We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.
—Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868–1932), Indiana humorist
POLARIZERS NEED CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES TO KEEP THEIR SUPPORTERS energized, and they need enemies to keep them angry. If the early era of polarization got its energy from civil rights, Vietnam, abortion, and “family values,” Bill Clinton and George W. Bush came along later to provide the enemies. Each man stirs a well of resentment in the opposition party that runs deeper than any witnessed in modern American politics.
Some argue that these two presidents “coincidentally” came to power during a time of polarization and paralysis in national politics. In this theory, after two decades of increasingly disruptive partisanship, presidents elected at the end of the twentieth century were bound to inherit a growing and highly charged political climate. It was the times, rather than the people in power, that brought on polarization.
The trouble with this theory is that political personalities actually do matter. Of course Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were elected during a time of extreme partisanship. However, during their terms the climate grew increasingly toxic. Some argue that neither Clinton nor Bush could control the political environment they inherited, but that is doubtful. Both men had personalities and agendas that exacerbated and intensified polarization. Worse, both came to realize that the polarizing climate could enhance their own political fortunes.
Initially, both men recognized that governing in a polarized environment was not in their interest and that an atmosphere that might lead to some consensus on their respective agendas would be much more effective. Two things conspired to ensure that this would not happen.
Clinton and Bush were elected to their first terms under circumstances that raised questions about the legitimacy of their victories. Both presidents began their terms with a majority of voters having opposed their election; in Clinton’s case by an historic margin. Clinton won his first election with only 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race. Although Clinton won the electoral college by a wide margin, he was the first president since 1968 to receive less than a clear majority of the popular vote. The third-party candidate, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, won 19 percent of the popular vote, the highest total for a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Bush won his first term after losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent by 500,000 votes. Not only did Bush lose the popular vote, but his electoral-college victory was challenged in the courts for over a month until the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, ruled that the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, was within her constitutional rights in deciding that Bush had won the state’s twenty-seven electoral votes. A hard core of Democrats still believes that Bush’s victory was illegitimate.
The second factor that doomed any chance for compromise was that neither man’s party leadership was interested in bipartisanship. When Clinton was first elected, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress; when Bush was elected, Republicans were in control of both chambers. Events that had preceded the election of each man had caused much rancor in Congress, particularly in the House. In both cases, the minority party in Congress frustrated efforts by the majority-party president to enact much meaningful legislation. The goal was to ensure that the president would be unable to enact anything that the opposition party considered extreme. More important, the minority did not want the president to succeed.
Ironically, the reversal in standing, with Republicans now in the majority, seemed to bring more cohesiveness to each party. The Democrats needed a united front if they were to thwart the Republican agenda, and the Republicans rallied together, knowing that whatever bills they passed would be with few, if any, Democratic votes. They also knew they faced Clinton’s veto pen until the 2000 election. That election and the controversy over it would further strengthen the Democrats’ partisan cohesion.
In the end, both Clinton and Bush chose to be polarizers. After the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Clinton adopted a strategy for his reelection that depended on constant confrontation with the Republican Congress. Bush simply ignored the Democrats, while Republican congressional leaders kept their thin majorities together and steamrolled the Democrats on issue after issue. With Bush as president, the Republicans on Capitol Hill no longer feared a veto pen. As a result, the divide between the parties grew ever wider and more polarized.