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COMMENTATORS
Joe Conason
E L E C T I O N_' 9 8
Key race results GOP Newtered |
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What it all means
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I'm sitting here in New York watching the returns, and my friends and I are playing a little parlor game: Will D'Amato congratulate Schumer; how gracious will he be in defeat? My guess is that he'll be pseudo-gracious. How would Stuart Smalley advise him to handle the pain of defeat? I think he would say [in Smalley's voice], "Look in the mirror and say 'Hello Alfonse, 46 percent of the people voted for me -- they like me -- and that's not so bad.'" Lauch Faircloth's defeat in North Carolina, now that's a sweet one, because I blame him for Starr. It looks like the Democrats may actually pick up a few seats in the House, which is pretty stunning. It'll be very interesting to see what the GOP does now with the impeachment process -- I think they've got to back out of it. And the White House will not even feel like making a censure deal now, which they were offering a few weeks ago. Clinton must be a very happy man tonight. Looking at the black vote, he must be saying, "Yep, I did the right thing by going on the Black Entertainment Network yesterday." But I don't think he'll be doing any victory dances in public. For the next two years, he will [imitating Clinton] continue to do the business of people. As for those poisonous voices in American political life like Rush Limbaugh, I don't think the election results will matter much. Nothing will silence them. But this does feel like a little bit of a tide turn, a shift toward reasonableness. The Republicans who are doing well tonight, like the Bush brothers, are reaching out to moderates, Democrats, minorities -- they're more pragmatic conservatives. People who we can work with. I have a new book coming out in January called "Why Not Me?" in which I run for president. My platform calls for the elimination of ATM fees -- in fact, that's my only issue. And I win decisively. But my presidency is a bit of a disaster. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My immediate reaction is largely of exhilaration -- that we won't have Al D'Amato to kick around anymore. I think the conventional spinning is right: that the Republicans lacked a convincing enough goad to their people, and failed to exploit the normal advantage they have in an off-season election. Certainly, it's not the vote of confidence that the Republicans wanted. It says to me that the Republicans don't have a winner on their hands. And they would be well-advised by their own lights to get done with the hearings fast and move on. From the early returns, the less socially conservative Republicans seem to being doing best. George [W.] Bush is not Ralph Reed. The Republicans have used the impeachment issue as a binder to do what they have tried to do for many years: merge the economic conservatives and the moral/social conservatives. And if they don't have that cement, I don't know what they will have. So it's been pleasant for them to divert themselves with the impeachment crusade, but if it's not playing that well -- and clearly it hasn't been since the beginning -- and the vote today seems to confirm what has been true in public opinion since January, then what do you know, they're going to have to resort to politics again. That's problematic for them. Newt's a wedge for the Republican Party; despite his pale efforts to present himself as a leader, he's not really convincing. He doesn't have much to offer but a lot of bluster. I don't think he's satisfying either the social conservatives in the party or the business-minded people, and if he still has presidential ambitions, I think he immediately dropped back behind George Bush tonight. None of the Republican presidents have been gung-ho moral conservatives; they fake it -- Reagan faked it, George Bush faked it, Bob Dole faked it. Reagan was a more compelling faker than the rest of them but even he really abandoned the anti-abortion people. The Republicans' dilemma is there are enough of the Republican moralists to nominate candidates, [but] there aren't enough of them to win an election. So they have to move to the center to win and the right wing of the party doesn't like it. So much of the Democrats' success rests on the relative comfort of the economy. That seems to be the decisive issue in presidential campaigns and really, what this election is turning out to be is a referendum on Clinton. The Lewinsky issue, which would have detracted, didn't, so we're left with sort of a normal vote of confidence for a presidential party that's seen as doing rather well. If in early 2000 it still looks that way, then the Democrats are in good shape. