http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0011796snip....
Other results of the voting across the United wo days after the vote, the chairman of the House judiciary committee, Henry Hyde, announced a drastically scaled-down schedule of imStates may not have been as shocking, but in their own way they were no less surprising. Surely, chorused the experts, a party led by a President dogged by scandal and teetering on the brink of impeachment would suffer at least some retribution from voters.
Wrong again. In contests for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate, Bill Clinton’s Democrats defied the odds. They fought their opponents to a draw in the Senate, where party standings ended up unchanged: 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats. But in a modern-day Dewey-defeats-Truman upset, they actually gained five seats in the House, leaving the standings at 223 Republicans and 211 Democrats (plus one re-elected Independent).
It was a tremendous blow to Republicans, and the aftershocks came immediately. Conservatives and moderates alike rebelled against the men who had steered their ship onto the rocks. The party’s chief strategist and most controversial figure, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, drew the bitter conclusion: he announced he will step down and clear the way for new leadership.
It was, in its way, the ultimate political turnaround. Only weeks earlier, it was Clinton whose political career was in tatters, and Gingrich who could delight in seeing his arch-foe suffering the humiliations of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Instead, it was Gingrich who took the fall. In four years, he had gone from being a self-described "transformational figure" who won control of Congress for Republicans for the first time in 40 years, to being the scapegoat of a party frustrated at every turn by a President who engineered miraculous escapes from all the political traps they set for him. Gingrich himself blamed conservative hardliners in his ranks for pulling the trigger on him, telling Republican congressmen that the right-wingers were "cannibals."
In large part, Gingrich was the author of his own destruction. A fierce partisan and conservative idealogue, he energized Republicans to win a majority in the House in 1994 at a time when American politics were more polarized than they are in the prosperous, complacent late 1990s. But those same qualities made him deeply unpopular among moderate voters and unable to broaden his party’s appeal. And in Clinton, he confronted an opponent far more adept at the art of political survival. Just three weeks before last week’s vote, the President forced the Republicans to fight on his turf by cutting a last-minute budget deal that brought to the fore issues such as education, which favor Democrats. And in a type of political judo, he turned his own weakness - from the Lewinsky scandal - into strength. After plunging the country into 10 months of turmoil through his liaison with the former White House intern and the lies he spun around it, the President successfully managed to paint the hapless Republicans as irresponsible scandal-mongers. As a result, the drive to impeach him in the House hit a brick wall.
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"I totally underestimated," he said, "the degree to which people would just get sick of 24-hour-a-day talk television and talk radio, and then the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by sheer repetition." The final nail in his political coffin was his decision in the final week of the campaign to run TV and radio ads raising the scandal issue. If anything, they backfired on Republicans and encouraged Democrats to vote in larger-than-expected numbers.
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The clearest example of that trend is in the South, where sons of a former president now hold sway in two key states. With his landslide re-election as governor of Texas, George W. Bush confirmed his position as early front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 - if he decides, as expected, to go for it. He leads all prospective candidates, running ahead of Vice-President Al Gore by a margin of 51 to 39 per cent in exit polls last week. At the same time, his younger brother, Jeb Bush, won election as governor of Florida. Having brothers running the second- and fourth-most populous states is remarkable enough. With one a likely presidential candidate, the pairing might be enough to put a Bush back in the White House eight years after Clinton ousted their father. The Bush brothers are all the rage in Republican circles for another reason. Together, they have charted an approach to governing they call, in what has instantly become the new buzz-phrase of U.S. politics, "compassionate conservatism." Less hard-edged rhetoric about cutting government programs. Less holier-than-thou moralism aimed at the Republicans’ conservative, family-values base. More talk about ways government can help people left out of the economic boom of the 1990s. And more reaching out to women and minorities.
In many ways, the Bushes have stolen a page from Clinton’s playbook - trying to repackage Republicanism much as he remade the Democratic party for the ‘90s. If national Republicans do tilt the brothers’ way at the end of the decade, it will amount to a rejection of the purist path blazed by the discredited Gingrich. And it may be the ultimate political compliment to their chief opponent - Bill Clinton.
Maclean's November 16, 1998
Author ANDREW PHILLIPS in Washington
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