The Daily - How 1994 Gave Us Today’s Politics

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

To understand the divisions that define this year’s midterm elections, you have to go back to the midterm elections of 1994. We look at the moment when exploiting differences of opinion became a winning political strategy. Guests: Jennifer Senior, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, speaks to Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. To understand the divisions that define this year's midterms, you have to go back to the midterm election of 1994. My colleague, opinion columnist Jennifer Senior, on the moment when exploiting differences of opinion became a winning political strategy. It's Thursday, October 25th.

So, back in 1994, I was a cub reporter on Capitol Hill. With resignation. I was covering Congress. But with resolve. And this happened to be the exact same year. I hereby end 40 years of Democratic rule of this House. That Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. I now have the high honor and distinct privilege to present to the House of Representatives.

And the architect of Representatives. And the architect of that particular takeover was our new speaker, the gentleman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich. When we and the president can agree, we ought to get things signed. When we and the president deeply disagree, we ought to get things vetoed. Newt Gingrich was this shrewd. I recognize sadly. Ambitious. That the Washington press corps is all too often the Praetorian Guard of the left. Combative congressman from Georgia. It tells you something about how out of touch they are with the American people. And how much will you cooperate with the Democrats?

Well, I think we should be judged on whether or not our ideas are better for America. So back in those days, I spent time with his aides, with other Republican leadership aides. And one day I was talking to one of the top Republican aides. I'm pretty sure we were in the Capitol building itself. And he kept using the same term. He kept repeating over and over again the term wedge issues. And I was not sure I had ever heard of it. But what became totally clear was that this was part of the plan to retaining the Republican majority. Wedge issues.

The desecration of the flag of the United States of America is akin to walking out in the street and punching someone in the nose. Some of their favorites. Marriage is something very specific. It always has been. Gay marriage. It's not an arbitrary thing to say that it has to be a man and a woman, which was by no means at the top of the Democratic agenda. Will we vote to defend and protect the women and future children of this nation? Also, a late term abortion procedure that is technically

called intact dilation and extraction, which Republicans would start to refer to as partial birth abortions. Partial birth abortions are never, never needed to preserve the life or fertility of the mother. So the idea was to induce extraordinary discomfort in Democrats by daring them basically to defend policies that most Americans, at least at the time, opposed. And I was thinking about this lately because... Excuse me, are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? President Trump. How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. He is more or less a wedge-issued generating

machine. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. From the moment he started campaigning. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. Right into his presidency. We're going to build the wall. We have no choice. We have no choice. And now, here it is again. The Trump administration officials are

considering legally defining gender as somebody's biological sex at birth. A move that could jeopardize the rights of more than a million transgender Americans. It's the midterm season. A different Republican Congress is again trying to stay in power. And what do I see just days away from voting? They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now. You know that as well as I do. And we're looking at it very seriously. This will be the election away from voting. They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now. You know that as well as I do. And we're looking at it very seriously. This will be the election of the caravan,

Kavanaugh, law and order, tax cuts, and common sense. That's what it is, common sense. Oh, hello. Hello. Congressman Weber. Hi, how are you doing? So I decided to call Vin Weber. Well, let me tell you, honestly, I thought we were going to make great gains in the 1994 election.

But I remember being with Newt maybe a week before the election or two weeks before the election, and he predicted with absolute certainty that we were going to take control of the House. How well did you get to know him and in what context? Oh, Newt and I were very, very close. In fact, I was considered his closest political confidant in the House during the 1980s. He and I argued about some things and we agreed on a lot of things, but we believed that there was a Republican majority out there and that we needed to pursue different strategies to turn it into a majority in the House of Representatives. So remember, we'd had 12 years of Republican presidency, eight years of Ronald Reagan and four years of George H.W. Bush. And we elected President Clinton in 1992. And Newt understood that in a midterm election with a Democrat in the White

House, there was a great opportunity for Republicans to win congressional seats. And we're here because we are taking the first steps. There are things, issues that the Republicans could run on. And we're taking them in a contract with the American people. And Newt devised a contract with America, which I worked with him on quite a bit to help give people something to talk about. Every item in our contract is supported by 60% or more of the American people. This is a contract with Americans for America.

But the main dynamic was... Good evening. President Clinton had done a number of things that aggravated the conservative base. Tonight I want to report to you on the progress we've made. And they turned out to vote, and Newt saw that that was going to give us seats that we had never been able to win before. Do you remember specifically what things Clinton was doing that was riling up the base? We asked the well-off to pay their fair share.

