Keeping the Political Score (February/March 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 1)

Keeping the Political Score

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1

As I write these lines, another mid-term election has gone into the books, without profound impact on the nature of things. Great and transforming events continue to shake the world, but the voting returns, so far as the make-up of the 102nd Congress is concerned, tell a familiar story. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been retained and even slightly enlarged. And, until the lawmakers reassemble, we will be spared the familiar campaign nonsense from both sides: Republican charges that all Democrats suffer from a congenital itch to tax and spend; Democratic rejoinders that the Republicans without exception ignore “the people” and speak only for the idle rich.

 

Of course, such broad-brush indictments ignore the complex reality of congressional votes in which coalitions are built on the basis of combinations of local and special interests. Most of us know that. I have since I was a boy in the Great Depression and used to hear elders tell me that Republicans “always” got us into depressions. When I found out that the biggest depression prior to 1929 began in 1893 under the Democratic President Grover Cleveland, it was my first useful lesson in historical skepticism.

But I did wonder one morning if there was in fact a distinctive party stamp that could be put on different eras of the past, depending on which party was in control of the government. That in itself—who controls?—is a tricky question, as I soon learned. No deep-dish research was involved. I merely reached for a volume of historical statistics and a couple of almanacs and began to count. As any baseball fan can tell you, part of the fun of the postseason season is playing with statistics. They can be fascinating—and likewise deceptive without analysis. Nonetheless, I plowed through the national political numbers for the past century, 1890-1990, and came up with the following politically unscientific data:

If we look separately at the presidency and Congress, we find that it’s been, on balance, a slightly “Republican” century. The period has seen 25 presidential elections, and the Republicans have taken 14 of them. When repeaters are counted, only 18 men have actually held the office, and 11 of them were Republicans, though one of those—Gerald Ford—did not win at the polls: he was named Vice President by Congress after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, and he succeeded to the office when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. Democratic presidential victories have gotten scarcer of late—only four in the last forty-two years, and two of those (Kennedy in 1960, Carter in 1976) were by razor-thin popular majorities.

Republicans have held the White House for 56 of the last hundred years, the Democrats for 44. Yet, to fix responsibility on a party, it would seem reasonable to expect it to have full control of the federal machinery.

And how often, readers, do you think that has happened? Most of the time? Very little of the time? Try