60 Year cycle
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) raised eyebrows Tuesday when she used a campaign phrase suggested for the Democrats early this year by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).
But it turns out that Pelosi is not alone.
Democratic candidates for Congress across the country have been employing the phrase “Had Enough?” in speeches and on their campaign websites.
After national Democrats unveiled their 2006 slogan, “Together We Can Do Better,” Gingrich in March said Democrats would be better off using “Had Enough?”
A month later, former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.) wrote an op-ed in The New York Times urging Democrats to embrace the phrase “Had Enough? Vote Democratic!”
In an interview yesterday, Roemer said the idea for the op-ed came to him after reading a story about Harry Truman that recounted that an advertising executive in 1946 suggested “Had Enough?” to the Republican Party, which adopted the slogan. Later that year, Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress.
11-7-1946
The man who “cooked up” the widely used Massachusetts election slogan — “Had Enough? Vote Republican” — is a Boston advertising executive who kept his identity secret until after balloting began.
Karl Frost, president of the Karl M. Frost Company of Boston, said that he and his associates “cooked up” the slogan at the request of the Massachusetts Republican Comittee. It required a series of tries, he said, before the catchy phrase was concocted.
Mr. Frost said the paint was hardly dry on Massachusetts’ signs when the National Republican Committee requested authority to use the slogan.
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11-7-1946
But when the Eightieth Congress assembles, the Republicans will be able to decide the fate of such measures themselves unless they split as the Democrats have done. In that event an anti-administration colaition of members of the two major parties will still command the actions of Congress. But the responsibility to the country for congress will rest on the Repuiblicans, and not on the Democrats as it has for the last fourteen years.
That is why, in view of the difficulties of making a political bridge between a Republican majority and a Democratic President over which essential functions of government can travel, some long-headed Republican politicians hoped their gains would fall just short of majorities in the House and in the Senate. They wanted thus to double the assurane that, with the aid of conservative Democrats, they would continue to have power over legislation. They wanted at the same time to be able to blame all consequences on the nominal majority.
But a landslide cannot be confined. A public which has “had enough” and is resolved on change, does what it can to make that change complete and certain. No strategy has been devised that can manage a landslide and this was again demonstrated on Tuesday.
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2006: If I could find the news reports about Democrats privately hoping they just narrowly remain in the minority, I’d post it here.
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10-5-1946
At the same time the Republican campaign managers and their candidates in closely contested areas realize that if they cannot induce the people to turn Congress over to them in current circumstances, they can scarcely hope for electoral success at any time in the visible future as their party is now organized and labeled. A revolution, similar to that which under the late President Roosevelt changed the character, aims, and the dominating influences of the Democratic Party, would probably be required for the Republicans to make a strong challenge very soon thereafter unless, meanwhile, the Democratic party itself exploded into several pieces because of its centrifugal disturbances.
That event will not happen unless the South seceds from the Democratic Party and its label, or the radical groups still affiliated with it set up in politics under a new standard. But the South in 1940 and 1944 resisted the most extreme provocations since 1860 to secede politically, giing its electoral votes to the Democrats as usual and the members of Congress with whom that party was able to organize.
U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, a senior black Democrat in Congress, said Wednesday that he would consider retiring from the House of Representatives if the Democrats don’t retake control of the House after the midterm congressional and Senate elections in November.
“If the American people support the Bush gang and reject what is sane, moral and just, then I would consider some educational opportunities where I could still fight for my principles without being on the losing side of the U.S. Congress,” Rangel told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
Rangel said he still expects the Democrats to win their elections, reclaim the majority of the House and discuss a bevy of issues, including withdrawing troops from Iraq; cutting the federal deficit; restoring funding for education and health care; Republican indictments and the federal government’s “incompetence” in responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But he said he may seriously decide to quit after 35 years in Congress.
“If the American people support two more years of Bush,” Rangel said in an interview, “this is not America. I really believe this [November] election will allow the American people to get rid of people who support Bush and his gang.”