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The story of the '94 elections is that a lot of moderate/conservative Democrats stayed home, not unusual turnout of voters for Republicans. Both sides had a partisan base of 37-38% that year; Democrats kept substantial majorities in Congress despite stalemate of the popular vote due to gerrymanderings and bias toward incumbents in the South and Midwest. National turnout in November '94 was about 38% of Presidential election voters for Republicans, i.e. 100%+-5% of their partisan base. National turnout for Democrats was 34% of the Presidential election voters, or 89% of their partisans.
National pollings throughout 1994 show control of Congress numbers getting to almost 70% wanting Republican control during that summer. That number fell off and declined into the fifties during the fall, i.e. when the Contract made its appearance. You could even plausibly claim, from pollings that followed Gingrich rolling it out, that the Contract diminished Republican support. The Contract was in fact lifted with only some modification from Ross Perot's 1992 Presidential campaign, i.e. had been previously rejected by partisan Democrats and Republicans alike. The Contract did what Gingrich hoped it would do in the electorate, bring Perot voters over to support for him and his Party, after the '94 elections.
When people have decided they reject one side, they'll justify their vote for the other side using the best excuse they can find that has public currency. The Right is far lazier about making up excuses.
About the SNL Gore skit and '9/11'....there simply was a lot of rot, anger/resentment, sense of deprivation, paranoia, and plain willingness to do some evil to deal with these pent up in the average American psyche during the Cold War and Civil Rights era and shift away from the agrarian/industrial economy. We suppressed it all as best we could during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, made a lot of low quality and (at heart) temporary compromises among ourselves simply to keep up what was the necessary priority, the fight against the USSR. As a country we binged between periods of then-unbearable virtue (early Eisenhower, Kennedy/early LBJ, Carter years) and indulgent, horrible, vice (late Eisenhower, Nixon, early Reagan, late Bush Sr years) in dealing with the situation. In the pattern the Clinton years are another period of unbearable virtue to the Right, and the Bush Jr years are another period of the horrible indulgence and vice.
During the Cold War the plain fact is the country simply didn't settle its problems in a sound and solid way. It was just muddling through. Around 1990 political consultants in the U.S. and everywhere else in the West and former East were telling everyone that the political Right was in ascendance- that there was tremendous anger about the condition of things, i.e. an awful lot of people who discovered themselves maladjusted to the world and the world itself in horrible condition according to their values and desires. In a word, a widespread condition of arrested development and arrested mental adjustment, a lack of adaption to the realities of things.
I see the present, i.e. Bush Jr-defined, years as the final indulging in and burning out of the Cold War extremisms and pathologies once fully embodied in the Nixon crew. Our national politics has to a large extent been a recapitulation, a rearguing, of the country's past and unresolved problems. You could claim that the Nixon people in part reargued the Twenties, under Carter and Reagan we reargued the issues and developments of the FDR years and WW2. Bush Sr.'s Presidency rehashed much of the Truman years (defunding the military-industrial complex) and recapitulated the Korean War in Kuwait. Clinton's Presidency started with a rehashing of parts of the domestic business of the Truman Presidency (healthcare, integration of the military, nonuse policy of nuclear weaponry, destruction of a do-nothing Congress) and a lot of the Eisenhower Presidency (McCarthyism, early feminism, imperialism mixed with paranoia, Hungary, Indochina, technology-based prosperity/class mobility).
The Bush Jr. Presidency begins, IMHO, with a rehashing of Fifties Civil Rights arguments in the South as the crux of the Bush-Gore race, which culminates in the vile abuses and disenfranchisement of black voters of Florida that effected the result. Next we got a recapitulation of the Gary Powers incident in the E-3/Hainan story. Then we got the JFK framing of Bush and the JFK invocation to justify the 2001 tax cuts, and the RFK/Mafia fight is recommerated in the California energy debacle and Enron scandel. Then there's a psychological revisiting of the dramatic height of Cold War existential fear- the Cuban missile crisis- via '9/11'. The Afghanistan business is sort of a corrective on the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban business at the time led to Vietnam, a terrible psychological urge to somehow fight the 'Communists' in a palpable (if objectively counterproductive) way in some arena which didn't put the country itself in danger...which, as you know, is at bottom the popular rationale for the Iraq invasion/occupation that followed and conceptualizing of Iraq resistance as 'Terrorists'. (Oh, and Hussein was/is a relic of Stalinism and the worldwide Soviet Cold War alliance itself. As are Castro and Il Jung.) In the form of the Dean-Kerry-Bush argument we rehashed the cultural and 'security' arguments of the late Sixties and early Seventies. The gay marriage legalization stuff coincides, in this time pattern, with the gay rights effort that followed the Stonewall incidents.
In the past two years we've rehashed and revisited the problems of the early and middle Seventies. Stagflation, unmanageable federal deficits, globalization, American industries becoming dinosaurs, male chauvinism outbreaks, and oil supply crisis, Presidential lawbreaking and investigation to the point of collapse of an Administration, political loss of a war overseas and at home...familiar, huh? And now it's on a political change of tone to moderacy that the hardliners of the Right hate abyssmally, to settling a score with the Iranian theocracy, and trying to settle some border and diplomatic issues in Israel/Palestine. There's an argument going on about legalizing immigrants from Latin/Caribbean countries that somehow doesn't really get settled, recapitulating the furore around the Mariano boatlift. And, like in 1978ish (and lasting to 2002 or so), there's a widespread and building sense that the various groups in power are obsolete and the domestic political order is about to change drastically. Like at that time, there's a sense that a kind of revolution is in the making.
And as all this stuff gets reargued- and tacitly there's a sense that it settles things, that there's never going be a need for a third go-over of any of it- voters feel an ever-diminishing need to back or empower the people who create this pseudo-rerun and rehashing of the country's Past.
That's my best explanation for all the pretty bizarre phenomena of the past couple of years. Be that the Lewinsky craziness, 1994, Gore's falling short, that post-9/11 insanity, Kerry's fate in '04, Iraq, or the present tipping of the center to liberal and the slow defection of moderate Republicans.
And I predict that we'll see the issues of 1980 and '81 and '82 cropping up and being rehashed in the political arena in the next couple of months. Unaffordable tax cuts, tough militarist bullshitting, tactical disaster on the ground a la Lebanon, more focus on propping "friendly" bad Latin American regimes by upping the violence, more faux nuclear weapons threatmongering. More pseudo-championing of bigotted social views that all political sorts know are hopeless. Bush will go Reaganesque, become a smiling face and facade and try to be an optimism-spreading leader of a hollow and defunct Cause.
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