THE ELECTION: Stampede!

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When General Andrew Jackson was swept into the White House in 1828, voters wanted change. The growing young country seethed with discontent and rebellion. Farmers and drovers in the West and South resented the rich Easterners who ran the country for their own benefit. After the general's Inauguration, his supporters returned to the White House and proceeded to get liquored up. In an orgy of populist celebration, they smashed the china and crystal. Men in muddy boots stood on damask-covered chairs. The overdressed swells at the party were so alarmed by the rabble that they fled through the windows of the People's House, along with the new President himself.

Last week a simmering American electorate, angry at a Washington establishment more concerned with serving the vested interests that pay for its campaigns than with the declining living standards and perceived moral decay of the rest of America, stormed into polling booths across the country and chucked much of the nation's governing class out the window. "We always vote for change, and we never get it," said Steve Douglas, 39, of Detroit, a house painter and Democrat who voted Republican this time.

Gone was 40 years of Democratic control of the lower house of Congress. Gone was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the first holder of that office to be defeated at the polls since 1862. Gone were Democratic Governors in at least 11 states. Gone, perhaps finally this time, was the once solid Democratic domination of the Southern states. Gone was the most eloquent defender of the liberal faith in America, New York Governor Mario Cuomo.

And if not gone, certainly drastically diminished was the prospect of William Jefferson Clinton's gaining a second term as President. A "national sea change," he called it, as he struggled to swim back into the ideological center. But he sounded more like a drowning man. Voters were saying they felt misled. "I voted for him, but he's just got it all wrong about where we all stand on gays and guns and taxes. He sold us a bill of goods is what he did," said Jerry Smith, 42, a machinist in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and a new convert to the G.O.P.

Replacing the Democratic liberals was a herd of Republicans ranging from the born-again to the libertarian, led by the china-and-crystal-sm ashing Congressman from suburban Atlanta, Newt Gingrich, the next Speaker of the House. After a short burst of conciliation on election night, he seemed disinclined to throw Bill Clinton a rope. The President, he said, would be "very, very dumb" to try to stand in the way of the new conservative agenda. And to sharpen the point of the election, he called the Clintons "counterculture McGoverniks."

Gingrich and the other Republicans had reason to be cocksure of their standing. Not a single Republican member of the Senate or the House was defeated last week; not a single Republican resident of a Governor's mansion was evicted. The anger of the electorate was anything but inchoate. It was neatly targeted. The Democrats were seen -- not unreasonably, given their control of the White House and Capitol Hill -- as the Establishment and were made to pay. The anger was not indiscriminate. The two most outrageous Republican offerings, the vacuous Michael Huffington and the felonious Oliver North, together spent more than $40 million on their egregious ambitions, and lost anyway.