5. So the era of foreign crises is over & the economy is slumping, voters decide to take a flier on a Southern D with no foreign policy background, some nods to not being a Mondale/Dukakis liberal. He hugely overreaches, GOP wins a House/Senate/GOVs/Mayors landslide in 1993-94.
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16. BUT it still feels to a lot of people like a story about sex; current mores on sexual harassment were not what they are now, in spite of the Thomas-Hill hearings (where polls during/after hearings showed large public majorities believed Thomas).
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17. Impeachment almost totally derails the 1996 dynamic of bipartisanship. 1998-99 legislative calendars much more modest after a 1997 compromise to cut the capital gains tax. Economy is in overdrive.
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18. Clinton throws some missiles at Saddam & bin Laden on days he needs a distraction (day of his grand jury testimony, day of impeachment vote), but country's at peace. Voters think it's nuts to tear the government in half over all this.
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19. BUT they also think Clinton is by this point an incurably reckless sex maniac who would lie to them about anything. They're happy with the job he's doing but a whole lot of people are sick of explaining blow jobs to their kids.
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20. 1998 midterms, with impeachment in the air, are a big disappointment to GOP by midterm standards, but also a stalemate: GOP loses just 4 House seats, no change in Senate majority. On top of this, scandal forces out both Newt & his replacement, Bob Livingston.
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21. Livingston lasts all of 48 hours; Republicans throw him under the bus just as they are voting for impeachment. Democrats as a whole rally in tribal fashion around Clinton.
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22. While the Senate votes 55-45 to acquit Clinton on the perjury charge, there's 50 votes to remove him from office for obstruction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/articles122098.htm#full3 …pic.twitter.com/A6H3Zchpth
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23. Clinton partisans do jigs over him getting off scot-free. Democrats nominate his VP, who had led the pep rally on the WH lawn. GOP nominates GW Bush, who evokes a cleaner, grownup White House but also (unlike McCain, his primary foe) conspicuously stayed out of impeachment.
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24. In 2000, following the traditional post-incumbent dynamic but helped along by the drag of the scandal itself, Bush beats Gore, creating the red-blue map we know today by a big swing in socially conservative states.
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25. Scandal puts Gore in a lose-lose: voters are tired of the stink, but it makes him gunshy about embracing Clinton, & he picks a running mate who had been one of Clinton's harshest critics. (Bush picks Cheney, who'd also stayed out of impeachment fights).
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26. Win for GOP, right? But not so fast. House majority erodes by another 2 seats in 2000, Dems pick up 4 Senate seats so that a single defection could - and does - strip Republicans of the majority. Only in 2002, post-9/11, does the Congressional GOP turn the page.
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27. If you weren't there, it's easy to forget how much of Bush's 2000 campaign - "compassionate conservatism," stresses on his bipartisan record in Texas - was running against the GOP Congress, just as his evocations of the dignity of the WH ran against Slick Willie.
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28. It's perilous to overdraw conclusions from 1998-99: the party electorates are much more polarized now. Nobody thinks in terms of the kinds of bipartisan stuff that got done between 1995 & 2004.
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29. But what we know is that Clinton's impeachment damaged & degraded both sides, Clinton & his team over the scandal, Congressional Republicans over their response; the voters hated it & turned to somebody who stayed out of the whole mess.
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30. In 2020, staying out is not an option. Trump's up for re-election. Biden is part of the scandal. Warren, Sanders, & Harris would all have to vote on removing Trump from office. Even if the same pox-on-both-sides attitude emerges again, there's no obvious place for it to go.
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