First of all, he raised taxes, and that was a bad thing. If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again. And, of course, the failed attempt to pass ClintonCare, which was probably the biggest negative issue.

And then there were some social issues. I believe that American citizens who want to serve their country should be able to do so unless their conduct disqualifies them from doing so. Gays in the military and things like that, things that we today couldn't imagine were really controversial even, but back then they were. Right. And then after Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I remember gay marriage being a pretty prominent issue. This is not prejudice legislation. The Defense of Marriage Act is not mean-spirited or exclusionary.

It is a preemptive measure to make sure that a handful of judges in a single state cannot impose an agenda upon the entire nation. And another one that I remember was so-called partial birth abortion. And I'm curious how much thought went into focusing on those specific issues, because they certainly didn't seem arbitrary. Yeah, well, you're not wrong. First of all, the central social issue really was, and in my judgment, is abortion. In the immediate aftermath of Roe versus Wade, the Right to Life movement united around the notion of amending the Constitution to ban abortion. Over time, people figured out a couple of things. First of all, that there was

not going to be political support for amending the Constitution. And second of all, that there wasn't political support for banning all abortions. But Right to Life movement still was quite united around trying to minimize abortion. Our vision should be of an America. Bill Clinton, you know, ran for office saying. Where abortion is safe. Abortion should be safe, legal. And legal, but rare.

And rare. He felt the need to use the word rare because he understood people were uneasy about abortion, even though they did not want to ban it. So finding a way to try to restrict some abortions without banning abortion across the board resulted in the focus on late-term abortions, which most people opposed. And most people thought, by the way, were illegal. The term partial birth abortion means the person performing the abortion partially, vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery. The name partial birth abortion did not exist until someone who wanted to ban an abortion procedure

made up this erroneous and inflammatory term. When it came to these particular late-term abortions, what seemed to me either very clever or devilishly cynical, depending on your point of view, was that it forced Democrats to articulate a position on abortion at its most extreme, which then painted them into a corner. Yeah, I think that you're basically right about it, although I wouldn't, that's not the words that I'd use. You know, we have the term Reagan Democrats back in the 1980s, and the Reagan Democrats essentially were Southerners that used to be Democrats and blue-collar Northerners, mainly Catholics that used to be Democrats, and they crossed over and they voted for Reagan. Well, in both cases, there were Democrats that were at odds with the liberal consensus on these social and cultural issues we've been talking about. So you take a Democratic politician and you put them in a very difficult position if you force them to come front and center on some of those issues,

because it created a wedge between their liberal base, if you want to use that term, and the more traditional conservative cultural voters. So to force Democrats to confront those issues, you know, was a winner for the Republicans, no question about it. You know, it's funny, one of those early memories I have from back then was seeing Patty Murray, a very liberal Democrat from Washington state, who was, yeah, I'm sure you remember her. She was a senator who was voted in during the year of the woman. And I think she was this avatar of progressive promise.

And suddenly the Senate was voting on the Defense of Marriage Act, and she, like the majority of Democrats, was voting to ban gay marriage. And I remember her coming off the Senate floor and being surrounded by a scrum of local reporters, and she looked pretty miserable defending her position. Yeah, well, the Democrats were definitely tortured over those issues, and a lot of them changed their positions to conform with a more liberal cultural view, and that accelerated the movement of cultural conservatives into the Republican Party. They were no longer, you know, Reagan Democrats or Bush Democrats. They were Republicans. So how do you think the strategy has aged? Well, that's a good question. I think that,

yeah, I think that there are some issues where it's continued to work, but I think that there are some problems that the Republicans face long term because of the change in the culture. The most obvious, I think, and it's a place where I think Republicans are changing, is on the LGBTQ issues. But I think that those issues, I don't know if I'd like to say that they have aged well or poorly. I don't know if I'd like to say that they have aged well or poorly. I would simply like to say that they present a challenge to Republicans going forward, even if in the short term they are working, it would seem, to the benefit of President Trump and the Republicans. So you are anticipating where my mind was moving, So you are anticipating where my mind was moving, which is that certainly as late as 2004, gay marriage seemed to be working in the Republicans' favor.

