrich mob." Since the start of the Reagan era, Springsteen's work--in and out of the recording studio--has contained a progressive populist tone. It's not uncommon for rock stars to possess a liberal/left bent, but Springsteen is one of the rare, if only, millionaire rockers whose politics focus primarily on class issues, such as unemployment, industrial displacement, low wages, poverty, and immigration. That's the hard stuff. He was there for No Nukes and "We Are the World"--the easy causes--but he also campaigned against Proposition 187 [or 189?] in California (which would have denied public services to undocumented immigrants) and has written elegant songs about those dispossessed during a time of plenty.

Tracks offers a few hints of how this came to be. Springsteen, who hails from working-class Freehold, New Jersey (a town less fetching than seaside Asbury Park), was drawn to the plight of back-in-the-world Vietnam vets. They were screwed over by a government that sent them to fight a pointless war and then hit hard by the Reagan recession of the early 1980s. At that time, Springsteen was donating to food banks in Pittsburgh's Mon Valley, where deindustrialized steel workers were hitting the skids. He also was helping the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. He put his concerns to music on the title track of "Born in the USA," which George Will and Ronald Reagan misinterpreted as a patriotic anthem. They were fools, perhaps confused by the pounding drums and cascading keyboards, for in the song a down-and-out fellow is forced to enlist, loses his buddy at Khe Sahn, returns home wasted, and can't find work. Tracks contains an acoustic version of the song, recorded in 1982 as part of the sessions that yielded the desolate-sounding Nebraska album. The cut has a haunting feel--a dash of "Gimme Shelter"-- and if Will or Reagan had heard it, there would have been no mistaking Springsteen's intent. >From caring about guys like himself--or like he would have been had rock and roll not been so kind--Springsteen extended his social view. On Tom Joad, he mostly dealt with the dirt poor, not the working-class wounded, but the itinerant worker, the farm laborer, the immigrant who crosses the border illegally in desperate search of hope. There are not many mega-stars who are solid cultural heroes for the left. Springsteen qualifies.

It's not that late Springsteen equals early Dylan. The times a-changed. His songs are not broadsides or in-your-face indictments of the excesses of American capitalism. Yet when Republicans hail a "Morning in America" or set up as targets welfare recipients and immigrant workers, it is a political act of sorts merely to write compassionate songs about those who remain on the down side of the country's economic triumphalism. "When I sit down to write--I don't like things that are didactic," Springsteen told me in 1995. "I don't like agitprop. I don't like speechmaking. I don't like soapbox stuff. I don't believe you can tell 'em anything. You can show 'em things. But you can't tell 'em anything. You can't tell them what to think....I don't set out to make a point. I just set out to create understanding and compassion--and present something that feels like the world."

The unreleased material on Tracks goes light on the social/political front. There's classic Springsteen rockers about cars and girls and bars and bands, songs about the worries of love, B-side material--literally and figuratively--and a few worth-the-price-of-admission gems (such as "Shut Out the Light," about a returning, freaked-out vet, and "Johnny Bye-Bye," a Chuck Berryish meditation on Elvis Presley's death.) The album is proof Springsteen usually made the right choice in selecting his album cuts. Still, Tracks--which ends with the elegiac "Brothers Under the Bridge," a song about, yes, a homeless vet--is a heartening reminder of a career that yielded what is, alas, too rare a combo: working class and rock-and-roll hero.

-- David Corn