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Sat 11 Nov, 2006 11:11 am
It looks like the Reagan Democrats had enough and came home.---BBB
The Great Revulsion
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 10 November 2006
I'm not feeling giddy as much as greatly relieved. O.K., maybe a little giddy. Give 'em hell, Harry and Nancy!
Here's what I wrote more than three years ago, in the introduction to my column collection "The Great Unraveling": "I have a vision - maybe just a hope - of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country."
At the time, the right was still celebrating the illusion of victory in Iraq, and the bizarre Bush personality cult was still in full flower. But now the great revulsion has arrived.
Tuesday's election was a truly stunning victory for the Democrats. Candidates planning to caucus with the Democrats took 24 of the 33 Senate seats at stake this year, winning seven million more votes than Republicans. In House races, Democrats received about 53 percent of the two-party vote, giving them a margin more than twice as large as the 2.5-percentage-point lead that Mr. Bush claimed as a "mandate" two years ago - and the margin would have been even bigger if many Democrats hadn't been running unopposed.
The election wasn't just the end of the road for Mr. Bush's reign of error. It was also the end of the 12-year Republican dominance of Congress. The Democrats will now hold a majority in the House that is about as big as the Republicans ever achieved during that era of dominance.
Moreover, the new Democratic majority may well be much more effective than the majority the party lost in 1994. Thanks to a great regional realignment, in which a solid Northeast has replaced the solid South, Democratic control no longer depends on a bloc of Dixiecrats whose ideological sympathies were often with the other side of the aisle.
Now, I don't expect or want a permanent Democratic lock on power. But I do hope and believe that this election marks the beginning of the end for the conservative movement that has taken over the Republican Party.
In saying that, I'm not calling for or predicting the end of conservatism. There always have been and always will be conservatives on the American political scene. And that's as it should be: a diversity of views is part of what makes democracy vital.
But we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism - the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.
Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don't accept the legitimacy of opposition. Democrats will only become acceptable, declared Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, once they "are comfortable in their minority status." He added, "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate."
And the determination of the movement to hold on to power at any cost has poisoned our political culture. Just think about the campaign that just ended, with its coded racism, deceptive robo-calls, personal smears, homeless men bused in to hand out deceptive fliers, and more. Not to mention the constant implication that anyone who questions the Bush administration or its policies is very nearly a traitor.
When movement conservatism took it over, the Republican Party ceased to be the party of Dwight Eisenhower and became the party of Karl Rove. The good news is that Karl Rove and the political tendency he represents may both have just self-destructed.
Two years ago, people were talking about permanent right-wing dominance of American politics. But since then the American people have gotten a clearer sense of what rule by movement conservatives means. They've seen the movement take us into an unnecessary war, and botch every aspect of that war. They've seen a great American city left to drown; they've seen corruption reach deep into our political process; they've seen the hypocrisy of those who lecture us on morality.
And they just said no.
Democratic victory may signal the emergence of new coalition
Posted on Fri, Nov. 10, 2006
Democratic victory may signal the emergence of a new coalition
By STEVEN THOMMA
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON ?- Republicans lost more than an election Tuesday. They lost their chance to extend the conservative Republican majority that's dominated American politics since Ronald Reagan seized the presidency in 1980.
They may be able to get it back. Or they may be falling victim to one of the decisive shifts in the political landscape that occur about once a generation, when a new coalition consolidates around one party to dominate politics for decades.
It happened in the presidential elections in 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and arguably in 1968 - only to be interrupted by the Watergate scandal, then rebuilt and expanded in 1980. It hasn't happened since, but the preceding midterm congressional elections often signaled the shift. Will such a new coalition emerge in 2008?
Democrats hope that this week's elections signal that the American electorate is up for grabs again as it hasn't been in decades because the long-dominant Republican coalition has fractured.
Pivotal blocs of swing voters - including independents, Hispanics and Roman Catholics - moved away from Republicans this year. Even parts of their once-loyal base, such as evangelical Christians, suddenly were open to voting for Democrats.
It's not that America has shifted to a liberal Democratic course. Many of the Democratic gains came with conservative or centrist candidates, such as anti-abortion-rights, pro-gun-rights Democrat Bob Casey Jr., who won Pennsylvania's Senate race. Also, seven of eight states approved amendments banning gay marriage.
In an Election Day survey, Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen found that 53 percent of voters said the Republicans didn't share their values, and 47 percent said the Democrats didn't share theirs. "There's a strong sense that the two parties are out of touch with the mainstream," Schoen said.
