The election of Nov. 8, 1994 cannot be described accurately as anything other than a political revolution. On that day, the Republican Party ousted the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Republicans ended up with a net gain of 54 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 12 governorships.
Thirty-four Democratic House incumbents were defeated, including the powerful chairmen of the House Judiciary and Ways & Means Committees, both 35-year House veterans.
The senator expected to be the next senate majority leader was defeated. Iconic Gov. Mario Cuomo (D-New York) was defeated. House Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) became the first sitting speaker of the house since the Civil War to be defeated.
George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich and George Pataki became household names. Any way you look at it, the Democratic Party was steamrolled.
Now it's payback time, right? President Bush's approval rating is even lower than Bill Clinton's rating was in 1994. The Republican majority of 2006 is less than half the size of the Democratic one in 1994.
Fiscal conservatives are upset because government spending has spiraled to new heights under Bush, and the Christian Right is dismayed by Congress's failure to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Democratic voters can smell blood and will be turning out in droves. Gingrich himself has summed up the Democratic message to voters in two words: ""Had enough?""
However, taking back the Congress in a landslide may not be as easy as the Democrats think.
The 1994 election was more than the result of one election cycle. It was a culmination of a decades-long investment by the GOP to reverse their seemingly permanent minority status during the New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society years.
The reversal began with the ""southern strategy,"" employed in 1968, which elected Richard Nixon and flipped the South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. Phase two was the Reagan Revolution of 1980, which saw the rise of the new right-wing GOP and the all-but-extinction of liberal Republicanism. Election '94 was simply the third and final act.
The Republicans won in 1994 because of a party-wide, national message known as the Contract with America. The important part of the contract was not the specific policy proposals but rather the innate promise of a new moral order under GOP leadership.
The Democratic majority had become corrupt and increasingly complacent after years of congressional domination. Taxes were high; government was bloated; rates of crime, drug use, and teen pregnancy were spiking; the surgeon general wanted to discuss masturbation in public schools; and the first signs of scandal were creeping into the Clinton White House.
Republicans, on the other hand, were small government, tough on crime and socially conservative. The ""Silent Majority"" coined by Nixon in '68 was primed by '94 to snap back the liberals who had run the show for decades.
The spirit of change is present again in 2006, but it's not quite the same spirit as 1994. Twelve years ago was a revolution against everything the Democratic Party stood for. This year is a potential revolution against the mayhem in Iraq, the botching of the Hurricane Katrina recovery and the corruption in Congress. In other words, all events of the last two years.
Voters are upset about issues, but are they disgusted enough with the very idea of Republicanism to vote them out en masse? And even if they were, why should they vote Democratic when several Democrats are themselves under investigation for corruption? Plus, the Democratic Party still cannot offer a non-contortionist answer to any question about Iraq.
Creating a lasting political shift takes decades of money and organizing and can't be thrown together in just two years.
In this cycle, the democrats may indeed come out on top. But if they do, they should not call it a political revolution a la 1994. Election 1994 was for the Republicans the pinnacle of their rise to power. If the Democrats win, Election 2006 will only be the beginning.
