The Sixties was a term invokable any time some nut shot another person or TV got
Posted in General on 20. Jul, 2010
“The Sixties” was a term invokable any time some nut shot another person, or TV got violent, or writers were more sexually explicit than Gingrich had been in his own mildly racy novel.Yet the very speed with which he drove the Contract through the House began to look like an empty exercise as things bogged down in the Senate. As he told a group of Young Republicans: “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” The obverse of sugarcoating one’s own proposals was to drench the other side in the language of revulsion. Opponents were not just wrong but vicious, corrupt, grotesque, sick, or insane – favourite Gingrich adjectives. If money was needed to pass the Contract, that was justified by the fact that the Contract was the people’s will. The alleged mandate excused any tactics needed for its implementation In this way, the Contract became a money-washing machine.
Dirty cash, processed through it, came out clean.Gingrich likes to think of politics as war (or a war movie). Perot had inveighed against incumbents who became tools of the Gucci-shod lobbyists. Yet no one has done more to butter up the lobbies than Gingrich. Money-raising by congressional officeholders has far surpassed all Democratic equivalents, giving members a big head start for their races in the presidential-election year.After years of attacking Democrats’ corrupt use of incumbency to please lobbyists, Gingrich came not to destroy but to perfect that practice – and to carry it to new heights His excuse was revolutionary necessity. Term limits had to be included in the Contract, since they were especially popular with the key Perot voters. He said his model was Sergeant Stryker, the John Wayne character in Sands of Iwo Jima, who must be hard on his troops so they will perform well in battle.Those Congressmen tempted to falter under the Gingrich discipline were lured back by the extraordinary access to money he was providing Here is the second major irony of the Revolution.
When some Republicans in the House were tempted to waver, Gingrich held them to the Contract – and, through them, required the people to “keep their bargain”. Yet despite the Republican National Committee’s expenditure ($265,000) to disseminate the Contract in TV Guide form, only 17 per cent of voters said they were aware of it. Those who knew about it were hazy on its contents.There is no denying the effectiveness of the Contract as a campaign tool It probably did sway a marginal portion of the voters. But only those bemused by a metaphor can think that the American people entered into a binding compact.
The Contract language was invented to please people tired of politics as usual. “See,” it said, “we are not your normal politicians making promises; we are contracting with you to do what you want and if we fail to do it, throw us out”.If voters fell for that hocus-pocus, well and good for the Republicans. But Gingrich was so in love with his own invention that he fell for it himself. Gingrich wanted to hold the American people to a contractual obligation they supposedly assumed when they voted Republican. Terminological sugar-coating would be important throughout the Revolution. All they determine is who will be carrying out policy for a while.If a presidential mandate is shadowy at best, what can one expect of a congressional “mandate,” assembled from so many different regional contests, embodied in no single spokesperson, reflecting agendas and urgencies not universally shared? It is one of the many ironies of Gingrich’s movement that, while professing to return government to state and local levels, he urged candidates at those levels to run a national campaign, restricting their campaign themes to those dictated by his national “brain trust”.More important than the items included in the Contract were those excluded.
Divisive issues were suppressed for the duration of the campaign – abortion, school prayer, gun ownership The point was to concentrate on areas of maximum agreement The goal was to win. After getting control of the Senate and House, Gingrich assured the restive, Republicans could reward their friends, take care of the gun lobby, cut off funds for abortion and so on.Once the issues were chosen, the pollster Frank Luntz was asked to find the most seductive ways of phrasing each point. He found that even the word “Republican” was too divisive for inclusion, so the Republican Contract became just the Contract With America. No one had ever before tried to create a national mandate from congressional elections Yet elections are clumsy tools for setting policy. A master of destructive techniques, he did not suspect that mere destruction destroys itself. A quick-change artist, he thought he could change society with political tools, which is like changing the weather with a thermometer.It would be hard to overstate the audacity of Gingrich’s Contract With America.