Eleanor Clift: The 2010 Midterms are Looking a Lot Like the 1994 Election
[Eleanor Clift is contributing editor to Newsweek.]
Florida Senate candidate and tea-party darling Marco Rubio is riding the wave of what he calls "the single greatest pushback in American history." While his view of history and the impact of other populist movements can be debated, there's no doubt that Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts has thrust Senate Democrats into a deep panic. They complain they have no message and no leadership, and they're angry at their leader, Harry Reid, and at President Obama, when their own failure to act is a big part of the public's dissatisfaction with Washington....
The tea party is not all that different from earlier populist movements that served as vessels for anger on the right. A CNN/Opinion Research poll found its members tend to be male, rural, upscale, and overwhelmingly conservative, a more virulent version of the voters that identified with Ross Perot in 1992. When Clinton took office in '93 as a reformer wanting to use government to get the economy moving and the country out of recession (sound familiar?), he confronted a similar government backlash to what Obama faces today. Clinton attributed it to a combination of forces unleashed by the '60s, among them the anti-elitist fervor of his day. When defending segregation was no longer fashionable, George Wallace invented language that made government an object of scorn, deriding pointy-headed bureaucrats and tax-and-spend liberals....
Obama's tenure so far is strikingly similar to '93 and '94 when another young Democratic president entered office with high expectations and soon found himself down in the polls and battling a wave of conservative sentiment. The advisers around Obama would never admit it, but losing one or even both houses of Congress might be better for Obama than the gridlock paralyzing his agenda. History in our partisan age suggests that for a president to be truly successful and get big legislative achievements, a divided Congress may be necessary. Only then does each party have some stake in governing, and maneuvering room to compromise.
Clinton never would have been able to sign welfare reform if the Democrats controlled Congress, and the same is true of the balanced budget that Clinton achieved in '97... If Obama wants a jobs bill, he will have to go up to Capitol Hill and be engaged and tell the Democrats what he must have for his political survival—and for theirs, come November.
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Florida Senate candidate and tea-party darling Marco Rubio is riding the wave of what he calls "the single greatest pushback in American history." While his view of history and the impact of other populist movements can be debated, there's no doubt that Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts has thrust Senate Democrats into a deep panic. They complain they have no message and no leadership, and they're angry at their leader, Harry Reid, and at President Obama, when their own failure to act is a big part of the public's dissatisfaction with Washington....
The tea party is not all that different from earlier populist movements that served as vessels for anger on the right. A CNN/Opinion Research poll found its members tend to be male, rural, upscale, and overwhelmingly conservative, a more virulent version of the voters that identified with Ross Perot in 1992. When Clinton took office in '93 as a reformer wanting to use government to get the economy moving and the country out of recession (sound familiar?), he confronted a similar government backlash to what Obama faces today. Clinton attributed it to a combination of forces unleashed by the '60s, among them the anti-elitist fervor of his day. When defending segregation was no longer fashionable, George Wallace invented language that made government an object of scorn, deriding pointy-headed bureaucrats and tax-and-spend liberals....
Obama's tenure so far is strikingly similar to '93 and '94 when another young Democratic president entered office with high expectations and soon found himself down in the polls and battling a wave of conservative sentiment. The advisers around Obama would never admit it, but losing one or even both houses of Congress might be better for Obama than the gridlock paralyzing his agenda. History in our partisan age suggests that for a president to be truly successful and get big legislative achievements, a divided Congress may be necessary. Only then does each party have some stake in governing, and maneuvering room to compromise.
Clinton never would have been able to sign welfare reform if the Democrats controlled Congress, and the same is true of the balanced budget that Clinton achieved in '97... If Obama wants a jobs bill, he will have to go up to Capitol Hill and be engaged and tell the Democrats what he must have for his political survival—and for theirs, come November.