For a second there this weekend I thought we had stepped into a collective time warp and were back in the early 1990s. I turned on the television Saturday afternoon and watched Rush Limbaugh's impassioned "address to the nation" from the dais at CPAC. Then on Sunday morning I opened the New York Times Magazine and read this exchange between Newt Gingrich and Matt Bai:
At one point, I asked Gingrich, now a healthful-looking 65, about his sudden exit from Congress in 1998. "First of all, in the Toynbeean sense, I believe in departure and return," he told me. "In the what sense?" I asked. "Arnold Toynbee," he replied matter-of-factly, as if no one would walk into his office without having read "Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England." "I believe in the sense that, you know, De Gaulle had to go to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises for 11 years." "I'm sorry?" "Departure and return. And someone once said to me, if you don't leave, you can't come back, because you've never left."
Those words might be the opening bid for Gingrich's 2012 presidential campaign. The difference between the right 16 years ago and today is in its sense of history. In 1992, Clinton won only 43 percent of the vote and the GOP picked up House seats. Reagan was a recent memory. So the GOP was in a good position to go on the offensive. History, it seemed, was on its side. Does that still seem to be the case? In 2008, Obama won 52 percent of the vote and Democrats expanded their congressional majority. There's more of a sense today, even among conservative Republicans, of a sea change in public opinion that runs against the GOP. Now, that sea change actually might not be real. Obama could reach beyond his grasp. Regardless, while the right might look like it did in 1993, the political context has changed for sure.