WASHINGTON — More than 300 Republican House members and candidates crammed the steps of the Capitol on Sept. 27, 1994. They gathered to sign the 10-plank “Contract With America,” describing their first acts if they won control of Congress.
Soon-to-be-Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia was at the forefront of the platform that helped lead to a GOP landslide. Political neophyte Mitt Romney, running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, wanted nothing to do with it.
The top two contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination were shaped in many ways by the 1994 election. It was Romney’s first race, and a humbling one. It was Gingrich’s rise to power, the beginning of a rollicking four-year ride in the speaker’s chair.
Romney, running against Sen. Ted Kennedy, positioned himself to the left of national Republicans, causing difficulties for him with some conservatives even today. It was also the first time he faced accusations of flipping on positions, a problem that still nags him.
For Gingrich, 1994 was when he cemented his image as the Republicans’ idea man, although many of those ideas still haven’t come to fruition.
That includes several of the ideas in the Contract, but that doesn’t lessen the impact it had on the 1994 election.
“It allowed us to have a very strong last month of campaigning where we were for something; we weren’t just against the Democrats,” said Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s press secretary at the time and now a public relations strategist in Washington. “And that set the tone that allowed us to win a lot of close elections that night.”
The Republicans gained 54 House seats and eight Senate seats, seizing control of both chambers for the first time since 1954. But the GOP wave did not crest in Massachusetts, where Romney gave Kennedy the closest re-election race of his career, and Kennedy still netted 58 percent of the vote.
Romney explicitly rejected the Contract when asked about it during a debate with Kennedy.
“I think that’s a mistake,” he said. “I think if you want to get something done in Washington, you don’t end up picking teams with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other entering into a contract and saying, ‘OK we’re all going to do this.’ And then, of course, that works and the other side feels like they’re the loser. ... I’d rather say let’s get together and work together.”
Advisers on both sides figured the move was shrewd politics.
“We have found here in Massachusetts that the national party doesn’t help our candidates at all,” said Boston-based Republican strategist Charley Manning, who worked on Romney’s 1994 campaign and now informally advises his presidential bid. “Whenever Democrats are able to nationalize a campaign here it really hurts the Republican candidate.”
That was not the case in most of the country in 1994. Many voters had soured on a young Clinton administration that pushed through a tax increase and never got a health care overhaul off the ground.
The Contract consisted of longtime GOP initiatives. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time noted that it resembled President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign platform. It pledged a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution — which congressional Republicans still are fighting for — and initiatives the Republicans achieved such as welfare and tort lawsuit reforms.
Upon Gingrich’s insistence, all the platform planks had to be supported by at least 60 percent of Americans in polls.
Robert Walker, then a Republican U.S. representative from Pennsylvania, found the Contract to be quite practical.
“It was going to take us a while having been out of power for 40 years to organize ourselves,” said Walker, now a lobbyist. “And if we weren’t organized around a specific legislative plan, there would be chaos.”
Gingrich kept his promise to bring all 10 bills to the floor of the House within 100 days. Most did not clear the Senate, and the amendments to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget and congressional term limits did not get the necessary two-thirds majority in the House.
For Gingrich, the Contract established his position as a Republican intellect, a reputation he holds to this day and has been a major factor in his recent rise in the presidential race. For this go-round, Gingrich has released an outline for a “21st Century Contract With America,” which he said he will release in final form Sept. 27, 2012 — 18 years to the day from his previous Capitol event.
Instead of big ideas, Romney’s race focused on the personas of the candidates — particularly Kennedy.
It was Kennedy’s first election after a prominent scandal in which his nephew was accused of rape (he was later acquitted) in Palm Beach, Fla., on a night he had been out carousing with the senator.
Still, Kennedy was a 32-year incumbent with a gold-plated name.
Romney first told Manning of his plans in the fall of 1993.
“You are crazy,” Manning replied. “You can’t beat a Kennedy in Massachusetts. No one can beat a Kennedy in Massachusetts. Ted could drive down to Downtown Crossing [in Boston] drunk at noon and run over 14 nuns and he still wouldn’t lose.”
Well-funded and telegenic, Romney tried to paint Kennedy as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal, attacking him for opposing the death penalty and welfare reform.
Kennedy’s press secretary at the time, Bob Shrum, recalled that the Democrat’s most effective ads focused on workers who had been laid off as the result of company restructuring conducted by Romney’s private investment firm, Bain Capital. The Contract With America never really came up.
It made sense for Romney to keep his distance, as “he was running as far to the left as a Republican could,” Shrum said.
Romney tried to toe the line on abortion. At a debate he said he personally opposed abortion but believed “abortion should be safe and legal in this country” and that the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade should stand.
Kennedy responded, “I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple-choice.”
Now Romney and Gingrich are in direct combat, vying for GOP voters in a much different climate. Gingrich has achieved legendary status in the party for 1994, but Romney’s campaign this week highlighted the speaker’s messy departure from Congress in 1998 and his sometimes erratic style. Romney, who fell short in his first presidential run four years ago, has built a formidable campaign but is dogged by his ideological shifts from running and governing in liberal Massachusetts to seeking conservative votes in Iowa and elsewhere.
“He runs for office with a business plan,” Shrum, the Democratic consultant, said of Romney. “He conforms to the market.”
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