Magazine Preview - Democrat in Chief? - NYTimes.com

Magazine Preview - Democrat in Chief? - NYTimes.com: "It is difficult to overstate the role that 1994 plays in the tormented psyche of the Democratic Party. For those who went through them, those midterms were less a bunch of elections than a single, sudden event that they never saw coming until it was on them, like something out of “War of the Worlds.” Most of the Democrats who woke up firmly in control of American government on Nov. 8, 1994, had no memory of a time when they didn’t make all the laws, and they couldn’t really conceive of it; by nightfall, 40 years of near-total Democratic dominance in both houses of Congress had been washed away. The costs, for years afterward, were too painful to fully contemplate. Without the voter uprising of 1994, there would have been no Speaker Gingrich, no impeachment and almost certainly no George W. Bush, who, by winning election as the governor of Texas, found himself"