Search for a boogeyman

With Clinton and Gingrich out of the picture come Election Day 2000, how will Democrats and Republicans scare the voters? Hint: Imagine Dick Gephardt with horns.

By Jake Tapper

Jun 11, 1999 | Though few people outside the Beltway noticed, champagne corks were popping at the National Republican Congressional Committee last week, after Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was willing to raise taxes if the Democrats were to regain control of the House in 2000.

"He slipped; he usually doesn't make mistakes like that," says Jill Schroeder, press secretary for the NRCC. But she was happy nonetheless, because Gephardt's comments will make it easier for the GOP to tie new Democratic congressional candidates with tax-and-spend politicians of yore. "If we can remind people what life under Democrat control was like," Schroeder says, "there's a good case to be made" for voters to go GOP. Gephardt's Philadelphia story only helps the NRCC make its case. "The man stumbled," Schroeder says. "But sure, we're going to jump on him for that."

It's all part of the preparation for 2000, and the parties' search for a boogeyman. In 1994, President Clinton's myriad slip-ups and the health-care debacle helped Republicans win the House and Senate for the first time in generations. Many Republican ads actually featured Democratic candidates' faces morphing into Clinton's.

Then, after House Speaker Newt Gingrich went from hero to zero in one short election cycle, Democrats pulled the same stunts on him. As 2000 will be the first election cycle since 1990 without Clinton or Gingrich as speaker running for office, party stalwarts are trying to create some new beasts from the opposing party to use to scare voters in the coming election.

Republicans seemed to have found theirs last week, when Inquirer scribe Larry Eichel asked the minority leader where funding would come from for increased spending on education. Gephardt said, "You've got to have a combination of taking it out of the defense budget and raising revenue. We can argue about how to do that, closing loopholes or even raising taxes to do it. I feel we can find room in the budget to do what must be done without a tax increase. But if we can't, well, this is the paramount challenge we face as a society, and I think the public shares that view."

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