It was a fascinating election. The pollsters and pundits who like to instruct the electorate on what it is that people are thinking and feeling were almost 100 percent wrong. Pre-election prognostications suggested that the Republicans would gain six to twelve seats in the House of Representatives and perhaps enough seats in the Senate to enable them to shut off debate if they so chose. These estimates were considerably down from those that circulated a month earlier when a Republican blowout was being predicted. Goaded on by a moralistic religious right, this party hoped to exploit the Clinton scandal into a major political bonanza. That agenda dictated a policy that allowed hundreds of pages of salacious testimony to be made public about Mr. Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It fueled the Republican calls for impeachment and caused the Congress to authorize, on almost totally partisan lines, an open-ended House of Representatives investigation.
President Clinton has incurred the undying wrath of the religious right by supporting the two issues that have become the twin phobias that motivate this conservative, religious part of our electorate; namely, the quest for justice for our gay and lesbian citizens and a woman's right to choose an abortion. This President had not only sought to liberalize the armed services policy which dismissed homosexual members from the military, but he had actually nominated a gay man to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. He had also vetoed every congressional attempt to limit abortions, including the proposed ban on partial births procedures. The visceral hatred against Mr. Clinton seemed to know no bounds. The salivating eagerness with which the religious right embraced the sex scandal at the White House, however, seemed to overwhelm their political judgment. It captivated their total attention and presented them with the perfect opportunity to purge this evil man from their world. They set about with single-minded devotion to seek a reversal of the last two presidential elections. In their strange religious way they saw this opportunity as a "gift from God," rewarding them for "their true faith." They were primed for a great political victory. In the days leading up to the election, however, two events occurred which galvanized the consciousness of this nation in a different direction. In Wyoming a 21-year-old university student named Matthew Shepard was pistol-whipped by two young males, tied to a remote fence post in sub-freezing weather and left to die. The reason for this inhumane murder was that Matt Shepard was a gay man. Shortly thereafter in Buffalo, New York, a much loved doctor named Barnett Slepian was murdered in his own kitchen by a sniper. The reason for this act was that this doctor was willing to do legal abortions. The rhetoric of hate marking the religious right had thus translated into the activity of killing.
Awakened by the horror of these murders, the citizens of this nation looked anew at the shrill voices of those national leaders who respond to the organized religious right. As the realization of where fanaticism can lead began to rise to awareness, a political reaction set in. The polls began to show the Republican margins shrinking. To counter this declining trend the Republican central committee led by the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, decided yet again to seek to exploit the White House scandal in an attempt to rebuild their once imposing lead. So a new national advertising campaign was adopted which had the effect of turning this election into a referendum on Bill Clinton and impeachment. The official reason stated by those who signed off on this strategy was that it was designed to get out the core vote of the party which in large measure is the religious right. The results were exactly the opposite of what they anticipated. When the votes in the election of 1998 were counted, the political shock of the decade had been registered. Al D'Amato, the three-term Republican senator from New York, a strong anti- abortion politician, who had presided over the politically-inspired anti-Clinton, Whitewater hearings, was defeated by a 55 to 45 percent margin. Senator Lauch Faircloth, the North Carolina Republican who was Jesse Helms' hand-picked candidate and who had played a significant role in the appointment of Kenneth Starr as Independent Counsel, was unseated by a young opponent who had never before run for public office. Representative Michael Pappas in New Jersey, who had composed and sung a flattering song to Kenneth Starr based on the children's rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, had his ditty used by his opponent in his television ads to the revulsion of the people of his district. Representative Pappas was defeated by freshman Democrat, Rush Holt, tipping the scales toward a Democratic majority in New Jersey's congressional delegation. In South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama the religious-right-endorsed Republican candidates for governor, two of them incumbents, were defeated. In South Carolina Fritz Hollings, almost the sole Democrat left in the Senate from the deep south held onto his Senate seat, against a heavily financed religious-right-endorsed candidate. Meanwhile, moderate Republican governors, like George W. Bush in Texas, George Pataki in New York, Jeb Bush in Florida, John Engler in Michigan and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin rolled up impressive victories by ignoring both the Clinton scandal and the religious right and began the process of wresting Republican leadership away from the religious mentality that occupies the right wing. Even our fine Governor in New Jersey, Christie Whitman began to appear less as a fringe Republican nationally, and more as a mainline Republican. When the sun rose on the day after the election, the Democrats had gained five seats in the House, held the Republicans even in the Senate and had regained a new foothold in the once conservative south, while the pollsters and pundits were eating crow as they tried to explain just how it was that they had been so wrong. As a result of this election, the impeachment of President Clinton has become all but politically impossible and, even if impeachment were voted by the House, any chance of a Senate conviction has disappeared. Forty-eight hours later Newt Gingrich, the architect of the "Contract with America," the shutting down of the Federal Government and the impeachment hearings had announced his intention to withdraw from the race to succeed himself as speaker and to resign from the House of Representatives. In his place a non-ideological, pragmatic man of conservative credentials and wide legislative experience, who seemed to sense that an effective politician is ultimately a person who understands the necessity of compromise, was chosen to succeed him. Without actually saying it, the Republicans were now looking for a face-saving way out of the impeachment process, and even a separation from the albatross of being the party of the religious right. Thus it can be said that this election brought about a sea change in American politics. The religious right has finally crested. Those voices that claimed to speak for God, but who had spewed forth so much venom and hostility that the American political system had been poisoned, had finally overplayed their hand. The Republican Party was forced to begin an internal assessment which will inevitably bring about change. They will recognize that their continued dependence on the religious right, their willingness to play to the religious fears and prejudices of those motivated by the abortion fight and a rampant homophobia is not a winning formula. It is rather a prescription for a permanent minority status. The successful Republican governors, who ran quite independently of the religious right, are today clearly the wave of the political future, even in the Grand Old Party. Four years ago I wrote a column urging Mr. Clinton to name the religious demon that was threatening to destroy this nation's political system, to run the risk of being publicly critical about the distorted religious perspective of his most vehement critics. He did not do so. Then, to complicate matters, his own irresponsible behavior played directly into the hands of his religious enemies. Unable to stand success, however, the excessive zeal on the part of these religious fanatics finally brought them down. That is, perhaps, the only redemptive thing to emerge from the White House scandal. I suspect that from this time forward the religious right will continue to decline until another major dislocation in our society creates a new wave of rampant insecurity that will enable these religious voices to come roaring forth once more seeking to impose their particular security system with its narrow-minded, traditional and moralistic solutions on the whole society. But for now I believe we can bid farewell to the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells, James Dobsons and Ralph Reeds as political leaders. Their day is over. The era of sexual McCarthyism is at an end. It was a good election in November of 1998.
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