In search of lost principle: the Republicans could benefit from rereading their two-page masterpiece.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Contract With America

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FOR A LONG time conservative rhetoric used to make me fall asleep early. When some Bob Grant fulmination on WABC-AM would go on too long, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself, "I'm falling asleep." Half an hour later the thought that it was time to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives would awaken me; I would make as if to turn off the radio, which I imagined was now playing the Jay Diamond show, and to turn out the light. I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been hearing, but these thoughts had taken a strange turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the subject of my dreams: a well-policed street, a balanced budget, the rivalry between job creation and wage enhancement.

When American voters threw, in the words of the late Peter Jennings, "a temper tantrum" in November 1994, I was too steeped in Chupacabra-coverup and Andy Kaufman assassination theories to doubt the official story of the election results. According to the conventional wisdom, the Republican Party's 54-seat gain in Bill Clinton's first midterm elections had occurred thanks to the much-discussed Contract With America. This document, in which the Republicans pledged to enact eight reforms to the legislative process and pass 10 conservative bills (very small parts of which overlapped with limited-government goals), was signed by all but two current and aspiring GOP representatives. (One of the refuseniks was Alaska's lifelong anti-reformer Don Young.)

The contract's Frank Luntz-tested contents were a rebuke to both a Democratic House then under the control of cannibalistic space alien Tom Foley and, more important, to the misrule of President Bill Clinton. The subsequent GOP landslide seemed to justify even the most outlandish claims that the Republicans were now the dynamic, forward-looking party, and that congressional elections could be organized as national referenda not only on process and politics but on style. For a moment in the 1990s, perhaps in the clauses of a Russ Smith "Mugger" column in the New York Press or between the covers of some visionary tract by Newt Gingrich explaining the benefits of private mining expeditions to Titan, the Republicans became cool.

Time, that machine which takes the raw material of eager youth and crafts it into bitter age, has not been kind to the contract or to its drafters. Only one of the self-dubbed...