A Fleeting Majority?

Another article appeared in the Times yesterday about the apparent extinction of the “Yankee Republican.” The New England Republican effectively died as a politically viable faction of the GOP.

Consider New Hampshire: a fairly solidly red state, though really more libertarian than anything else (live free or die! or both, seeing as there is no helmet law for motorcyclists in NH). “In New Hampshire, before the election, the State House of Representatives had had a majority of Democrats only once in 132 years, in 1922; the Senate had been Democratic only twice, in 1912 and 1998.” Both houses now have Democratic majorities.

As the article notes, this is a shame. Gary L. Rose, a professor of politics at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn: “The Republican Party has lost a very important voice internally, too, and that only further exacerbates the polarization between the parties. Something’s going to be lost here in American politics without their voice.”

But also – and this seems to be my pet topic – it’s a warning for the Democratic Party. The reason that New England went entirely for the Dems is that all of the moderates – and there are many – all went to the Democrats. This means that if the Democrats go too liberal or if the GOP fronts a centrist in ’08, the blue majority could disappear just as fast as it appeared.

So, what do we progressives have to say about that? I’m still working on it…

Some Thoughts

The current Doonesbury Straw Poll asks “which election loser will you miss the most?” One of the possible choices is “Lincoln Chafee. The most liberal Republican in the Senate, and the only one to vote against the Iraq war: Our newly-bipartisan world could have used a guy like that, even though losing him helped make it bipartisan. Curse you, irony!” The sentiment is similar to one found in the Daily Princetonian, discussing Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA): “Leach, one of Congress’s most liberal Republicans, who has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and supports abortion rights, lost a closely fought race against Democratic challenger David Loebsack, ironically becoming a victim of nationwide ire directed toward a policy Leach himself had opposed.”

Though I am obviously pleased with the Democratic takeover of Congress, it is still a sad state of affairs when principled Republicans – probably those most true to the Eisenhower/Nixon mold – have to be voted out of office in order to stem the hijacking of our democracy.

In other news, we have now been in Iraq longer than we were fighting in World War II.

The Left-Behind Left

Along the lines of what I said yesterday, here’s what Charles Krauthammer had to say in today’s WaPo about how the Democrats won on Tuesday:

The result is that both parties have moved to the right. The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past, the Rockefeller Republicans. And the Democrats have widened their tent to bring in a new crop of blue-dog conservatives.

This, I think, shows the difference between 1994 and 2006. In 1994, Bill Clinton was punished for trying to be liberal and progressive. The country had moved to the right, and the Democratic Party had not caught up. In 2006, on the other hand, it was the party system that shifted to the right. The GOP is now so lost in neoconservative-and-religious-right-land that the Democrats now firmly hold the center. Just how firmly is the question for 2008….

Blue Dogs vs. Bull Moose: The Future of the Democratic Party

Tuesday night’s blue wave, as Joe Scarborough said, appeared to make the northeastern Congressional Republican as endangered a species as the Southern Congressional Democrat. But who was voted into Congress in place of many of these Republicans? The cadre of Democrats voted in this year, I would imagine, is decidedly more conservative than the cadre voted out in 1994.

Look at some of the big names of the 2006 midterms. Bob Casey, who felled Rick Santorum, is a very conservative Democrat, whose vote on social issues is likely to be no help to progressive politics. Jim Webb, who just barely made it into the Senate, tapped into the traditionally Republican side of issues such as gun control or immigration. Harold Ford almost became the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, and he did it by staying to the right of standard Democratic positions. Though his picture can still be found in the dictionary next to the word “insipid,” David Brooks actually had the rare, well, point today, when he said that Tuesday was a great day for the center. America, I think, has not moved farther left. The whole party system has moved farther right, leaving the average American in the “blue” column.

Until he announced he wasn’t running, Mark Warner was a popular name being floated for the 2008 Democratic nomination. Evan Bayh – a conservative Democrat from Indiana who, in 2004, managed to receive more votes than President Bush – is still a name that conservative Democrats are talking about.

Is this the future of the Democratic Party? Is the successful Democrat of 2008 going to be the socially conservative, Midwestern or mid-Southern, worker-friendly, protectionist type? While Hillary Clinton is currently the frontrunner in the polls for the Democratic nomination, will the 2006 midterms lead people to look to a more conservative Democrat? And If this represents most Americans and will get a majority of votes, is there really a problem with the party going this way?

Yes.

Brooks, to quote The West Wing, “is like the French radical watching the crowd run by and saying, ‘There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.'”

Americans are still in this Reagan-induced haze that it’s still “Morning in America.” Meanwhile, schools are becoming more segregated, the wealth gap is increasing, and poverty has long since won the War on Poverty. Reagan convinced us we didn’t need the Great Society anymore, and since his presidency, morning has quickly turned to a very dismal afternoon. Most people just haven’t noticed yet. The person we need as our presidential nominee in 2008 is the person who can wake us up and remind us what it truly means to be Democrats.

With Great Power…

So, the Democratic Party has taken control of both houses of Congress. Overall, a good day for America. It’s been a long time since I woke up feeling good on a Wednesday morning in early November. For the last two years of the Bush II presidency, at least, Congress will not be a rubber stamp for undermining the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions. That in itself is an enormous victory, and it should not be underestimated.

Of course, these great victories in ’06 potentially set up the Democrats for a huge defeat in ’08. A lot of Democratic gains on Tuesday were in districts and states where Democrats do not typically win, and these victories often came for a very simple reason: they were not Republicans. As pretty much every pundit has said, this election had less to do with Democratic mobilization and more to do with disillusionment with the Republican Party over the War in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and a whole slew of ethics scandals. 2006 was not the new 1994. Nancy Pelosi had nothing like Newt Gringrich’s “Contract with America” that drove Democrats into office. The party had no coherent platform that it was presenting to the American people.

This election puts a heavy burden on the Democrats. If they don’t deliver something significantly better, in the public eye, than the Republicans have been doing, then their momentum will disappear in a heartbeat. The Democrats now have power. They are not in the White House, and they still not the “ruling party,” but they have power. If they can’t show that they can do more and do it better than the Republican-controlled Congress, then they will not only fail to gain the presidency in 2008, but they will also lose their newly-won control of the legislative branch.

Will Rogers once said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Thus far, the Democratic Party has failed to give me any indication that that is not still the case. Let’s hope they can step up to the plate.