Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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These two articles in the New Republic appear to have inspired today’s David Brooks column. The TNR gang wonders if the strategies that helped Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s could work for Democrats today.

Brooks is doubtful.

The Democratic Gingrichians are different. They feel that Social Security is to Bush what health care reform was to Clinton - the big overreach that will allow the opposing party to deliver a devastating blow to the president, and maybe even regain control of Congress.

Their core belief is that Republicans have won of late because they have been ruthless and disciplined while Democrats have been responsible and wimpy. It is time, the neo-Gingrichians say, to scorch the earth. "I believe that the Republican majority has acted in such a dictatorial fashion that a full-scale revolt is the only solution," the Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson told Michael Crowley of The New Republic.

That means waging a Gingrich-style war on the entire Congressional power structure. That means furiously opposing every other Bush initiative. That means giving up any hope of trying to work with Republicans, but staging an all-out effort to crush and delegitimize them.

Any Democratic effort to emulate the Republican strategy that led to 1994 ought to recognize that those mid-term elections came amidst a perfect storm for the Republicans.

Bill Clinton rode into Washington with a stack full of promises, and promptly began to fight on all the wrong issues. After campaigning on cutting taxes for the middle class, Clinton and the Democrats raised taxes. Welfare reform, the epitome of the president’s New Democrat bonafides, was put on the back burner. He got into a culturally alienating fight with the Pentagon over gays in the military. Hillary’s leadership style on the health care plan alienated members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Les Aspin resigned as Secretary of Defense after he refused to authorize the use of tanks to support a mission in Somalia. Clinton had to ask for Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders’ resignation after she recommended teaching teenage boys something many of them figure out on their own. The Clinton gang looked like a bunch of amateurs, incapable of running the government.

Finally, there was what I consider the hidden issue: the cancellation of the 1994 World Series after Clinton had invited the owners and the players’ union to the White House to continue negotiations. Clinton looked impotent when the public just wanted him to take the billionaires and the millionaires and knock their heads together. What better sign was there that the world had gone haywire than a baseball season that ended with no champion? Voters went to the polls angry, and took it out on the Democrats’ party.

If in 2006, there is a similar sense that the Bush administration has failed and flopped in most of its policy initiatives, then there may be a similar widespread dissatisfaction that Democrats could ride to power. Of course, Democrats thought they had that widespread disapproval of Bush this year – and promptly lost House and Senate seats.

First lesson for the Democrats? Stop fooling themselves into thinking that they are doing better than they are.

UPDATE: More than a few TKS readers observe that the House banking scandal helped Newt Gingrich portray the Democratic House leaders as a bunch of corrupt fatcats (even though some Republicans, including Dennis Hastert and Dick Cheney, also had overdrafts). The New Republic contends this was small potatoes - "what amounted to small, interest-free loans to members."

The gist of the TNR argument is that Democrats will emulate Newt's tactics by accusing GOP leaders of corruption, like the recent attacks on DeLay.

[Posted 01/18 12:20 PM]