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This is an unmitigated disaster for Republicans. I blame the Republican leadership -- and I've been blaming them for three years. The young Turks should start replacing them tonight -- not tomorrow. If the Republican Party is not a party of reform, it has no identity. Why exist? This is about the 105th Congress -- a Congress that produced pork-laden budgets, passed a $200 billion transportation bill and used the same kind of doublespeak as the Democrats: They said, "Supplemental spending is not spending." It sounds a lot like, "Oral sex is not sex." I think it's too early to say the Bush boys are the future. The Republican Party is a very hierarchical, royalist party. That's why they nominated Bob Dole even though it was clear he could never get elected. It's a romantic story, but whether George W. Bush is the right candidate for the GOP in the year 2000 is too early to say. The success of gubernatorial races only underlines the failure of the national leadership. The attempt to nationalize the election turns out to be a historic blunder. In the statehouses, Republicans win, which shows they can appeal to voters on issues. The GOP's congressional campaign strategy was masterminded by Joe Gaylord, Newt Gingrich's closest advisor. They didn't dare address the question of Clinton's obstruction of justice and perjury; they said it was just about lying. And after the Republicans had just lied to their loyalists about the budget -- well, look who's lying now. You have no idea how discontented the Republican base was. The national media only looked at Republicans in terms of left or right. But the real story here is there are Republicans who are about reform, and then there are those who are power grabbers. Newt Gingrich is a classic power grabber. He used reform rhetoric to defeat (former House Speaker) Jim Wright. But the minute he got power, he became just as bad as they were. And he completely abandoned the agenda of caring about those left behind. We cannot just write off African-Americans. You had (Republican pollster) Linda DiVall celebrating that Republicans were going to win 52 percent of white women's votes. I got the chills -- that they were writing off black and Latino voters. Large majorities of blacks and Latinos went to the Democrats. I'm encouraged by (Democratic campaign finance reformer) Russ Feingold's victory in the Wisconsin Senate race. I really thought he would go down, but he demonstrated you can put your principles above your survival. That should be a lesson to the Republicans. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In all of the competitive races the Democrats have done well. I'm a little surprised that the Democrats did as well as they did, but I'm not shocked. When you have a situation where every hotly contested race -- with the major exception of the Illinois Senate race, and the possible exception of the Senate race in Kentucky -- breaks one way, that's called a national trend. And national trends happen around national questions. Even if the voters coming out of the polling places tell the pollsters that the Clinton scandal is not foremost in their mind, this national trend still says something about the scandal. It says that the people for whom the scandal has been foremost on their minds -- mainly the Republicans -- are talking about the wrong thing. The clear upshot is that this election was about the scandal, particularly when so many of the close races were resolved by an extraordinarily high voter turnout among black voters. The black voters were casting a pro-Clinton vote. The single most important day in this campaign was Sept. 21, when they released the videotape of Clinton's testimony to the grand jury. The Republicans in Congress clearly expected it was going to blow Clinton out of the water once and for all, and instead it changed the question that was before the country. The question before the country up until that moment was whether Clinton was fit to serve as president, but with the release of the videotape the question became whether Congress was fit to judge Clinton. Because there was absolutely no legal or Constitutional rationale for releasing that tape. It was a bald and transparent effort to get Clinton. In California the Senate race began to change around that time. I think that Boxer's victory is in large part due to a backlash against the scandal. Boxer is the sort of candidate who should have been expected to lose. She's the kind of liberal who gives liberals a bad name. She's very shrill and strident and knee-jerk reflexive, and she's probably as far to the left as Lungren is right. The question that Republicans are going to have to ask themselves is whether they have moved too far to the right of the public to be viable. There was a period of 40 years when the Democrats were the majority. Then, partially due to their success, they moved to the left of what the public would tolerate. Now after about 20 years -- one-half the time it took the Democrats -- it looks like the Republican party is doing the same thing. If Clinton is the national face of the Democratic Party, then the national face of the Republican Party is Newt Gingrich. He's the big loser of the night. His speakership will be imperiled -- he'll be challenged by people in his own party who will blame him for the party losses. Especially if they actually lose a few seats in the House, rather than pick up the 20 or 30 that they expected a couple of months ago. The paradox is that the Republicans who will challenge Newt are to his right, which will just push the party further from the mainstream. This is not going to help the party. