The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?

• Author: Clift, Eleanor

Why the Republican Revolution didn't pan out

Polls showed the words most associated with them were "mean," "extreme," and "arrogant." But that didn't deter the 73 Republicans elected in 1994 from their kamikaze mission to end government as we have known it. Linda Killian, in her exhaustively reported book, The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?, observes that this class of lawmakers took "perverse pride in being called Visigoths." The abuse heaped upon them by the voters, the media, and their own leadership in Congress served only to spur them on to greater excesses.

I thought that reading this inside account of the freshmen, their hopes and dreams, would kindle some sympathy within me, if not for their cause, for their sincerity. Killian accomplishes her goal "to get inside their heads." But what she finds there does nothing to alter the collective image of the '94 GOP freshmen as a bunch of narrow-minded, partisan prigs. "Poor people aren't our constituency," One freshman nonchalantly explained as the Republicans axed programs affecting the poor while leaving corporate subsidies and tax breaks virtually untouched. Rewarded by the special interests they protected, the freshmen raised so much money for their re-election that Ann McBride, president of Common Cause, remarked that they had "come to shake Washington up," but instead "they stayed to shake it down."

Ask anybody with any common sense and they will tell you that shutting down the government for three weeks in 1995 was a mistake, a big mistake. Ask one of the hard-core GOP freshmen, and you'll get a different answer: It was their proudest moment. "They even said they would be happy to do it again," Killian writes. But the government shutdown proved to be the turning point that derailed the vaunted Republican Revolution. The freshmen blamed Newt Gingrich for losing his nerve, and the Speaker in turn threatened no fewer than four times to resign during those rocky months if the unruly freshmen did not fall into line. He had done more than any single human being to create the Republican wave that captured Congress in 1994, but like a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, Gingrich's experiment had gone wildly awry. "Gingrich created me ... . We are him," said Indiana Rep. Mark Souder, one of the True Believers. Dubbed by the media "Newt's ninnies," the freshmen were supposed to serve as Gingrich's shock troops. "But they were even more lethal because they were Gingrich with...