Democrats, be of good cheer! Defeat is neither final nor fatal. As a former Republican conservative activist who once wandered in the wilderness, I can attest that a bracing loss can serve as a liberating experience that can help pave the way back to power.
I am not making light of the significant setback for the national Democratic Party. Although there was only a small margin of difference in the presidential race, the signs were ominous for Democrats in this election: The Democratic Party has no defining message. The electoral map is shrinking for the party as the GOP is making inroads into Democratic turf. Republicans increased their margins in Congress, particularly in the
Senate. And increasingly, voters who hold traditional values are estranged from the Democrats.
But this has not been the first time, nor will it be the last, that one of the two major parties found itself cast into the wilderness. Conservatives have found these forced exiles to be particularly helpful as a time for retooling their movement and beginning the long march back to power. Democrats should learn their lessons: In the ashes of the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater landslide, the right, which was thought to be dead, famously rose like a phoenix. Conservatives used the time out of power to cultivate future leaders, develop institutions, and, perhaps most importantly, nourish ideas that would eventually be the primary force in their ascendancy to political heights.
The clarion call for the right was the slogan gleaned from the title of a book by a conservative intellectual, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. Acting on that impulse, conservatives established think tanks and opinion journals, and eventually developed a clear, simple, and coherent agenda. Even after Ronald Reagan's defeat in the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, conservatives we re undaunted in their efforts to press their agenda forward. They were happy warriors, indeed. And in 1980, they we re rewarded when their icon, Reagan, won the White House, and Republicans seized control of the Senate. The conservative revolution was truly ascendant.
I had my own experience with being thrust out into the political cold and then participating in a stunning comeback. Having served in the George H.W. Bush administration, I found myself unemployed after Bill Clinton's victory in November
1992 -- a difficult time to be an unemployed Republican, because Washington was completely in the grip of the Democrats. Consequently, I became creative in my job search and gained a position as the legislative director of the Christian Coalition. When I began my new position with the religious conservatives, I thought I could not be farther away from the locus of power in Washington. Little did I know, I was to be part of an extraordinary political insurgency that has now made the Capitol a bastion of conservative and Republican hegemony.
Something happened on the day I started at the Christian Coalition that may provide some insight into what motivated the socially conservative voters in the 2004 election. At that time, the gays-in-the-military controversy was dominating the news. An article in The Washington Post described religious conservatives who opposed the newly installed Clinton administration on this issue as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command."
This description incited an explosion of outrage from the ranks of the religious right. I learned that nothing motivates religious conservatives more than the perception that they are the only group in America that can be caricatured and stereotyped with impunity. Among the religious right, there is a deep feeling of alienation from mainstream cultural institutions, particularly the media. In this year's election, the Republican Party tapped into this vein of alienation to promote a president who genuinely connects with this community.
Early in my tenure with the Christian Coalition, I had the opportunity to watch closely the implementation of the audacious plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to gain control of Congress. As I heard his grandiose schemes to win a majority, I initially thought they were fanciful. After all, the Democrats enjoyed significant majorities in Congress and they also occupied the White House. But Gingrich thought boldly and moved relentlessly on several fronts to construct an effective opposition, and his plan worked. Here's how:
Newt built coalitions. Gingrich understood that the Republican Party's tent could hold broadly diverse groups ranging from born-again evangelical home schoolers to Midwestern fiscal conservatives to corporate titans. Gingrich persuaded these groups that they had a common interest in uniting to oppose the liberal Democratic establishment. He convinced them to put aside their differences and find their common interests. (Ironically, this task was easier for Gingrich when the Republicans were out of power than when expectations soared after they became the majority.) Gingrich was assisted in coalition building by the networking efforts of outside allies, especially by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, right-wing activist. Norquist conducted weekly meetings of social conservatives, economic supply-siders, and business lobbyists. This group was known as the "leave us alone" coalition, because its members shared a disdain for government intervention. (Paradoxically, the social conservatives wanted the state to ban abortions, and business lobbyists were just fine with corporate welfare.)