Thus the country enters the next two years with no dominant ideological or partisan consensus, unable or unwilling to coalesce into a solid majority behind either party. How voters align for the next era could hinge first on how Democrats govern in Congress, and then on the 2008 presidential election.
Given the rapid changes under way in American society - where party loyalty is a quaint notion for many, and large blocs such as independents and Hispanics swing back and forth from Republican to Democratic - it's unlikely that either major party can build a durable majority simply with partisan appeals to its base supporters, as both have tried to do in the past.
"We're in a period of great foment," said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. "There are so many elements of the electorate in play. The demographic structure is changing rapidly. We're seeing regional migrations; we can't build exurbia fast enough. Also, the globalization of the economy is by no means over. An awful lot is going on socially and economically."
The result is a shifting political landscape that's ripe for what Green called "attempts at coalitions that might not last longer than one election."
Or temporary coalitions built issue by issue.
One such coalition could be built around comprehensive immigration restructuring, for example, which was supported by President Bush, moderate Republicans in the Senate and Democrats, but blocked by Republicans in the House of Representatives.
The president wanted to keep building Republican support among Hispanics, the fastest growing part of the population. Hispanic support for Republicans increased from 31 percent for Bush in 2000 to 37 percent in the 2002 midterm elections to 44 percent for the president in 2004.
Yet House Republicans, appealing to a conservative base that refused to support any plan that let illegal immigrants remain in the United States, blocked comprehensive immigration revisions despite being criticized as anti-Hispanic.
Hispanic support for Republicans plummeted Tuesday, to 26 percent.
Hispanic immigration helped break the Republican grip on the fast-growing Southwest and Mountain West region, as Democrats gained offices in Arizona and Colorado.
Indeed, the way Republicans governed the last six years - catering to their base for short-term, narrow victories in 2002 and 2004 - probably cost them the chance to build a broader and more durable majority that might have weathered this year's anger at the Iraq war and scandals in Congress.
First they lost support from Hispanics. Second, they lost ground among Catholics and evangelical Christians.
Once dependably Democratic, Catholics were lured away by Reagan in the 1980s and have leaned Republican ever since. Two years ago, Catholics voted for Bush over their fellow Catholic John Kerry by 50-47 percent.
This year they supported Democrats by 55-44 percent.
In the pivotal state of Ohio, Catholics went for Democrat Sherrod Brown by 54-46 percent over fellow Catholic Mike DeWine, the Republican senator who was defeated.
"This could mark a change in alignment in which religious divisions might work well for Democrats," Green said.
The Republican share of the white evangelical Christian vote dropped from 80 percent in 2000 to 70 percent this year.
As they drove away parts of their coalition, Republicans also governed Congress in a partisan way that turned off independents and moderates. They shut out Democrats from negotiating legislation, all but closed down bipartisan ethics monitoring and refused even to inform the Democrat on the board that oversees the House page program of suspected problems involving former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla.
Independents went for Democrats this year by 57-39 percent, after dividing almost evenly between the major parties since the mid-1990s. Moderates went for Democrats by 60-38 percent.
"There are a bunch of people in the center who aren't satisfied with the way everything became so polarized," said Holly Brasher, a political scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
"People may be growing more conscious of the need to balance the right with the left. People do think consciously of that; it's not an accident."
Leading Democrats appear conscious of the pitfalls of trying to move the pendulum too far to the left, but the party's liberal base wants exactly that.
Pro-impeachment forces plan a rally in Philadelphia to pressure the Democrats to throw Bush out of office. As many as 60 congressional Democrats planned to meet next week to discuss a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq with George McGovern, whose 1972 Democratic presidential campaign defined antiwar activism.
But Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a liberal who's expected to be the next speaker of the House, has signaled that she wants the new Democratic House to avoid partisan ideological battles on issues such as impeachment or forcing a quick withdrawal from Iraq.
Al From, the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, agrees that the path to building a Democratic majority lies in not repeating Republican mistakes.
"In pursuing the Bush-Rove formula over the last six years, Republicans have deliberately abandoned the political center and invited Democrats to occupy it," From said.
"While Democrats benefited from an energized party base, the key to the victory was . . . among moderates, middle-class voters and suburbanites. These voters could represent an expanded Democratic base and an enduring progressive majority - if Democrats use their new power wisely."
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