Pendulum Swings and the Balance Impulse

Although I became aware, at seven years of age in 1963, of our Presidents (with John F. Kennedy being my "first", although I was born during Eisenhower's tenure), I did not follow elections until 1968. Since 1976, when I began to vote, I have voted in every Presidential election (except 1980). So, at least from 1968 on, I feel that I have a pretty good sense as to what the issues were in each race and what the mood of the country was at the time.

One recurring phenomenon that I noticed through the years was that, after a political party, be it Republican or Democrat, had been in office for at least eight years, there would grow within the voting population a sizable number who seemed to swing over to the other side and thus put the opposition party in power. This happened in 1968, 1976, 1992 (after three Republican terms), and 2000. There were specific issues of concern in each election (such as Vietnam, Watergate, and a recession), but I believe that there were two other factors in play. One was "voter fatigue", where people just got tired of looking up on the TV screen and seeing the same old faces saying the same old things. Another, as I see it, was a growing anxiety that the current governing party was in power long enough, and the other party needed to replace them for a while, in order to ensure that political power would not become too entrenched in the hands of one group. For a certain small, but crucial percentage of the electorate, the impulse to "balance" power between the two parties over time would in itself become an important election issue. For several elections during the mid-twentieth century, the Republicans depended unsuccessfully upon this idea in trying to unseat, first, Franklin Roosevelt, and then, to their unexpected chagrin in 1948, Harry S. Truman. But it was this sense of letting the "pendulum swing" back and forth that I believe ultimately led to the Constitutional Amendment that limited a President to two full terms. Still, people fear a party being in power longer than that. This, to me, was an enormous factor contributing to George W. Bush's (highly disputed) victory over Al Gore in 2000. For at that time, if you watch the debates and read about the issues, there really wasn't very much going on then to capture the voters' interest. And Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998-99 didn't seem to hurt Gore at all in his campaign.

And now, here we are again, on the edge of 2008, wondering in which direction the electorate is going to swing this time around. If the current two poll-leaders (Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani) obtain their parties' nominations, it may very well be this almost unconscious desire to "balance" the process and swing the pendulum back in the other direction that will determine the election's outcome.