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Obviously D'Amato had problems. He wasn't well-liked. I haven't seen turnout figures, but upstate I heard it wasn't good. But there's a lot of Republican voters sitting on their hands right now because the Republican leadership gave them nothing to vote for. Republicans are lame right now. Everybody understands that. The budget deal showed Clinton could be an effective president, crippled as he is. There was no tax cut, and there were a tremendous number of things in the budget that bring grief to Republicans. And I think the Democrats were especially vicious, especially deceptive in their campaigns. The California Republican ticket will go down on the abortion issue -- but that's federal law, and the governor in particular has nothing to do with that. Their stances were distorted. Matt Fong was attacked as a right-wing extremist, and all we got back from the Republicans is his mother saying he's a good son and a good senator. They were Boy Scouts, and the Democrats were vicious. I think Republicans decided to run below the radar, believing that people would recognize they were the ones who balanced the budget, got welfare reform done -- they thought they'd ride on their laurels as incumbents. The congressional leadership counted on Clinton defeating himself for a year and wasted time. This is a dangerous man in the White House -- and it's left to Seymour Hersh and my nemesis Christopher Hitchens to report what he did in the Sudan. So the election was lost because of Republican ineptitude, while Democrats played dirty politics but very skillfully. It will be sobering for the leadership. What happens to Gingrich is a very interesting question. Somebody has to be willing to challenge him, and that isn't clear yet. But it's not all negative here. You have tremendous victories by the new leadership of the Republican party -- the Bush brothers, especially George Bush in Texas. He won 69-31, with a huge proportion of the Hispanic vote. He speaks to the people. He's a Republican who cares about what happens in the inner cities, who cares about America's multi-ethnic changing face, he's made great efforts on education, and he speaks a conservative vision. And before they celebrate, Democrats should look at all those governors, and all those statehouses, still controlled by Republicans. Plus, this will be the third straight election in which the Republicans have held the Senate and the House. And another thing that should cause liberal Democrats concern: If you look at what Democrats said, it was all: I'm for capital punishment, I'm for more prisons, I'm for balancing budgets. In California, Gray Davis -- who was the left wing of the Democratic Party -- ran what would have looked like a very conservative campaign five or six years ago. So the underlying shift toward conservatism is maintained. Finally -- and I'm probably the only one who'll say this -- there's the way the black community votes like a communist country. Hollings got something like 30 percent of the white vote and 90 percent of the black vote. And the way Clinton and Gore went after black voters -- it was just disgusting, their cynical exploitation of black votes. When he had the power in his first term, Bill Clinton did nothing for black liberals. He ignored them and did his Sista Souljah thing. Then he got in trouble. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I was out watching Senator D'Amato concede. It was a thing of beauty. I waited 18 years to watch that. He looked like a piano fell on him; he looked like he was on Thorazine. This is huge what's going on tonight, just enormous. If the predictions are true, it's the biggest repudiation of the pundit class, who first told people what they were supposed to think and then told them how they're supposed to vote. And they were massively rejected. I would say bitch-slapped. I just cracked a bottle of champagne. People in New York are just wild about D'Amato losing. It was a crushing defeat. But there were some surprises, like the victory of Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, because he lived by his principles and rejected soft money in favor of campaign reform. And he won against the hard right -- the conservative, well-financed Republicans. He kicked their asses. The correspondents on TV right now are wondering if this is a backlash against the Clinton investigation. Duh. What do they think this is about? The Republicans got backlashed big time -- a historic-size backlash, a tsunami. As I predicted in my Salon article yesterday, it's the end of Newt Gingrich -- he led these people into the Little Big Horn. I believe that Whitewater and the Monica stuff really hurt these people in the end. People are sick of it and they made it known. All these pundits have to be asking themselves, "How did we get this so wrong? How come we are so out of it that we have no fucking clue what Americans are thinking about?" There were very few of us who said that people would react the way they did, and we were mocked for it. This election was just a rejection of the Republican program of investigation, inquisition and hypocrisy. