The year is 1994. Polling shows American faith in government sits at around 17% and republicans manage to pull off a landslide victory in the house and senate. Newt Gingrich, along with other newly elected Republicans are declaring total ideological victory and a mandate to do whatever they want, daring slick willy to frick around and find out.
Victorious Republicans interpreted the results as a popular endorsement of their ideological agenda, promising a “Republican Revolution” once they took office the following January. “If this is not a mandate to move in a particular direction, I would like somebody to explain to me what a mandate would look like,” crowed House Speaker-in-waiting Newt Gingrich of Georgia on the night of the election. According to Gingrich and his Republican colleagues, the American people had registered a decisive preference for their party’s platform of small-government conservatism. “I believe that, starting today, the train is going to pull out of the station, and it is going to be a train that is bound for less government and more freedom,” remarked Texas senator Phil Gramm the following morning Jon Christensen of Nebraska, one of many newly elected Republican “citizen legislators” who had never previously held political office, simi- larly argued, “The American people sent a clear message to us…. They elected a republican majority to change the way congress does business. After 40 years of liberal big government spending they said enough was enough.
The cons were on to something here. Polls showed 67% americans wanted to slash the federal budget.
The word around washington is the democrats are obsolete, conservatives had won a total ideological victory and the electorate really wanted conservative policy.
Right away they push a budget gutting the environment, Medicaid, education, raising taxes on the poor to fund tax cuts on the wealthy. All of the draconian contard shit you can imagine. Looking willy right in the eye, daring him to do shit in the face of the mandate from heaven conservatives believe themselves to have.
Does slick willy back down? No, he fricking slams a veto down and goes to war. Government shutdowns start.
During the state of the union slick willy avoids talking about ideology at all, he calls for a "smaller, smarter" government as that's what the people want. He rallies all of the people in society that hate con policy (basically all of them, even Republicans) and attacks newt on medicaid cuts, education cuts, all of it.
By the end of this 67% of americans are against the cuts.
Slick willy beats newt over the head, signs a budget with basically no con cuts. By the end of it Newt is the most hated politician in America for trying to push through unpopular cuts on the back of a fake mandate, and is blamed for the shut downs.
By 1998 newt is out, exiled for "being too soft on Bill Clinton."
From conservative revolution to dumpster fire. And the origin of blood sport american politics and why the GOP no longer deals in policy.
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