Huff Post: Deal With It: 2008 Wasn't Anything Like 1933 or 1965

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-galston/deal-with-it-2008-wasnt-a_b_490354.html


William Galston Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution Posted: March 8, 2010 02:43 PM

While history never repeats itself, the past does offer useful benchmarks of comparison. Many otherwise sober observers discerned in the 2008 election results the harbinger of a new 1933, or least 1965. At the time, those analogies struck me as far-fetched, and nothing in the ensuing year has made them more plausible.

On the eve of the 1932 elections, Republicans held 218 seats in the House of Representatives. When all the returns came in, they had lost 101 seats, giving Democrats a 313-117 edge. In the Senate, similarly, Republicans began with 48 and lost 13, yielding a 60-35 Democratic majority. One might have thought that after such a sweep, the majority party would have nowhere to go but down. But in the 1934 midterms, the Democrats gained an additional nine seats in both the House and the Senate. For all practical purposes, the Republicans had ceased to exist as an effective opposition. When the dust settled after the 1936 election, they were down to 16 Senate seats and 88 in the House. President Roosevelt enjoyed unprecedented freedom of action. The only check on the New Deal-and it proved temporary-was the Supreme Court.

In 1964, Democrats won an additional 36 House seats, increasing their margin from 259-176 to 295-140-68 percent of the seats, and the largest House majority held by either party since 1936. In the Senate, Democrats began with 66 seats and ended up with 68. Like FDR in 1932, Lyndon Johnson won the popular vote in a landslide. And the Republican opposition was ideologically heterogeneous, with substantial numbers of moderates and liberals. More than half of House Republicans voted for Medicare, as did 43 percent of Senate Republicans.

2008, by contrast, was more like 1992. Bill Clinton won the presidency with a six percentage point margin in the popular vote. When he took his oath of office, he joined 258 Democrats in the House and 56 in Senate. Barack Obama's majority was seven points, and Democrats ended up with 257 House seats and 57 senators (58 when the protracted Minnesota struggle was resolved in their favor). To be sure, Obama helped add to the Democratic congressional majority, which Clinton had not. Still, the raw numbers did not give him substantially more freedom of maneuver than Clinton had enjoyed-in some ways less, given the routinization of the filibuster that had developed in the interim.

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[onehandle]

1. There is so much about all of this that reminds me of 1992.

The only difference is the impotent blind hatred of the racist Republicans and their gun-mad teabagger cousins.

I thought the mindless hatred of Bill Clinton was over the top.

I stand corrected.

[regnaD kciN]

2. Except for the not-so-minor difference...

...that Bill Clinton made health-care reform the centerpiece of his administration's agenda -- and couldn't even get it to come up for a congressional vote in either chamber.

We'll soon see if what brought about the 1994 "Republican Revolution" was Clinton's attempt to pass HCR...or his failure to do so.