Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.

Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.

It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit.

The view that Republicans had been routed was so widely accepted that some of them proposed legislation to prevent a shutdown from ever taking place again. The idea was that if no budget were enacted, the government would just keep going on the previous year’s funding levels. The legislation never went anywhere because Democrats thought the possibility of a repeat performance of the 1995-96 shutdowns gave them leverage.

Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now. The “balanced budget deal” of 1997 included the creation of a new health-care entitlement for children, something the Republicans of 1995 would never have accepted but the post-shutdown Republicans were too beat down to resist. The conservative end of the party hated the deal.

The Consequences

And that deal wasn’t the only leftward move the party made in response to Clinton’s victory in the shutdown battle. The rise of the big-government-friendly politics of George W. Bush was another, more consequential one. Gingrich is hoping that today’s partisans of smaller government have forgotten this history, or are too young to have experienced it.

While Clinton’s poll numbers improved after the shutdowns, Gingrich’s declined. After he lost his job as speaker, the Gallup Organization reviewed his generally low ratings in office and concluded, “The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995.” Through most of the next two years, it noted, people who viewed Gingrich unfavorably outnumbered those who viewed him favorably by almost 2-to-1. That unpopularity, of course, contributed mightily to his losing the job at the hands of his Republican colleagues.

{much needed emphasis lovingly provided by CTG}

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-12...government.html

Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #2

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Utter bullshit and spin. Clintons approvals picked up because the economy took off again after the '94 landslide. There was also something called Welfare Reform that Clinton touted through the '96 election cycle. Also as a result of the shutdown, we GAINED 2 Senate seats and held control of the House for the first time since the 20's, suffering minimal losses consider how big the sweep of '94 was.

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Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #4

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Quote: Cedric wrote in post #3

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It was on track to pick-up 25+ before the ill-conceived shutdown.

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Absolutely no one expected a 25 seat pick up after gaining 54 seats....

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"In retrospect, if I were doing it all over again, we would consciously avoid the government shutdown. It was clearly wrong." - NEWT GINGRICH

Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #8

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Quote: Justme wrote in post #6

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"In retrospect, if I were doing it all over again, we would consciously avoid the government shutdown. It was clearly wrong." - NEWT GINGRICH

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Who cares what he says today about an issue from 20 years ago? He was shilling to be President and said all sorts of things that were diametrically opposed to his position at the time. BTW, his approvals took a bigger hit when he whined about his seating position on Air Force One than the shutdown.

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Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #10

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Quote: Cedric wrote in post #9

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Gingrich was a disaster.

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He is a disaster now, but he was able to manufacture a landslide win in '94. Apparently you don't remember his floor speeches destroying the Rats on a daily basis. Of course you don't. You are 14 years old.

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Maybe if the GOP rank and file wouldn't have freaked out and ran away like their pants were on fire the first time the MSM ran a government-shutdown-sob-story back in '95, today's congressional Republicans might have a little more "fight" in them.

But, alas, they don't trust you to support their efforts when the going gets tough.

And I don't blame them.