Is Bill Clinton’s Lasting Political Legacy Going to Be the Resurrection of the GOP?

Overemphasis on President Bill Clinton’s individual failures--in health reform, foreign policy and moral leadership--clouds our understanding of what could be his most significant 1993-94 political impact: the extraordinary rebuilding of the Republican Party and the serious dislocation of U.S. liberalism. Barring a surprise in Haiti, Clinton is doing for liberalism what Jim Jones did for Kool-Aid.

The political reversal has been stunning since George Bush left office in January, 1993, after getting just 37.5% of setback the vote--the lowest for any Republican President since 1912. Earlier, Bush’s job approval had set another modern record by plummeting 60 points in 15 months--from 90% in March, 1991, after the Gulf War, to just 30% in midsummer, 1992.

But now the GOP is storming back, with a string of 1993-94 off-year and special-election victories unprecedented for the party out of power, and the prospect of operational, and perhaps official, control of the U.S. House and Senate. If Republicans make even a modest version of the November gains predicted, Clinton will confront the largest number of congressional Republicans to face a Democratic President since 1952.

This may not be altogether bad for the President, but it is bleak news for the U.S. liberal agenda, which faces a Siberian winter for the next year or two. What’s remarkable, though, is how the Democrats are following the same counterproductive political-sitcom script they’ve followed most of the last half century: Elect a President from a border state or the South with a taste for cronyism, frequently with a brother out of a L’il Abner cartoon, a tendency toward ideological compromise and military ineptitude, a manner that grates on many voters and a diplomatic style that produces snickers in the global community.

Harry S. Truman of Missouri, President from 1945 to 1952, begins the list. The roster should also include Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and his brother, Sam Houston Johnson; Jimmy Carter of Georgia with his brother, Billy, and now Clinton of Arkansas with his brother, Roger. During these presidencies, the holiday White House has shifted to centers of gravitas like Johnson City, Texas; Plains, Ga., and Hot Springs, Ark.

Scandals and conflicts of interest have been epidemic since Truman’s term, usually involving mink coats, 5% rake-offs, deep freezes, family broadcasting stations, peanut deals, country banks, commodity straddles and good ol’ boy law firms. Truman, Johnson and Carter all botched wars or military actions--the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis with its failed U.S. rescue attempt. Because voters were unimpressed, all three faced strong renomination challenges.

Such is the unfortunate regional and philosophic tradition from which the Democratic Party chose Clinton in 1992, but the latter so far has surpassed his predecessors. After his first 100 days, he had the lowest ratings of any newly elected chief executive since the invention of polling in the 1930s. His current ratings are near the lows for this point in a presidency; and he is the first Oval Office occupant to generate major scandals and lose the trust of the American people even before the first midterm elections.

Clinton has reduced the public’s faith in Washington below the levels achieved by Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Carter and Bush. Moreover, Haiti has the potential to be a historic first: the first invasion ordered over the opposition of much of the public--73%--by the first President accused of being a draft dodger.

The previous military miscarriages in Korea, Vietnam and Iran were all damaging to the Democratic Party, but were all ordered by Presidents who had themselves served as military officers. Compared with Clinton, a cynic could say that Truman, Johnson and Carter were Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas A. MacArthur and George S. Patton Jr.

So is all this about to be held against the Democratic Party? Probably. At least that’s what the polls and the special elections of the last 20 months seem to suggest. In fact, Clinton’s three border state-Southern predecessors did much the same thing. Truman’s unpopularity enabled the GOP to sweep the 1952 elections; Johnson’s multiple foul-ups allowed the GOP to resurrect itself from the 1964 Barry M. Goldwater disaster and elect Nixon in 1968. And national dissatisfaction with Carter paved the way for the stunning victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980, just six years after Nixon was forced to resign after Watergate.

In short, the resurrection of the GOP achieved by Clinton isn’t unprecedented. What is unusual, though, is the breadth and speed of the process. If Carter was a case of Geritol for the GOP of 1980, the Clinton Administration has been the equivalent of Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth. No one is praising the great sagacity, talent pool and leadership of the Republican Party--if the Vegetarians were the sole party on the ballot opposing Clinton, they’d probably be winning, too.

Therein lies the second half of the American political dilemma. The Republicans can be resurrected, but they can’t gain the lasting trust of the people. The Truman, Johnson and Carter failures produced the two- and three-term regimes of Eisenhower, Nixon-Gerald R. Ford and Reagan-Bush, but none of these could please the public enough to give the GOP a top-to-bottom national political supremacy. On the contrary, by 1992, when the GOP had held the White House for 20 out of the last 24 years, the party’s share of the presidential vote plummeted 16 points from its previous level in 1988.

Historically, that magnitude of decline has signaled a watershed and movement into a new era--as it did in 1932 and 1968. The point is that conservatives who believe Clinton’s failure was inevitable and that the GOP era is simply being renewed may be fooling themselves, like the Democrats did after Nixon resigned in 1974 and Carter won in 1976. Democrats generally assumed that they were back, that the Nixon years were a fluke and liberalism could resurrect its old rhetoric and blueprints. Carter’s defeat in 1980 proved the new era was real.

If the Republicans make major gains in November, as appears likely, they may make the same error. They may mistake Clinton’s personal failure as a mandate for a return to an ideology of domestic inaction and drift that the public rejected under Bush--and that also helped cut short previous GOP regimes. This kind of GOP record in Congress over the next two years could give Clinton just the 1996 whipping boy he needs. If the Democratic Party of the last half-century has continued to bounce along in a rut, arguably that is almost as true of the Republicans.

The time has come to face a basic truth. Disgusted American voters aren’t merely tired of Clinton and the Democratic Party. They’re angry at Washington and its entrenched political classes, they’re sick of the two-party duopoly and there’s some evidence that they’re also radicalizing toward support for a major overhaul of the U.S. political system. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this larger upheaval was the ultimate political consequence of the Clinton Administration?