Maybe the Democrats were right in 1998 when they defended President Bill Clinton during the impeachment process by noting that he only lied about having an affair with a White House intern. It was only about sex after all. Besides, despite the widespread knowledge of Clinton’s womanizing, he still won two terms as President. It wasn’t about official actions. Or was it?
The problem with Clinton was that his moral relativism didn’t stop at the bedroom door. It permeated his life – public and private. Much to the glee of Republicans and the frustration of Democrats, Clinton’s moral relativism resulted in Washington spending much of the 1990s investigating the Clintons and the Clinton White House. Whitewater. FBI files. Travel office firings. Law firm billing records. Chinese campaign contributions. Pardons. Clinton’s ethical problems defined his presidency and likely caused Al Gore to lose the 2000 election.
Notwithstanding the disdain of moderates and liberals who pooh-pah the importance of personal morals and ethics, those concepts – debated by some of the greatest minds in history like Aristotle, Plato, and St. Augustine – matter because, without them, man reverts to the state of nature where anything goes and might makes right. For years, Republicans had cornered the market as the party of values because it understood this reality.
In the watershed election of 1994, Republicans offered voters the Contract with America. The Contract with America contained (among other items) pledges to be fiscally responsible and to promote personal responsibility and reinforce family values. The voters accepted the Contract with America by giving Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over four decades. Soon thereafter, Republicans captured the Senate and the Presidency. During that time, Republicans had an occasional Bob Packwood, but he was lost in the Clinton Ocean of ethical issues. In a 1998 Gallup Poll, Republicans had an eleven-point edge as the party most able to deal with moral issues.
On the road to Damascus, however, we lost our way.
In the twelve years after that historic election, Republicans broke the fiscal covenant they had made with the voters by, among other things, increasing the size of the federal government (passing Medicare Part D; expanding the federal role in education with the No Child Left Behind Act; and adding roughly 7,000 pages of new federal regulations), and significantly accelerating the use of earmarks (from 1,300 in 1994 to 14,000 in 2005). In a November 1994 Gallup Poll, Republicans held a whopping twenty-one point lead over Democrats on who could better handle the economy. Gallup’s latest poll has Democrats leading Republicans by twelve points – a thirty-three-point swing in just thirteen years.
Likewise, Republicans shredded all remnants of the value covenant and lost the banner it held as the party of values and ethics. While the Democrats have the on-going corruption case of William Jefferson, the sordid details of the Jack Abramhoff case – along with the corruption convictions of Republicans Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham – was tailor-made for twenty-four news channels struggling to fill air-time and left-leaning reporters always eager to highlight Republican hypocrisy on ethics. At the state level, Ohio Governor Bob Taft pled guilty to failing to pay for perquisites and got intertwined with his own Jack Abramhoff in the form of Tom Noe. The reporting of Mark Foley’s salacious emailing of pages just weeks before the election sealed the deal for voters in 2006.
In the November 2006 election, other than the war in Iraq, the two biggest issues that hurt Republicans with the voters were the irresponsible use of taxpayer funds and the ethics and corruption taint. The voters decided en masse it was time to take a shower to wash off the Republican taint by giving control of the Congress, several key governorships, and many state legislative chambers to Democrats.
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