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POLITICS
The GOP's Hunger
Will 2010 be another 1994?
The most startling scene in HouseQuake, the new documentary about the 2006 midterm election directed by Karen Price, isn't even on film. It's a story told by Naftali Bendavid, author of The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution. In the film, Bendavid recounts an incident at the end of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, when staff members gathered to celebrate victory.
"Most were feeling good and giddy," Bendavid reports. "Emanuel picked up a knife and started stabbing it into the table, yelling out names of people who had opposed Clinton.
"He would say, 'So-and-So. [Stab.] Dead! So-and-So. [Stab.] Dead! So-and-So. [Stab.] Dead!' And he kept going until he had named all of Clinton's enemies as he perceived them."
Ruthless, indeed. "I have a degenerative gene, an intensity level that others don't have," Emanuel says in the film.
That is certainly part of the story of the Democrats' spectacular comeback in the last midterm. That's not the whole story, though. Emanuel, who in 2006 headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, goes on to say, "I didn't care where a [House] seat came from. It's not like I had a preference for one geography over another, one ideology over another. I only cared about [gaining] 15 [seats]. That was the magic number."
Republicans are looking toward 2010 with the same hunger and anticipation that Democrats felt three years ago -- and that they themselves felt 16 years ago after four decades in the minority. "In terms of candidate recruitment, fundraising, and issue development, we are far ahead of where we were at this point in 1993," Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told the conservative website Human Events. "And you remember what happened in 1994."
"In terms of candidate recruitment, fundraising, and issue development, we are far ahead of where we were at this point in 1993." -- Rep. Pete Sessions
Will 2010 be another 1994? What gives Republicans hope is the falloff in President Obama's job-approval ratings. The Gallup Poll reports that his approval ratings averaged 53 percent in the third quarter, down from 62 percent in the second. Gallup calls that "one of the largest quarter-to-quarter drops for any first-year president."
Obama's troubles are real. The latest CNN poll conducted by Opinion Research shows a big jump in the number of Americans who say they disagree with him "on the issues that matter" to them, from 41 percent in April to 51 percent in October.
But Obama's troubles do not seem to be doing the GOP much good. In the CNN poll, only 36 percent of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, the worst rating since December 1998, when House Republicans voted to impeach President Clinton. Asked recently by the ABC News/Washington Post poll how they would vote if the congressional election were held today, respondents gave Democrats a 51 percent to 39 percent lead over Republicans. That's bigger than the Democrats' lead in November 2006.
Why can't the GOP capitalize on Obama's difficulties? Here's one reason: The Republican Party is becoming more and more of a conservative movement party. In a movement, you have to agree on everything -- taxes, abortion, gay rights, health care reform, Iraq, school vouchers, everything. If you don't, you're not part of the movement. Political parties are supposed to be coalitions. To be part of a coalition, you have to agree on only one thing: You're for the party's candidate. No further questions asked.
Look at what's happening in next week's special election in New York's 23rd District, where upstate voters haven't sent a Democrat to Congress in more than 100 years. Many Republicans are rallying behind Doug Hoffman, the nominee of the Conservative Party, not the moderate Republican nominee. Last week, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman, saying, "Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: No more politics as usual." Maybe no more Republican House member from that district, either. Two late-October polls show the Democratic nominee leading the three-way race.
Emanuel's lesson is that to win elections a party can't become an exclusive club. It must be a broad coalition. As he says in HouseQuake of his 2006 strategy, "There was no sentiment in this. It was pure winning."