It's about Iraq, stupid (part trois)
Arianna Huffington:
Everywhere you look, "experts" are sifting through the rubble of last night and offering standard-issue, conventional wisdom-approved explanations for the GOP's defeat....[But] the GOP lost for three reasons: Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. Period. End of discussion. Election Day 2006 was an unambiguous repudiation of the Bush administration's failed and tragic policy in Iraq.She gets it and she backs it up with a list of nearly a dozen candidates who ran strongly against the war and beat established incumbents. She cuts the other way, too, citing several Democratic candidates who ignored the issue and lost (including Lamont!).
And another thing: this nonsense about the country becoming more conservative -- how many Democrats won by being more conservative than their opponents? Can you name one?
So to all the Republicans who think they lost by ignoring the commandments of conservatism: you sound like the old Marxists who still believe that communism can work if you just really, really, just give it another chance.
Not to argue with you and Arianna but I heard someone responding to the question about what this showed about the political/ideological shift in the public mind, also relative to past swings in party control of government. He said the public attitude was the same in each instance, only the victim of their ire was the same: the party in power. The attitude: throw the bums out.
I also heard that each of the “revolutions” coincided with unpopular wars and I thought: 1) when haven’t we been at war and 2) which wars were “popular” with the public at large.
Net, net, you will never be able to completely parse how much of this was about widespread and serious Republican congressional corruption, the Iraq war, the insertion of evangelical sensibilities into public policy, the administration’s assaults on science, the Bill of Rights, government competence, trustworthiness and transparency. It was the biggest one-party sh*tstorm in American history. If not for gerrymandering, they’d have lost 50 seats in the House.
"...only the victim of their ire was the same: the party in power."
That should read either:
"...and the victim of their ire was the same: the party in power."
or
only victim of their ire was the different: the party in power."
Now I've been thinking too hard.
This was the inevitable disintegration of the laughingly impossible Republican coalition: conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians and evangelicals. Clinton triangulated, the Republicans tried to quadrangulate (yes I made it up). They could never have satisfied those sometimes diametrically opposed agendas and, in the end, they satisfied none of them.
The real clout left in that party right now is the southern evangelicals. The conservatives are disgusted, the neocons are disgraced, and there's not a lot of libertarians in any case. Independents swung to the Democrats -- at least for now.
We'll see how this develops over the next two years.
Here’s the coalition problem for Republicans, as I see it. All four legs of the Republican coalition stool (choose your meaning) are built on an ideological belief system – as compared to the Democratic coalition which is built on middle-class building economic populism and conservative realism in foreign policy. Neocons believe in aggressive use of US power, conservatives believe in isolationism, libertarians believe in extremely minimalist government, while (many) evangelicals believe in their distorted version of “Christian values” and government’s role in promoting same.
When Republicans had some credibility with these groups they were able to sell all those belief systems at once, mostly by deceiving the public about their intentions, which, in turn, destroyed their credibility. The only thing they have left is the hatred of liberal Democrats they’ve imbued in hard-core supporters, about 30% mostly white southerners. I say they will never be able to get the four legs back without destroying whatever credibility they have left with the true believers. And all the growth, Hispanics and younger voters (the Jon Stewart generation) is moving Democratic at the same time.
Only the Democrats can give Republicans a winning majority again. Independents will not rejoin evangelicals except to reject Democrats and the same is for true small-government conservatives and neocons. At least until the memory of the last Republican majority is faded enough for Republicans to craft a believable façade, or, if they someday return to an actual governing party, something that would take at least 10-20 years of political reform.