Winners And Losers In The American Midterm Elections
There were two big winners of Tuesday's U.S. election and two big losers. The winners: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The losers: Newt Gingrich and Al Gore.
Mr. Clinton is a winner because the election result has quashed virtually any possibility that he will be impeached, or even held answerable, for his perjuries in the Paula Jones sex harassment case and before Ken Starr's grand jury. Within 48 hours of the vote, Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde had decided to truncate his Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings dramatically: They will very likely be wrapped up by Christmas, with the Republicans calling only one witness, Ken Starr. Best guess: The committee will vote in favor of one or two articles of impeachment, but they will languish on the House floor and never reach the Senate for trial. Once more in his astonishing career, Bill Clinton has beaten the rap.
Newt Gingrich is a loser for an equal and opposite reason. It was Mr. Gingrich who -- in conjunction with the equally hopeless Trent Lott, Republican majority leader in the Senate - made the fatal decision to surrender to Mr. Clinton on the budget and on taxes so that they could turn the 1998 election into a referendum on the perjury scandal and only the perjury scandal. The Romans advised that statesmen should be suaviter in modo, fortiter in re -- gentle but firm. Mr. Gingrich is exactly the opposite: Strident but weak.
The rebellion against his leadership has already begun: U.S. newspapers carried the story the next morning that Bob Livingstone, the powerful Louisiana congressman who chairs the appropriations committee, had suggested that Mr. Gingrich quit. Who do you suppose told the papers that story? And do you think he would have done it if he feared that Mr. Gingrich still possessed the power to punish rebels against him?
George Bush Jr. is a winner -- the winner of a 69% landslide in the second-most populous state in the country (it passed New York in 1994). With his immense popularity at home, his father's fundraising network at his fingertips and his experience as the de facto chief of staff of the Bush White House, he must now be reckoned far and away the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And Republicans almost always stick with their front runners.
It may be surprising to hear Al Gore described as a loser. He is, after all, the number two man in the most successful Democratic administration since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's. But Mr. Gore is running some 20 points behind George Bush Jr. in CNN's presidential preference polls -- an amazing gap for a sitting vice president.
And those numbers reflect something real. Winning the presidency is like assembling a big jigsaw puzzle: A successful candidate must win 268 of 535 electoral college votes. With Republicans holding the governorships of eight of the 10 biggest states (California is the one great Democratic stronghold), George W. Bush will begin with a daunting advantage. If he were to pick as his running mate one of the three Republican big-state governors who won by more than 10% of the vote yesterday (Pataki of New York, Engler of Michigan, or Ridge of Pennsylvania) and assuming he can count on Florida, where younger brother Jeb Bush was just elected governor with 57% of the vote, he will be one-third of the way to the presidency before he shakes his first hand.
But Mr. Gore's troubles go beyond the mechanics of the U.S. electoral system. The fact that Americans oppose impeaching Clinton does not mean that they agree with Democrats that the man should be let off scot-free. While only about one-third of Tuesday's voters wanted to see Clinton impeached, more than 60% of the voters agreed that he should be punished in some way. And if nothing much happens to him in the next session of Congress, then the only way left to punish him will be by casting a ballot against his colleague, henchman and partner in illegal fundraising: Al Gore.
Don't you remember in high school that there was always a basically good kid who tried to ingratiate himself with the local hood? And don't you remember, too, how whenever the authorities finally cracked down, it was always the basically good kid who found himself left inside the candy store as the cops arrived, while the hood made his escape? That's Gore's predicament -- and it's why despite the debacle of 1998, 2000 will be a big Republican year.