This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “Morning Joe.”
In every speech I’ve given over the past 20 years, I talk about the ebb and flow of American politics: If a party gets voted into power and goes too far left or too far right, they’re corrected in the midterms and readjust for the next election.
I learned this firsthand during President Bill Clinton’s first administration. After he was elected in 1992, Clinton passed the Tax Reform Act of 1993, which increased the corporate tax rate and the top federal income tax rates.
In 2022, Democrats didn’t have this usual “shellacking.”
Clinton was quickly painted as a left-wing radical, and that reaction got people like me elected in 1994. However, when we shut down the government trying to balance the budget, we were seen as going too far right, which helped Clinton get re-elected in 1996.
In 2008, we saw the same thing with President Barack Obama. He won this massive, sweeping victory, but two years later the tea party came in and said, “It’s our turn now.”
The realignment in 1994 helped push Clinton to declare, “The era of big government is over,” during his 1996 State of the Union address. That was Clinton readjusting to the actions of the American people. He realized he had to go to voters and say government wasn’t the answer.
It’s the same thing that happened with Obama: He started talking to Republicans in 2011 and 2012 about the deficit and spending caps. He talked about welfare reform and balancing the budget after Democrats got a “shellacking,” as Obama would say, in the 2010 midterms. His base hated it, but he did it anyway — just like Clinton.
But in 2022, Democrats didn’t have the usual incumbent party “shellacking.” Ezra Klein makes a very compelling argument in The New York Times that since there wasn’t a reckoning two years ago — one that would have made President Joe Biden not run for re-election or make Democrats reconsider some of their policies — the party developed “political blindness” going into the 2024 election.
After the Democrats’ defeat last week, it may finally be the time for the party to go through that political reckoning.
Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW's "Morning Joe" alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls "revolutionary." In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is "The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again."
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.