But as you're pointing out, millennial Republicans now, more of them favor gay marriage than not. And many older Republicans are keeping mum about this issue. I keep thinking about how John Kasich during the debates, you know, gave this response when asked about gay marriage where he just basically said that his God told him to love everyone. Yeah, I think that the gay issue is a little different than some of the other cultural issues. One of the things that's happened

is that everybody today knows gay people. That was not always the case because people kept it hidden. And an awful lot of the Republicans you're talking about are confronting a different reality, which is this is no longer a theological issue or a theoretical issue. This is about my friend Jack or my friend Linda or the people that I know. Looking back on it, do you think that they were on the wrong side of history? Yeah. I mean, on that one, I would say yes. Yes. Then more broadly, do you think that maybe other wedge issues are short-sighted? I mean, because that was one of them.

other wedge issues are short-sighted. I mean, because that was one of them. Well, I don't want to broaden my response on that. You know, I don't want to say that's true of cultural conservatism generally. I would not extrapolate. I am now thinking about the Trump administration's efforts to try and establish a legal definition of sex, one that effectively calls into question, if not obliterates entirely, the category of transgender identity. And, you know, when he did that, I immediately did flashback on 1994, because it's another wedge issue. Do you think it's politically shrewd? It doesn't strike me immediately as being politically smart, no. And why do you say that? Because I think that it reinforces a stereotype that Republicans are discriminatory against large

groups of people based on gender. And the transgender issue is not the same thing as gay marriage, but it's in the same world. And I think that particularly young people are developing an attitude that Republicans are intolerant of a whole lot of things that they take for granted. But it's not just the sexual orientation issues. Immigration, in my view, as a cultural issue, is very much the same thing. Young people have grown up with people from different cultures and nationalities and ethnic backgrounds around them, and they just don't understand why some people have this problem with immigrant people or with LGBTQ people. And I think Republicans, they can't write off everybody under the age of 40 today and going forward. And that's what the political danger on this is.

Well, it's very interesting that you are talking about young people and their attitudes towards immigration, because some of my colleagues here at The Times are saying that right now, as we sort of roar up to the midterms, we are seeing the president use the caravans coming up toward Mexico as a as precisely this kind of thing as a wedge issue. Do you think that that makes sense? I have two conflicting thoughts. First of all, I do agree that he and other Republicans are going to use the caravans as a wedge issue.

I think that's true. I also think that the caravan is a little different than the broader issue of immigration. It seems to me that we ought to understand that we're not going to get comprehensive immigration reform unless we satisfy that those people in the country that are deeply concerned about border security. Comprehensive immigration reform in the absence of something that reassures people that the borders are secure is not going to happen. So, yeah, I think that focusing on the caravans is a political strategy. There's no question about that. Do you think that that caravan is to the immigration debate what the

so-called partial birth abortion kind of debate? It's funny you said that. As I was listening to you formulate the question, that's what I was thinking. It takes a large, complicated, complex, and important issue and boils it down to what most Americans would think is an indefensible act. So, here is my problem. Is this helpful in the long run? Is what helpful? We are now, to indulge in the most cliched of phrases, living in a very polarized time. And wedge issues, by definition, are wedges. They divide. So to the extent that you helped advise Newton those days, do you feel like you helped contribute to this situation at all, that you might have been able to rein in some of his impulses?

You know, we were of the minority. We were trying to become the majority and we advocated on behalf of things that of the fact that focusing on issues that divide people polarizes the country. But I think the question you've got to ask is, are those issues things that shouldn't be discussed? Or do they reflect real differences that kind of have to be discussed? Liberals can kind of get in trouble there by sounding like they think those are simply issues that are not worthy of discussion, and hence they should go away so that we can unite the country. And the way we do that is by people disagreeing with us liberals. I don't think you can say that. I think you've got to sincerely listen to people and realize that we have to work at it. But I'm not hopeful on the issue of political polarization and cultural polarization for a while.

I think maybe someday things will change. But in the near term, I think that it's going to be not pretty in this country. Thank you. Nice to talk to you. Good to talk to you. Bye. Bye. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The FBI is investigating a wave of homemade pipe bombs sent to targets of right-wing criticism, including at least five prominent Democrats. It happened at a large horse country property

registered to a firm owned by the Soros family. It began on Monday with a bomb that was hand-delivered to the home of George Soros, the billionaire liberal philanthropist. An employee here at the residence found the device in one of these mailboxes along the side of the road, became suspicious, took it out into the nearby woods and called police.

By Wednesday, authorities had discovered bombs addressed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and the offices of CNN. They say that the device is inside the CNN building. It was a package that was mailed and made it into the building. Almost all the intended recipients are the subjects of routine attacks from conservatives,

at times led by President Trump. routine attacks from conservatives, at times led by President Trump. As we speak, the packages are being inspected by top explosive experts, and a major federal investigation is now underway. On Wednesday, Trump denounced the pipe bombs, none of which detonated, and said he would put the full weight of the U.S. government behind investigating who sent them. And I just want to tell you that in these times, we have to unify. We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political

violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.