while it was obvious that change was coming, not
many predicted a political shift of the magnitude
that would take place.
The 1994 Republican Revolution was an event of
near unprecedented political force. It took the reins
of both houses of Congress from the Democrats,
who had unflinchingly held them for decades, and
gave them wholly to the American right. This seismic
shift is best understood by viewing it through two key
figures, President Bill Clinton and Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich, for it was as much a testimony
to the failures of Clinton as to the ideals of Gingrich.
After Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential
race, the Democrats held not only both houses of
Congress but the White House as well. Though the
future seemed bright, Clinton’s election was hard
for his fellow Democrats, who were constantly asked
to explain allegations tied to his governorship in Lit-
tle Rock, Arkansas. Once in office, Clinton went
back and forth on matters that his party held as para-
mount, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton led
an effort to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
Taken together, the allegations, Clinton’s “waffling”
on key Democratic issues, and outrage at the at-
tempt to universalize health care were too much.
The ambience of a honeymoon that normally sur-
rounds the surge in political power that the Demo-
crats managed in 1992 was gone a year and half later,
as members of Congress in Clinton’s own party dis-
tanced themselves from him. Subsequently, the
American people were weary of both Clinton and
the Democratic Congress. Public approval ratings
for Congress fell to 18 percent in polls conducted in
the spring of 1994.
The Republican Response While Clinton and Con-
gress were losing favor with the American people, a
group of congressional Republican candidates
promising to give the government back to the peo-
ple was garnering support. Led by men such as Dick
Armey of Texas and Gingrich of Georgia, these Re-
publicans outlined their agenda for change in the
form of Gingrich’s Contract with America. This con-
tract contained ten parts, each of which was no less
than a political promise to the American people.
Among them were the Taking Back Our Streets Act,
directed toward greater crime control; the Ameri-
can Dream Restoration Act, focusing on tax code re-
form; and the Personal Responsibility Act, designed
to bring about welfare reform.
On November 8, 1994, the Republicans took con-
trol of both houses of Congress, with Gingrich be-
coming the first Republican Speaker of the House in
four decades. They had accomplished this feat both
by promoting the Contract with America as a solu-
tion to the big government policies of the Demo-
crats and by campaigning nationally instead of
through district-specific campaigns, although the
norm in politics at that time was summed up in the
popular maxim “All politics is local.” On the other
side of the aisle, Clinton and the Democratic leader-
ship were stymied but not surprised. Shortly after
the elections, Clinton held press conferences in
which he said that the American people had sent a
message that they did not want government to be as
intrusive as it had been in the recent past.
The First Hundred Days After taking their places in
Congress in January, 1995, the Republicans sought
to emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first hundred
days in office. By mid-April, the House of Represen-
tatives had passed most of the legislative items tied to
the Contract with America, but they faced a tougher
fight in the Senate.
Many of the freshmen Republicans who had run
as conservatives, however, began to compartmental-
ize their conservatism and to describe themselves as
either fiscal or social conservatives rather than
purely conservative. This meant that among the
newly elected Republican majority were true conser-
vatives who opposed abortion and gun control and
supported tax cuts, fiscal conservatives who sup-
ported tax cuts and business deregulation but who
were not very concerned about stopping abortion or
curtailing gun control, and social conservatives who
opposed abortion and gun control but were not av-
idly opposed to the level of taxation then in place.
Gingrich’s coalition appeared less and less unified
with time.
The election of 1996 brought an end to the Re-
publican Revolution when Clinton defeated Repub-
lican presidential candidate Bob Dole for his second
term. The Republicans had been given a chance and
squandered it through a lack of party cohesion.
Clinton, who had seen his chances of reelection
drifting away in 1994, had found a way back into fa-
vor with his fellow Democrats.
Impact Ironically, the impact of the Republican
Revolution remained strong until George W. Bush, a
Republican, became president in 2001. The earlyThe Nineties in America Republican Revolution 717