Stampede!

By John F. Stacks

When General Andrew Jackson was swept into the White House in 1828, voters wanted change. The growing young country seethed with discontent and rebellion. Farmers and drovers in the West and South resented the rich Easterners who ran the country for their own benefit. After the general's Inauguration, his supporters returned to the White House and proceeded to get liquored up. In an orgy of populist celebration, they smashed the china and crystal. Men in muddy boots stood on damask-covered chairs. The overdressed swells at the party were so alarmed by the rabble that they fled through the windows of the People's House, along with the new President himself.

Last week a simmering American electorate, angry at a Washington establishment more concerned with serving the vested interests that pay for its campaigns than with the declining living standards and perceived moral decay of the rest of America, stormed into polling booths across the country and chucked much of the nation's governing class out the window. "We always vote for change, and we never get it," said Steve Douglas, 39, of Detroit, a house painter and Democrat who voted Republican this time.

Gone was 40 years of Democratic control of the lower house of Congress. Gone was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the first holder of that office to be defeated at the polls since 1862. Gone were Democratic Governors in at least 11 states. Gone, perhaps finally this time, was the once solid Democratic domination of the Southern states. Gone was the most eloquent defender of the liberal faith in America, New York Governor Mario Cuomo.

And if not gone, certainly drastically diminished was the prospect of William Jefferson Clinton's gaining a second term as President. A "national sea change," he called it, as he struggled to swim back into the ideological center. But he sounded more like a drowning man. Voters were saying they felt misled. "I voted for him, but he's just got it all wrong about where we all stand on gays and guns and taxes. He sold us a bill of goods is what he did," said Jerry Smith, 42, a machinist in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and a new convert to the G.O.P.

Replacing the Democratic liberals was a herd of Republicans ranging from the born-again to the libertarian, led by the china-and-crystal-sm ashing Congressman from suburban Atlanta, Newt Gingrich, the next Speaker of the House. After a short burst of conciliation on election night, he seemed disinclined to throw Bill Clinton a rope. The President, he said, would be "very, very dumb" to try to stand in the way of the new conservative agenda. And to sharpen the point of the election, he called the Clintons "counterculture McGoverniks."

Gingrich and the other Republicans had reason to be cocksure of their standing. Not a single Republican member of the Senate or the House was defeated last week; not a single Republican resident of a Governor's mansion was evicted. The anger of the electorate was anything but inchoate. It was neatly targeted. The Democrats were seen -- not unreasonably, given their control of the White House and Capitol Hill -- as the Establishment and were made to pay. The anger was not indiscriminate. The two most outrageous Republican offerings, the vacuous Michael Huffington and the felonious Oliver North, together spent more than $40 million on their egregious ambitions, and lost anyway.

That voters were angry was not the surprise. They were plenty angry two years ago, when George Bush felt the pain after one term for failing to pay attention to the concerns of average Americans. But the Democrats thought they were the solution, not the problem. They became entranced with the big-picture economic statistics that showed a growing economy, rising employment, low inflation and a shrinking deficit. What they missed was the undiminished economic anxiety of the large working class. Overall the economy seemed to be doing fine, but most voters still felt the recession was unbroken in their area. A large number, 58% in a recent TIME/CNN poll, said they did not feel better off as a result of the brighter economic picture. America may be No. 1 again in productivity, but the middle-class workers who made it so have seen many of their colleagues laid off, have been forced in some cases to settle for temporary jobs and in general have suffered an actual decline in disposable income.

At the same time, the upper class has actually increased its share of the nation's abundance. The top 20% of the country's income earners control half the country's wealth, and only that group's real income has been increasing over the past two decades. These numbers fuel a growing us-vs.-them psychology in the electorate and a decidedly jaundiced view of the political establishment: "they" are the people who vote themselves pay raises, take - junkets, do favors for the financial establishment and provide themselves with generous health-care packages.

Clinton did understand these facts as he campaigned for the presidency in 1992. He preached against the unfairness of the Reagan years, which provided tax breaks for the wealthy. His mantra was that people who "work hard and play by the rules" were getting worked over by pols who played around with the rules. But once in office, Clinton seemed not so much a friend of the working class as a captive of the economic and cultural elites. Most disastrously for the Democrats, he failed to understand that the most powerful expression of middle-class economic anxiety is an insistence that the government lighten the burden of taxation by shrinking itself and its role in the nation's life. "I was angry that every problem identified by Washington was considered a crisis and that the only answer they could come up with was to throw more money at it," said Bill Kovach, 39, a Chicago medical-supplies salesman and Democrat who helped oust Dan Rostenkowski last week.

Most disastrously for Clinton, his top-down, bureaucratic health-care proposal, while rightly aimed at one of the prime causes of middle-class anxiety, was easily made to look like the epitome of tax-and-spend liberal programs. That he and his wife had benefited from a chummy round of commodities trading and finagled a real-estate development deal didn't exactly make them appear to be champions of the hard-pressed middle class.

The Republicans have cast themselves again as enemies of Big Government, and thus as friends of the people. Tim Matuszewski, a machinist in Bay City, Michigan, believes it. "I'm sliding to the Republican side because they are more for the little guy." But the new G.O.P. majority on Capitol Hill is no less beholden to the special interests for campaign funds than are the Democrats. It has been no more willing to unravel the elaborate system of entitlements like farm subsidies and Social Security and a variety of tax preferences that favor the rich and the established and make real tax relief for the working class unaffordable. Some of the G.O.P. have as great a penchant for social engineering, in the form of making moral rules for the country to follow, as the Democrats do for contriving Great Society programs. And despite their fondness for building jails and imposing tough rules for sentencing criminals, they may be no more adept at providing one of the basic voter demands: safe streets.

The G.O.P. is still divided. While making war on Clinton, they will make war on themselves. By and large the new congressional Republicans, led by Gingrich, are of the busybody moralistic sort. But in the statehouses, Republicans like William Weld in Massachusetts and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin are of the libertarian, problem-solving sort. The Democrats, in a division embodied in Clinton himself, are split between old-line, Big Government sorts and a faction that sees the limits of state intervention. A stable middle has yet to be established. Neither party has the leaders or the programs to transcend the need to satisfy the fire breathers on the edges. The electorate, meanwhile, veers back and forth trying to reach an equilibrium. Democrats are down, then up. Republicans out, then in. The search is on in earnest for a party and a program and a leader that are not captive to Washington and its aura of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. It was certainly premature to declare a permanent Republican hegemony. One senior White House official had it right: "What the people have said is, 'We're going to make you folks co-CEOs. We know you don't like each other. But if you don't get together and do the job, we may just fire both of you.' "

It will not be easy for any Washington politician, including the newly incumbent, to break free of the capital's grip. Even Andrew Jackson couldn't resist the privileges of power. After his people had trashed the White House, he retained three servants who had worked for his elitist predecessor -- a French chef, a steward and a butler -- and began serving the finest clarets at dinner. He also hired a painter, who promptly began immortalizing his subject in heroic oil portraits. The rest is history.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington, with other bureaus