Politics 101The meaning of the midterms.By Paul Glastris^^ ^^^fF-vear elections are murky affairs. Most Americansdon't pay attention to them. Even fewer vote in them. Andtheir political significance must be discerned, oracle-like, fromthe results of hundreds of House and Senate races, most ofwhich tum as much on local as national issues.Still, once the returns are in, a roughly accurate consensususually forms ahout the meaning of a particular midterm. In1994, the GOP took control of hoth houses of Congress forthe first time in over 40 years. That rout was widely seen as arejection of sclerotic and uninspired Democratic congression-al rule, a rebuke of the shaky first two years of Bill Clinton'spresidency, and a sign that a growing portion of the electoratewas open to conservative ideas. In 1998, the Senate held steadyand the Democrats picked up five House seats. That result—the first time since 1822 that the party not in control of theWhite House had failed to gain seats in the mid-term electionof a president's second term—^was understood as a protestagainst impeachment inquiries then underway against a by-then-popular Clinton. In 2002, the Democrats lost theirpaper-thin Senate majority along with seven House seats. Inthat case, too, the message was clear: The public wasn'timpressed with tremulous Democrats who, 14 months after9/11, only wanted to talk about prescription drugs.While midterms offer important lessons, politicians don'talways learn them. After 1994, Bill Clinton got it right: Heretooled his staff, reembraced New Democratic ideas like wel-fare reform, and won big in 1996. After the 1998 midterms, bycontrast, GOP House leaders ignored the message voters weresending and impeached the president anyway, a move nowwidely seen, even by many conservatives, as a mistake. Andafrer 2002, Democrats waited another year—for Iraq todescend into chaos and for presidential candidate HowardDean to show them how to fight—before challenging theGOP on national-security grounds.This year's midterms are at least as crucial as the last three,and already it is possible to predict how their results will beread, and misread. In a nutshell, if Democrats win, both partieswill likely learn the right lessons. But if Republicans win, bothPaul Glastris is editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.parties are liable to take away the wrong lessons."Had Enough?"Consider the former possibility: that Democrats take theHouse, and possibly the Senate. Many conservatives arealready so openly disgusted with the behavior of HouseRepublicans—the spending, the corruption, the failure tostand up to the White House on civil liberties and separationof powers—that it will be hard for any Republican leader tocredibly argue that a midterm loss is anything but a rebuke forthat same behavior.Democrats, meanwhile, are unlikely to read too much sig-nificance into their win. After three straight election losses andendless roimds of self-fiagellation, few Democratic leaders areunder the illusion that they have a master plan for political suc-cess or the ideological key to voters' hearts. Should they takeback one or both houses. Democrats will feel not so much tri-umphant as relieved to finally be back in the game.Now consider the other possibility: that the GOP managesto hold on to its majorities in the House and Senate. In thatcase. Republicans, led by the president, will want to claim eventhe thinnest victory as public validation of everything they'vebeen doing over the past six years. One glance at the opinionpolls—on the economy, Iraq, you name it—is enough to showthat this isn't true. But you can safely bet a month's pay thatthis is precisely what GOP leaders will do.And if they do, they will be repeating the mistake Bushmade two years ago. After narrowly winning reelection in2004, the president claimed he had faced his "accountabilitymoment," and not only didn't need to change course but couldnow spend his "political capital" on such radical endeavors asprivatizing Social Security. A year later. Bush's approval ratingswere in the 30s and vulnerable GOP candidates were avoidinghis presence.Democrats, too, are liable to miss the real lesson of a failureto win at least one house. Egged on by their "friends" in themainstream media. Democrats may come to believe that theirmistake was one of message: They didn't offer up enough boldideas, an alternative vision to contrast with the Republicans'.It's true that Democrats have a message problem in themost profound sense: They don't quite know, and certainlycan't get across to voters, what they stand for or where they'dThe Washington Monthly 13take the country. But that's a problem that needs to be hashedout during presidential elections. It's much harder to do in off-year elections, and less important, too.Midterms tend to be referendums on the party in power. Ifthat's the case this November, Republicans will almost certain-ly lose. Indeed, if Democrats were running on big, bold,visionary ideas this year, they'd be playing right into the handsof their opponents, who would Uke nothing better than to shiftattention away from their own sorry record by making the elec-tion a contrast between the two parties' positions on the issues."I've never seen a positive message win a midterm,"observes veteran political analyst Charlie Cook. NewtGingrich's "Contract with America" may seem hke an excep-tion. But as Cook notes, a poll in late October 1994 showedthat 70 percent of voters hadn't even heard of the contract,which, we forget, was mainly a collection of dull proceduralreforms ("limit the terms of all committee chairs ... ban thecasting of proxy votes in committee") meant to reinforceGingrich's larger negative strategy of highlighting "corrupt"Democratic rule. This year, the former speaker has wiselycounseled the Democrats to do likewise: make the election areferendum on corrupt and incompetent Republican rule byadopting the slogan "Had Enough?"Street FightingIf the Democrats lose the midterms, it will not really bebecause of what their candidates said or didn't say on thestump. It will be because of what their campaign organiza-tions did or did not do behind the scenes. For years.Democrats have let their political machinery atrophy, whileRepublicans built theirs up. The result is that Democratstoday simply aren't as good as Republicans at the basicblocking and tackling of electoral politics.The very field on which Democrats must compete thisyear is tilted against