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As a longtime supporter of Geraldine Ferraro I was astounded at the outcome of the New York primary because what I saw was a victory of surging testosterone in Chuck Schumer's win. It was a Darwinian spectacle of wolfish masculine drive that made my political heroine Ferraro seem weak, pallid, senescent. Therefore I was very interested to see the battle between Schumer and D'Amato. The commentators have been carrying on for months about ideological issues and questions of dirty campaigning, but I could see that this was not the nature of the real conflict. Once again, Schumer conquered because of his primitive vitality, which exploded from the television. D'Amato obviously has long passed his macho peak. Like Ferraro, D'Amato in the campaign seemed to be on the verge of mummification. Schumer's ebullient, aggressive energy seemed to overwhelm his opponent. Ideas had nothing to do with this victory by Schumer. It was pure hormonal triumph of the will! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I actually thought that Schumer would win the race because he was as down and dirty as D'Amato. People couldn't say that, yes, D'Amato was corrupt and mean but he brings home the legislative bacon, he was Senator Pothole -- because Schumer matched him in reckless aggression. D'Amato has been very lucky in his previous races. In his last race he beat Bob Abrams, who was very mild-mannered, and before that it was Mark Green, who wasn't a pugilistic politician. So D'Amato has never faced another opponent with his "strengths." Schumer has many of the qualities that people think of as strengths in D'Amato, although I don't think of them as strengths. I wonder if the murder of Dr. Slepian, the abortion doctor, in Buffalo brought people out to the polls -- it really posed very starkly that abortion is not a trivial issue and that D'Amato was anti-choice. Two weeks ago I read somewhere that the majority of New Yorkers didn't know that D'Amato was anti-choice -- even though he was running on a right-to-life ticket. Of course, they're saying on TV that it's not a referendum (on impeachment). People want impeachment not to be the issue -- but there's no question that people are thinking about it. The American people have said the same thing all along about this scandal: We know and we don't care. It's fun to talk about but it should not be driving national policy. Pundits and columnists and Beltway commentators have been saying, "What's wrong with the American people?" But they haven't convinced people to change their minds. And another thing, everybody blames the women's movement for not criticizing Clinton, but for once, feminists have the exact same position as the rest of the country -- they like a lot of things about Clinton and they don't feel this should be the issue. So for once you can't say the women's movement is out of touch -- it's the Cokie Robertses and the Sam Donaldsons that are out of touch. Ellen Dubois, a great American historian, is here with me, and she thinks that the Republican TV ads mobilized the Democrats. For me, every time the Republicans went on and on about how terrible Bill Clinton's sex life was, I felt motivated to hate them more. I find the whole Starr investigation very disturbing for a whole host of constitutional reasons -- not to mention Monica Lewinsky, who is such a victim of unfair legal procedures. She never did anything wrong and she is the most famous person in country -- [she's] had her private life totally exposed -- and her life's been ruined. Kenneth Starr can leak to the press all he wants and Monica Lewinsky can't even speak to them. The irony is that the more the Republicans go on and on, the more you find out about how bad they are in their personal lives -- like Henry Hyde, as you so brilliantly discovered. [Newly defeated Alabama governor] Fob James was the one who said that the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to the states and that he would defend prayer in the schools with the state militia. Plus there's been a lot of speculation about his private life, but he's an example of the extreme Christian right that people are afraid of. I've always thought if you're not in the Christian Coalition, you hate the Christian Coalition. Sure they're very organized and they get out their vote, but there are only so many of them and the more they separate themselves out as a distinct strand, the more people can see what they are and hate them. They've played such a destructive role on many school boards that the regular conservatives can't work with them and want them off. It's not easy running a school with people who protest the Halloween party because it invites in the devil. