GOP could be poised to score a repeat of 1994 election

By J. Patrick Coolican

Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Give me a word, give me a sign

Show me where to look — tell me what will I find?

It was 1994, and the insipid Collective Soul song “Shine” was on incessantly. Abercrombie & Fitch was selling a lot of flannel. O.J. was busy looking for the real killers.

And that fall, Republicans won 52 House seats and eight Senate seats, and the Gingrich Revolution was on.

Former President Bill Clinton, who seemed to have brought about the destruction of his party that 1994 night, and his longtime chronicler Joe Klein, were in Las Vegas last week, so it seems like a good time to ask if 2010 will be a repeat of 1994. For Democrats such as Rep. Dina Titus, a first-term congresswoman in a swing district, the answer will determine her re-election chances.

In some respects, the environment is much like 1994.

Here’s how, and if you can identify the song lyrics, you’ll get a free Collective Soul T-shirt.

—I was born in a welfare state, ruled by bureaucracy: Conservatives are fired up. They, and their newest cohort, the Tea Party crowd, are providing money and organization. Circulations of conservative magazines are up, and talkers such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are again having their moment. Enthusiasm matters.

—Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: A Democratic president who broke cultural barriers — a Baby Boomer who’d smoked pot and (wink, wink) had problems in his marriage — tries to pass an ambitious universal health care plan. Reform opponents block it by painting it as a radical attempt to redistribute from the aged to deadbeats.

This should sound familiar. In an interview, Klein said in hindsight President Barack Obama probably should have done the more popular financial regulatory reform first and made some incremental changes to health care. Universal health care could have waited until a second term, he said.

Because of the vast challenges he faced — saving collapsing banking and auto industries — it was inevitable that on a few high-profile issues Obama would be out of step with independents.

But that’s no comfort to Democrats facing voters this year. And just as Democrats have lost some independents, they’ve discouraged their own base by compromising with moderates.

—Lotta poor man got to walk the line: As in 1994, economic recovery has begun, but it feels sluggish, jobless and uncertain — except even more so now than in 1994.

Add it up, and Republicans have a four-point lead in the so-called generic ballot, which asks which party you’ll vote for in your House race. This advantage may seem small, but it’s actually significant because Republicans are more likely to vote, especially in a midterm election. Harry Joe Enten, a young numbers whiz in the mold of Nate Silver, crunched the data recently and concluded the House is almost certainly going Republican.

And although that looks increasingly true, there are key differences from 1994.

(Sorry, space is tight: No more lyrics.)

Clinton noted last week in his Las Vegas appearance that Democrats are more alert to their troubles than he and his team were, and thus have time to adjust. Indeed, the White House has refocused its communications strategy in recent weeks, with Obama driving the debate. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, remain deeply unpopular.

Republicans don’t have two issues that dominated the agenda in the early ’90s: crime and welfare. Crime rates have dropped precipitously since then, and welfare was reformed in 1996.

Historian Nancy Cohen noted recently in the Los Angeles Times that the 1994 landslide was caused by two key factors: Christian conservatives finally coming out in force, and Southern conservatives switching parties. Both were inevitable. But it’s not clear what large bloc of voters would bring about the same result this time or in the future. The Republican Party is heavily white and aging, which means it still has a big demographic problem as the country gets more diverse and the 50 million-plus Gen-Y replace the Baby Boomers as the dominant societal force.

Cohen offered this advice to Democrats: “It’s time to calm down.”