GOP’s grim shutdown legacy: How the 1995 debacle turned states blue

[DonViejo]

Don't buy the spin that Republicans didn't pay for their previous shutdown. They're still feeling the effects today

BY STEVE KORNACKI

Gallup has corralled a bunch of polling data from 1995 and 1996 to test the familiar interpretation that Democrats “won” and Republicans “lost” the last government shutdown. The suggestion: It’s a myth – neither side received a measurable boost or paid a meaningful price in public opinion. The implication: Assumptions that today’s GOP is flirting with serious electoral fallout are rooted in a misreading of history and may be wildly off-base.

It’s hard to argue with numbers like these, but I’m going to try. Not because I disagree with the conclusion. My view is that Republicans will pay at best a limited price for the current shutdown in the 2014 midterms, and possibly no direct price at all. But the reason I think this is not because they skated in ’96; it’s because I believe they did pay a price that year, and have been paying it ever since. That the damage they suffered from what happened in the ‘90s was critical to reshaping American politics in a way that makes today’s Republican elected officials largely immune to electoral blowback for stunts like this.

Let’s start by remembering the context of 1995. The year began with both parties convinced a historic shift was playing out before their eyes. The 1994 midterms had been a shocking rout for the GOP, which picked up 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. No one had seen it coming. The Democratic Congress was supposed to be a permanent fact of life; it had been 40 years since Republicans had controlled the chamber.

It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which the ’94 GOP revolution shook the political class. Bill Clinton was immediately dismissed as a one-term president. The main question was whether he’d bow to the inevitable and decline to seek reelection, or if it would take a primary challenge to dislodge him. When we think of midterm tsunamis today, we probably think of 2010, when the political world reacted with relative calm and caution. But that was only because we all remembered how Clinton had recovered after ’94. But no such point of reference existed back in ’94, so it was assumed that the result signaled many more electoral disasters to come for the Democrats.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/03/gops_grim_shutdown_history_how_the_1995_debacle_turned_states_blue/

[DinahMoeHum]

2. Remember this spark to the fire, courtesy of the NY Daily News. . .

THIS is what started the swirlies, ie. circling the drain for Gingrich:

[sofa king]

3. I saw it firsthand.

In the late 1990s--and I'm talking at least three years after Newt Gingrich stole Christmas from government workers, I worked for and with numerous federal offices that had a firm policy of never returning calls from Republican Members of Congress.

As it was explained to me by one government librarian, her vacation was stolen by Republicans and her office had been chronically underfunded ever since. Since 100 percent of all inquiries and requests could not be answered due to low funding and staff, she automatically excluded all Republican requests, since it was the Republicans who created that situation. That library was very important to Members of Congress because at the time it was the only place that could do a particular thing--and Republicans couldn't do that particular thing for four years and probably another ten after that, too.

I saw that same sort of practice in half a dozen other places. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had so thoroughly written off the Republicans that as soon as they got control of Congress during the Bush debacle, they passed a law that required all incoming phone calls to the Department of the Interior to be answered by a human--because no human had returned their calls since 1995.

Indian tribes looking to endorse candidates--a lot of them Republican candidates in the 1990s--had a "do not fund" list based upon the government shutdown votes, because virtually all Republicans who voted for that also repeatedly voted to de-tribalize Indians in the same decade (the "Istook bills," if anyone cares to remember).

By the early 2000s, virtually all of them, including Gingrich himself, were long gone.

It occurs to me that Republicans in Congress may lack the institutional memory of the fallout from that shutdown, because it changed out most of the Republicans in Congress in fewer than eight years.

It's going to happen again, only this time, the votes won't be forgotten, and the people personally damaged by the Republicans are much more capable of causing Republicans severe damage. Nothing Republicans can do at this point can save them from that, either. The results will effectively undo the institutional gains Republicans tried to make in the Executive Branch, which makes this event at least as important as the departure of Bush and Cheney in the rebuilding of the United States.

I couldn't be happier about it, to tell the truth. This is precisely what President Obama needed in order to launch a 50-state House-cleaning effort next year, with a view toward regaining control of Congress and cementing the President's long-delayed agenda--whatever that is.