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I'm so happy. I'm ecstatic. I'm hysterical. I'm so happy that piece of shit D'Amato lost that I ate a can of Campbell's D'Amato soup to celebrate and now I'm eating all my child's Halloween candy to further the exhilaration. ... I just saw [Lauch Faircloth] give his concession speech: "I guess I let everybody down." They're going, "No. No. No." And I'm going, "You did. You did. We hate you. We didn't want you anymore. We saw through you." ... And I hear there was a huge turnout in Illinois of blacks. [Carol Moseley-Braun's] losing right now, it's like 29 percent ... I'm not giving up on Moseley-Braun yet. There was a really huge turnout of the blacks. And Feingold is ahead right now. [To son] Don't take candy out of your mouth and give it to me if you don't like it. That's like what a Republican would do. [To Salon] We're discussing the difference between [parties]. Republicans take candy out of their mouths that they decide they didn't want. That's what they have to offer: candy they've already sucked on [and] decided they don't want. [To son] A Democrat would let his mother take anything she wanted from the candy bag. ... The Democrats are us. Like Toys R Us: Democrats are us. Republicans suck. We should never be close to people that are Republicans because they don't take care of the poor, or black people or Hispanic people and they are not pro-women's rights. [To Salon] That's progressive. The Democrats have been eating shit this whole year. It's been such a bad year to be a Democrat. I just feel like it's been so great to have a good night, to have a few upsets. I'm just so happy. I think it's going to change the whole course of the impeachment proceedings. It's a real slap in the face to that prick Henry Hyde. Of course he got reelected. He's the incumbent, so he got reelected. But it doesn't really matter because his platform didn't get embraced. It's like people just said, "Stop. Bore us later. We don't give a shit. We're really, really concerned about real things." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The spin out of Washington tomorrow morning is going to be that this represents a huge sea change for California politics. But the truth is that Gray Davis ran a very status quo campaign. He ran as a fiscal conservative who is tough on crime. You couldn't have gotten him to talk about illegal immigration or affirmative action if you put a gun to his head. So he ran a very effective race as a moderate Republican. As a whole, across the country, however, the Democrats clearly did much better than expected. Back in January, tonight's outcome would have seemed very reasonable. But two months ago, it looked like Republicans were poised to do much, much better than this. What happened was that Monica Lewinsky ended up having a significant effect on the race, but a much different one than people anticipated. Back in early September, when the campaigns were making strategic decisions about how to run their races, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal looked like it was going to create huge problems for Democratic candidates. So it created a false sense of optimism for Republicans. When that tide went back out, the numbers went down. It looks like Bill Clinton wasn't the only one seduced by Monica Lewinsky this year. I'm not arguing that the campaigns should have been run more or less on the scandal. But when you're looking at polls that show a candidate eight or nine points ahead, who under other circumstances would probably be even, or at polls showing the candidate even, who without the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal would probably be running several points behind, you make different kinds of decisions than you would under other circumstances. In a way, the Republicans were too complacent. I go back to the decision over the budget. The Republican congressional leadership made a decision not to go to war with Clinton over the budget because they believed that it would shift attention away from the scandal. So as a result, they didn't fight for tax cuts, for school vouchers and for other conservative causes. So when the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal moved off the front pages, they were left with neither the scandal or the issues and it you saw the effect it had on the Republican base. As far as the Senate race went, Barbara Boxer won in 1992 because she was a woman, no more, no less. She won this time because she ran a tough, nasty, ugly campaign, the kind of campaign that either a man or a woman could have run and won. The shift in the polls came when she went on the air with the series of very nasty negative ads against Fong. And Fong did not respond directly until last week. The revelation of his contributions [to a right-wing group] wasn't really important. The biggest impact it had was that it kept him from talking about his issues to the press for a period of several days, but I don't think a lot of votes changed from one side to the other as a result. The most encouraging results tonight for Republicans are the victories in the governors' races. There are a number of Republican governors across the country who ran as conservatives, but as pragmatic conservatives, able to work with members of the other party and get things done. Like George W. Bush, George Pataki, Tommy Thompson, George Bush referred to himself as a "compassionate conservative." If there's a lesson for Republicans in this election, it's that the way to win the White House is to follow the examples set by the Republican governors who have governed as conservatives, but have also governed pragmatically. They're able to reach across party lines. That's a balance that a presidential candidate could do real well with. