I've spent much of the day feeling overwhelmed by all that's going on with the elections - in case you hadn't noticed, I am an actual Democrat, and so it's been a while since I even dared hope for the kind of positive result that seems likely on Tuesday. Like most Dems, I find myself endlessly repeating "please don't mess it up.... please don't mess it up... please don't mess it up..."
For the record I don't think we will. I have prognosticated here and here, and I am happy to be held to it: I think it's 30-40 additional Democratic seats in the House, and a net +5 in the Senate for a 50-50 tie, where all eyes are on Joe Lieberman, and I don't think anyone can count on him staying a Democrat. The writing is all over that wall.
But it's (always) the bigger picture that fascinates me, and no exception now. I've mentioned before that I think there are broader lessons in this election, and a few more occurred to me the past two mornings as I was waking up (my obsessive brain turns on at 5, without fail. It's very tiring). Here are a few thoughts:
- When the election is over, there will be one black man who was successful at getting into state-wide office - Deval Patrick. Four will not: Harold Ford, Michael Steele, Lynn Swann and Ken Blackwell. When Mara Liasson said today on Fox News Sunday that she had nothing but praise for Ford and Steele's campaigns "even though they both will lose," it hit me: losing is not a good thing. I'm not knocking Ford or Steele; indeed I think both of them did indeed provide a lot of interesting ideas and energy this season. But the question lingers - can black men get elected state wide? It's worth considering - only Illinois has proven in the post-Civil Rights era the kind of willingness to consistently elect African Americans (Moseley Braun and now Obama in the same seat) to the Senate. Only Virginia and now Massachusetts have shown willingness in Governorships. But there's no way to say our race issue in America is over; and all parties need to shape up. White Democrats need to figure out why they can't close the deal; Black Democrats need to stop blaming White Republicans; Black Republicans need to stop blaming Black Democrats; and White Republicans - some of whom are genuinely racially aware - need to face their own history and not pretend that ignoring it makes it go away. There is a black political class that I suspect has had more than enough of this. And I don't want to be in the middle if this becomes a real ugly conflict.
- Whatever the result, even if Republicans hold one or both houses (and I think they won't hold both), it's clear that the "conservative coalition" has run its course. This is something that has enormous ramifications. Some are pointing to the 12 year cycle that started in 1994 with the "Gingrich Revolution" - I'd call it, in fact a 26 year cycle that started in 1980. As I learned recently, it's possible to tie the history of Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff to the College Republican organization of the eighties, and the 1994 election is an endgame of their experiences, not the start of something. The reckoning will be ugly - indeed it already is - and start with the delinking of three groups: religious conservatives (feeling used, appalled by Foley and now Haggard), secular pro-business conservatives (never as gung-ho for the social stuff, and now appalled by fiscal waste), and libertarians (non-religious free spirits who are stunned by the betrayal on size of government). This touches so many things:
- Media - Conservative talk radio and Fox News are "True Believer" media. That is, the viewers and listeners feel they're getting "the truth." Losses on the magnitude that's coming will be incredibly demoralizing and some will wonder why they weren't told. Others will wonder why no one sees things as they do.
- "Hot button issues" - one serious fracture point will be homosexuality, where the defense and acceptance of Mark Foley on some level rankles true evangelicals and devout Catholics, and the more general shift to greater tolerance (like the way the "gay marriage" decision in New Jersey barely rippled) is going to unravel divisive political strategies that will no longer move enough votes.
- Election process - Redistricting and gerrymandering will be seriously questioned as useful tactics; the tension between voter suppression (a usual GOP strategy) and increasing turnout (which was supposed to save them as it had in 2004) bubbling to the surface; and serious qualms and questions about electronic voting
- Dearth of Ideas - conservatives, long crowing about having ideas while liberals offered "nothing new," have run the gas out of that engine. "New ideas" turned out to be old ideas in bad drag (killing off Social Security with "privatization," eviscerating public education with "school choice," even down to the long simmering loathing of the United Nations); and as those have fizzled, nothing has followed. Why? Well, because there really wasn't much there to begin with, and more to the point, there was no room for dissent or alternatives to be discussed and contemplated - conservatism, after all, is supposed to be about order, structure... not change.
I could - and I will at some point - go on. People will talk a lot about Iraq during the post mortems, and they should; it's the wedge that allowed the other tensions to crack open (although in some sense, it's the Bush inner circle's failure to appreciate how many things alienated their base - Harriet Miers, Terry Schiavo, etc - that created those fissures, too). But I've been realizing that a sea change election is really a sea change; I missed that in 1994, partly because I was naive. I think 12 years in the wilderness has snapped a lot (though not all) of Democrats' bad attitudes - that we don't have to actually build consensus, that we don't have to moderate our views and our goals at times, that we should be more concerned with making a point than winning elections. We aren't all done with growing up yet, but we are prepared to take the reins. And I think voters get that. It's time for a change.
All thanks for this post go to my Mom - because she encourages discussion and backs me up. :)
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