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November 8, 2006

Morning in America?

The Democrats have taken back the House, and it now seems to me that they are likely to re-take the Senate as well. Alas poor Santorum, we knew thee well!

So what does all of this mean? Is this the end of the Republican Revolution? Are the Democrats the new and emerging majority??? I fear that whatever the answers, the most urgent issue confronting our Republic (subsidies to make high-end Burgundy wine affordable) will remain on the public back-burner.

I have a couple of reactions to yesterday's events:

1. This is a vote against (Bush, congressional scandals, Iraq, etc.) rather than for (any kind of coherent Democratic agenda) anything. This sort of thing can buy the Democrats at most an election or two (as with the hang-over from Watergate). To really capitalize on this, the Democrats will have to come up with some kind of politically attractive affirmative agenda. Domestically, the question will be which branch of the party (the self-styled "progressives" or the centrist "Clintonites") will define their agenda. If it is the former, this will likely be a short-lived victory. If it is the latter, we may have an election on our hands in 2008 (though, ironically enough, I think that Sen. Clinton might be a risky choice to pick up the Clintonian standard). In terms of foreign policy, I think the issue gets more clouded: Clinton left no real coherent ideological legacy in that arena. Taking a really critical view of the Clinton era, his foreign policy legacy is as appalling as Bush's, with the possible exception that US casualties were lower and he made Europeans feel all warm and fuzzy. Indeed, most of the things Bush has screwed up involved outstanding challenges and threats from the Clinton era that Clinton tried to keep on hold (so he could simply hand them off to his successor) rather than resolve. And the Democrats have no better idea (from what I can see) what to do in Iraq. Their prescriptions are, on careful inspection, no more than the left-of-center analog to glib Rumsfeldian slogans.

2. In some sense, this might be as much a vote for conservatism as anything else. What I suspect will prove as important as who showed up at the polls is who didn't. I think there has been a certain loss of enthusiasm for the Republicans on the part of conservatives and libertarian types. From Medicare part D to that bloated monstrosity of a highway bill that passed recently, this White House and Congress have consistently delivered exactly the kinds of things that Republican government is supposed to protect us from.

3. In 2000, there were signs of waning Evangelical enthusiasm for the Republican Party (if the religious right had shown up in Florida, there would have been no debate about who won). By dint of an enormous amount of political footwork, Bush, Rove and the gang got them back out in 2004. I wonder whether all of the scandals in Congress took their toll again in 2006. If 2004 was a high-water mark for Evangelical support for the Republicans, I wonder what this will mean in 2008 and beyond. On the one hand, the religious right has been the margin that gave the Republicans such comfortable margins in elections. On the other hand, I have always felt that they represented a sort of ideological vulnerability. Just as the Democrats do best when they dance to the Clinton's tune, the Republicans are probably at their most competitive viz ordinary Americans when they stick to Reagan's big tent conservatism. The problem for both parties is that these positions are both centrist to center right, with considerable overlap. This makes elections more of a random affair driven by, for instance, personal idiosyncracies of the candidates.

4. Ceteris paribus, yesterday's events probably make a Republican presidential victory in 2008 more likely.

Posted by dag at November 8, 2006 10:23 AM

Comments

Posted by: The Good Rabbi at November 8, 2006 5:10 PM

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