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If the exit polls that show Boxer winning the Asian-American vote are true, it shows a maturing of the Asian-American vote, in that a majority of Asian-Americans went with someone according to issues, as opposed to ethnicity. But I would put a big question mark next to the validity of those numbers at this point. I know that there were Chinese-American groups doing their own exit polls biIingually, and I would wait to see the results of those before deciding whether or not the Asian-American vote and the Chinese-American vote overall went one way or another. I think that [the revelations that Fong made a contribution to a right-wing group] may have swayed some Asian-American Democrats who were on the fence. There was probably a core of Chinese-American voters who would have voted for Fong regardless of what he did. My guess is it swayed Chinese-American voters a little less than it did moderate voters. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
You can't know about voter turnout until 90 or 100 percent of returns are in. So we can't say much yet. We know Kentucky turnout is way up, Indiana is slightly down. California is probably up, too. But we just have fragmentary results. Back in 1984, Reagan won by a landslide. But in the turnout world it was a cliffhanger. It wasn't until the next morning I could finally say, by a small fraction, turnout had actually gone up. The one thing I can say: It does appear that there is some impeachment impact on this election. Elderly people and blacks were clearly mobilized. I can't explain Carol Moseley-Braun still being close any other way. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The most deeply disturbing thing about this whole campaign is the spin from the media. The election has been a referendum on the pundits. There's a profound disconnect between them and the voters. It's interesting to listen to them scuffling to recapture the ball and spin the outcome as if they were somehow ahead of it. The Republican landslide, the low voter turnout -- they acted like they knew what was going to happen, but they didn't know. The notion that Clinton and Lewinsky's pseudo-affair was going to drive the votes wasn't borne out, or if it was, it was people voting Democratic to voice their disgust. They wanted this Clinton affair to be ignored and no one would listen to them. People voted their interest and their outrage. The last year has proved that the myth of the liberal media is just that -- a myth. And with all the political turmoil in the last years, I have been heartened by the average American citizen. But you watch the reporters hyperventilating self-righteously, huffing, puffing, ignoring polls, and clearly they're out of touch. The whole notion that we elect our politicians as moral leaders is absurd: it's possible to be a political leader and have a personal life that one doesn't agree with. If all these pundits can't accept that, I expect them to repudiate Tommy Jefferson. Responding to David Horowitz's comment that black voters vote like a communist country, giving one party 90 percent of the vote, I give little credence to the analysis of an embittered former leftist. The consistency in the African-American vote has to do with an ongoing belief in democratic principles and very little to do with our being communists. When people are opportunistic and turn from leftism and become conservatives, that's considered sane, but when people are deeply wedded to democratic principles and stay Democrats, that's considered politically correct. Many of these races, like Schumer and Hollings, show the strength of the black vote. Let us hope that African-Americans will hold the politicians accountable. We are a profoundly cynical and pragmatic people and we go for the evil we know and not the evil we don't know. The untold story in African-Americans' continuing to support Clinton is that we have a historical reason to assume that whoever comes after him will be worse. Pay me! Pay me, that's my cry. African-Americans are often depicted as saps of the Democratic Party. It is assumed that we will be supportive and we don't need to be paid off. But every black elected official, the congressional Black Caucus and the ministers should be on the phone tomorrow saying, This is what we want and this is what we need. |
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