Newt promoted reform. In the 1992 election, the Republicans hemorrhaged voters to Ross Perot's insurgent campaign. Gingrich understood that in order to become a majority, the GOP had to regain this critical block of independent-minded voters. To accomplish that, Gingrich recast the Republicans as an insurgent party that advocated a fundamental restructuring of Congress. The fall of Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) and the House banking scandal that ensnared many Democrats reinforced Gingrich's message that the congressional establishment was ossified.
Gingrich embraced term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and welfare reform. Then he produced a document that had far greater impact on the 1994 election than anyone expected, the Contract With America. It framed the contest this way:
"This year's election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family."
Note how this statement integrated the conservative tenet of smaller government with reform and values. This proved an extremely shrewd way to appeal to the reformist impulse among independents and moderates and to the conservative base.
In short, Gingrich made a virtue out of necessity and reveled in the role of the outsider. He realized that Americans love a David vs. Goliath fight.
Newt valued ideas. You may not be attracted to Gingrich's ideas, but he certainly had them. He valued the role of transformative ideas in history and worked closely with conservative think tanks to develop and disseminate them. For Gingrich, politics was not merely the mechanics of fund raising and voter turnout. He believed that a compelling alternative vision was necessary to regain power. Many within Republican ranks felt that all they needed to do was oppose the Clinton administration's health care proposal and cultural positions. Gingrich argued that negativity was not enough. He pressed successfully for the GOP to forge the Contract With America, which embodied a Republican governing alternative.
Within the context of offering a compelling vision, Gingrich appreciated the power of values and culture. He had written, "[American] civilization is based on a spiritual and moral dimension. It emphasizes personal responsibility as much as individual rights." This did not mean just narrowly embracing the Christian right's agenda of opposing abortion and gay rights. Gingrich realized it fundamentally meant addressing Americans' concerns that society's order was deteriorating. In his book Values Matter Most, Ben Wattenberg described elements of the contract this way: "Not by accident many of the other items of the contract also touch on the intertwined themes of responsibility, discipline and something for something."
Wattenberg specifically noted the contract's call for budget discipline, tax relief targeted for families, and welfare reform to reduce dependency. These were all implicit value issues. Other ideas in the contract that appealed to the Perot constituency were term limits and congressional ethics reform.
Gingrich was also sensitive to the manner in which ideas were presented. For instance, one of his policy goals was the permanent elimination of the estate tax. Because only large, ultra-wealthy estates are affected by this tax, the populist appeal of this proposal was not readily apparent.
However, Gingrich insisted that this proposal be presented as the elimination of the "death tax." Who could be for taxing death? In fact, if any Republican uttered the words "estate tax" instead of "death tax," he or she was required to deposit a dollar bill in a jar that was kept in the speaker's office. Perhaps Democrats should emulate Gingrich's creative approach to language and refer to Bush's deficit as the "kid tax."
Gingrich's dream was realized when the Republicans surprised most prognosticators and seized control of the Senate and the House in November 1994. Soon, however, Gingrich proved himself to be far more adept at fomenting a revolution than at governing. As some at the Christian Coalition might have said, we know now why the Lord did not permit Moses to enter the Holy Land!
It is also important to note that Republican overreach and the Clinton administration's repositioning to the center precipitated Gingrich's undoing. Infected by hubris, he provoked a government shutdown in attempting to implement his agenda. Meanwhile, the
Clinton administration went back to its New Democrat roots and developed a values agenda of its own -- including welfare reform, deficit reduction, school uniforms, and targeting violence and sex in the culture. It struck home. I heard discussions in Republican and conservative circles while I was at the Heritage Foundation during this time that we had finally met our match, and that the Third Way could be our undoing. As
David Winston wrote in the conservative publication Policy Review, "The
Republican Congress, after its initial success, suffered four years of humiliating defeats at the hands of Bill Clinton, who has successfully co-opted conservative ideas and the credit that goes with them." Indeed, Clinton won re-election and the Republican revolution stalled.
Now that I've returned to my Democratic roots -- I was a Democratic activist in high school and college before moving rightward -- I see that there was much in Newt Gingrich's approach to politics that is abhorrent. He was an early master of the politics of personal destruction. But his successfully engineered insurgency -- through building coalitions, promoting reform, and valuing ideas -- can provide Democrats with a model for how they can develop their own ideas and operate as an insurgent minority, and most importantly, how that minority can become a majority again.
