The Morning After

It was 217 years ago today that a French feminist named Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror that was brought on by the French Revolution.

She was executed because of her radical views, which were widely distributed in political pamphlets.

De Gouges wasn't the only person who died during that particularly bloody chapter in French history. Many others, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, were executed as "enemies of the revolution."

No doubt there are many Democrats in America who can sympathize. They may well feel as if they and others have been under the blade after yesterday's elections.

That's understandable, I suppose.

But this morning, my thoughts are of my mother, who has been gone now for more than 15 years and was a devoted Democrat during her life.

I don't know if anyone ever asked her, in precisely these terms, whether a glass of water was "half empty" or "half full," but Mom was a positive kind of person so I'm sure her response to such a query would be "half full."

Mom died in a flash flood, and she was in apparently good health at the time of her death so I have often thought that, had she not been in the wrong place at the wrong time, she would still be with us.

Of course, if she hadn't died in the flood, something else might have happened, but, if it is true that she would be with us today, I am sure she would have voted for Democrats in yesterday's elections (although, living in Texas, she would have been aware of the fact that Republicans far outnumber Democrats here and few, if any, of the candidates she supported would win), and she would be grieving their massive losses in the House and their reduced majority in the Senate.

She would try to learn from the experience. But she would not abandon her principles. She would look for ways to bridge the gulf. And she would be listening.

I will always remember a phone conversation she had with an old friend the day after Ronald Reagan won the presidency and his Republicans captured the Senate and slashed the Democrats' majority in the House in 1980.

I only heard Mom's side of the conversation, but I could imagine what was being said on the other side. "We lived through the Nixon years," Mom said, "and we'll live through this."

And, in the days ahead, Mom really did look for common ground with those with whom she disagreed. And she looked for ways to be more attentive to what those voices had to say. That didn't mean she agreed with those voices. But she was listening to them.

She wanted to work with those with whom she disagreed — she found much truth in what President Kennedy said about seeking common ground with our adversaries because we all inhabit the same small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures and we are all mortal.

Maybe it had something to do with the times in which Mom grew up. She was a child in the Depression, when families and friends had to pull together to survive, and she was a young girl during World War II, when Americans were united in a common cause in spite of their political differences.

Mom knew that no election is truly final. It is not a guillotine. It may seem like one at times. It may have seemed like one to Republicans in 2006 and 2008. It certainly felt like one to Democrats in 1980 and 1994.

In fact, I remember speaking with my mother shortly after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Mom was worried about whether Bill Clinton would be re–elected in 1996. I told her that he would.

We had both been living in Arkansas when he was governor and we had seen his keen political instincts at work. I just knew, although I don't know entirely why, that he would be re–elected, that he was a pragmatist who would calculate what he needed to do — and then he would go out and do it.

And I tried to reassure Mom. I learned, after all, from her example.

Mom didn't live to see Clinton's re–election in 1996, but I went to the cemetery shortly after the votes were counted and stood next to her grave. And I remember saying, on a gray, chilly November day — perhaps to no one or nothing in particular — "Clinton won."

I couldn't say that to her directly by then — and if there is no afterlife, I said it to no one on that occasion, either — but I just felt the need to say that to her if I could or, at least, near her remains.

(If there is an afterlife, maybe she already knew. Or maybe spirits simply don't care what happens with the living. After all, if the spiritual world does exist, spirits know that what happens here is brief, temporary. It's not really important.)

If Mom could speak to today's Democrats, though, I think she would remind them that others have traveled this road before. And the ones who have survived are the ones who have listened to what the voters have had to say. Even the ones with whom they disagreed.

Which reminds me ...

I was reading an interesting article the other day in Commentary that compared Barack Obama to Woodrow Wilson.

There really are some remarkable similarities between the two men. For example, both were academics with modest political backgrounds when they were elected president.

Wilson "thought and acted like a professor even after he entered politics," wrote John Steele Gordon. "[He] always took it for granted, for instance, that he was the smartest guy in the room and acted accordingly."

Both were "the subjects of remarkable public adulation, and both won the Nobel Peace Prize for their aspirations rather than their accomplishments."

As I say, the similarities are striking.

Gordon is doubtful that Obama will be any more successful at bringing the two sides together than was Wilson, whose refusal to compromise with Senate Republicans prevented the League of Nations from ever achieving its objective.

And I am skeptical about that, too. I have seen little inclination on Obama's part to seek common ground, to be truly bipartisan. He gave it plenty of lip service when his party held huge majorities in Congress. Now we'll see if he can walk the walk.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two men — whether for good or ill — is the near–constant media exposure that was Obama's ally on the campaign trail but with which Obama has had an uneasy relationship since becoming president.

In Wilson's day, television didn't exist and radio was brand new. It should go without saying that the internet was not a factor.

Today, no matter which news source you may cite, Republicans appear to have gained more than 60 seats in the House.

It is the greatest shift in the House since Harry Truman was president. But the thing that I find really interesting is a similarity that Gordon couldn't have known about when his article was posted on Sunday.

In the midterm election of 1914, two years after Wilson was first elected, the Democrats lost about 60 seats in the House. Wilson had benefited from a split in the Republican ranks when he was elected in 1912; incumbent President William Howard Taft was renominated but many Republicans chose to support former President Theodore Roosevelt's third–party candidacy.

Democrats took advantage of the Republican rupture in the general election.

Republicans regrouped two years later and made massive gains as the electorate made its quadrennial midterm adjustment. Because the Democrats of 1914 held a majority in the House that simply dwarfed the one they had going into yesterday's midterms, the Democrats didn't lose control of that chamber until two years later — when Wilson was running for a second term.

When the votes had been counted in 1914, the Democrats retained their majority in the House, holding an advantage that is similar to the one the Republicans will hold in January.

Circumstances were different then. The economy was flourishing, and the policies that had been followed by Republicans prior to Wilson's election got a lot of the credit.

It is the third straight election in which more than 20 seats have changed hands in the House. That used to be a relatively rare occurrence. Never mind Wilson's experience. Of the 28 House elections between 1950 and 2004, only nine produced shifts of 20 House seats or more for either party.

It seems to me that the American people have been trying to tell their leaders something since before the start of the Great Recession — but certainly since that dreadful day in September 2008 when it seemed the entire financial system was imploding around us, and the economy was bleeding jobs.

And no one could stop the bleeding. It seemed no one was really trying. Maybe that's because no one has seemed to be listening.

Their sense has been that their leaders just don't get it. And my sense is that they will keep using the ballot this way until they get a system that really seems to be working for them. That someone is listening.

That's really the lesson that all politicians should take from this.

I think that is what Mom would remind the politically active Americans of today — Democrats and Republicans.

Remember who this is all about. Don't think that you have all the answers. Listen to their concerns.

You do otherwise at your own peril.