Look at it from House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s standpoint. His Contract With America not only helped to restore GOP control of the Congress but did so by electing a freshman class of young Republicans committed to downsizing the federal government and bringing the budget into quick balance. Why shouldn’t he have threatened to “shut down the government for a month” if that’s what it took to force President Clinton to give up his resistance to the Republican budget proposals. After all, the Republicans had a mandate to carry out their pledge.
But did they? Robert Theobald says they had no such thing. What looked like an historic Republican victory–the basis of the “mandate”–was more accurately a Democratic loss.
Is the New Orleans-based futurist splitting semantic hairs? He doesn’t think so.
“It is only as one looks beyond America’s borders that one can see the distinction. Incumbent governments throughout the world are profoundly unpopular. Indeed, the dominant party in Canada was essentially wiped out in their last election.
“Throughout the world, citizens feel that the policies of the party in power are failing. It does not matter whether they are left or right.”
Theobald is not the first observer to note that the 1994 GOP electoral victory was less than a mandate. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, for example, recently pointed out that the victory amounted to 52 percent of the vote in House elections for which only 39 percent of the electorate turned out. Not quite revolutionary, that.
But Theobald’s point has less to do with the size of the vote than what he sees as its essential message: The incumbents are missing the point.
“There is a broad and deep sense that nobody speaks for the average citizen who wants real issues addressed and less time spent on ideological fads,” he told me the other day. “This is the real reason Gen. Colin Powell spoke so clearly to so many people; he was not willing to pander to the extremist positions which dominate the airwaves and the press.”
There are two points in that–and it’s far from clear what can be done about either of them. The more commented upon point is the recent tendency of office-seekers to drive the issues to extremes–to draw sharper distinctions than the voters feel on issues ranging from welfare to abortion to the size of government. As the response to Powell’s almost-candidacy showed, most voters flop around in the middle, moving to one extreme or another only when politicians cut out the middle ground.
The other point is that there are “real issues” that are going unaddressed. Are there?
Theobald’s answer, no doubt influenced by his own ideological leanings, is a ringing “Yes.”
“At least a quarter of American adults are ready for forward-looking change,” he says. “They are aware that the patterns of the industrial age must change dramatically if a high quality of life is to be achieved. There is an acceptance of the ecological realities which require the end of our commitment to maximum economic growth and maximum employment. People are willing to pay for higher environmental standards with money, so long as the burden is fairly shared. They are also willing to earn less income as the cost of purchasing more leisure.”
Even assuming Theobald is right about our yearnings, how does one give them political voice? The most obvious answer is, if Republicans and Democrats care mostly about dividing us: a third party.
Theobald isn’t that hopeful. “At the current time, the probable pattern of third party organization is going to be through getting out the anti-vote. It is going to appeal primarily to negative forces, and it is going to look back to the past. It will fail to face the real questions which are emerging at the end of the 20th Century any better than either of the current parties.”
So where would he turn for relief? To us, as individuals “doing what we can in our own niche, not knowing how our actions will play out, but acting as though we can change our culture in ways that make sense given today’s dramatically changed realities.”
