blatham wrote:Quote:The question is whether or not they can keep the bit in their collective mouth for the next two years and not sour the Democratic presidential candidate's chances by pushing a left-wing agenda that will reinforce the notion that Democrats warrant the "L" word.
Well, that's the interesting deep element to the election...the degradation, in the popular american mind, of conservative governance and ideology. The serious sectors of the movement (which does not include Rush or Coulter or Fox) understand that their movement has taken a significant, perhaps terminal, hit. A corollary aspect of this is the shift, however implicit at this point, of what "liberalism" actually means/represents in relation to the electorate's values.
We'll see what happens in two years. But the goal of a thirty year republican dominance looks pretty tattered and unsalvageable at this point. If things stay much the same as they have over the last five or so years, McCain looks the republicans only real presidential hope. And a McCain presidency will, to something like a 90% probability, effectively dismantle the coalition of "conservative" interest groups...their interests being actually too conflicted to remain a political singularity outside of a solidly authoritarian comptroller. So spreken moi.
Wishful thinking blatham. I don't know how you can conclude that these elections indicate a significant, let alone permanent, rejection of conservatism in America. America remains a center-right nation, which can readily be seen by the manner in which the winners, the Democrats, have read the public sentiment that brought them back into power.
Permanent Republican dominance is, indeed, a lost cause, but then it was never really found. There was never a chance that the Republicans could rule the nation for extended decades, for the very reason that they just lost the congress: Power corrupts, and it takes far less than decades to do so.
I really didn't think the Democrats' "Culture of Corruption" strategy was going to have any traction, and in the end I think they agreed with me as they pretty well abandoned it in favor of Iraq as their central issue.
I figured the public didn't see all that much difference between the two parties when it came to corruption and only those races in which clearly corrupt politicians were involved would be affected by the issue.
I'm not convinced that in terms of the public's attitude about politicians in general, I was wrong, but it seems pretty clear that there was a significant level of disgust that easily focused itself on the party in power, and which led to an "anybody would be better" sentiment. Popular, moderate Republicans lost in any number of congressional races, their party affiliation, rather than their ideology serving as their Achilles Heel.
Again, I have to admit that I am surprised and impressed by the Democrat's measured response to their victory. Clearly they did not see the election results as a mandate for moving the country to the left, and they are not going to assume that simply because the system favors incumbents that now that they are in power they'll have a sure turn at keeping it for at least ten plus years.
Nancy Pelosi who, perhaps more than any other Democrat, seemed to have correctly judged the public's feeling about corruption seems fairly determined not to let her party be seen as "the New Boss, just like the Old Boss." (Although she did stumble a bit out of the box by supporting an unindicted Abscam co-conspirator for Majority Leader.)
Throughout my life, it has never been a catastrophic turn of events when the party I opposed controlled the government, and I don't expect it to be the case now. Certainly there will be policies enacted which fail to move the nation forward, and even set it back a bit, but ruination is hardly likely. It is all the less likely because the Democrats seem to really want to stay in power and just might be able to moderate themselves...at least for a while.
Old coalitions rarely, if ever, remain intact after a political defeat, and so it doesn't take a great deal of insight to predict that the new coalition of conservative interest groups will not be put together in precisely the same way it was during the glory days, but these groups are neither going to disappear, nor switch sides anymore than liberal interest groups did when the Democrats lost power.
