2006 does not appear to be a repudiation of conservatism
We have said that the process of realignment is sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful. It appears to us that 2006 represents one of the painful episodes, but that the process continues to chug along, more or less. The losses of the northern Rockefeller Republicans and the opportunistic recruitment of winning conservative Democrats in key districts tend to support this thesis, as do most of the ballot initiatives. Krauthammer:
Democrats took control of the House and the Senate. As of this writing, they won 29 House seats (with a handful still in the balance), slightly below the post-1930 average for the six-year itch in a two-term presidency. They took the Senate by the thinnest of margins — a one-vote majority, delivered to them by a margin of 7,188 votes in Virginia and 2,847 in Montana. Because both houses have gone Democratic, the election is correctly seen as an expression of no confidence in the central issue of the campaign: Iraq…
The fact that the Democrats crossed midfield does not make this election a great anti-conservative swing. Republican losses included a massacre of moderate Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest. And Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats, brilliantly recruited by Rep. Rahm Emanuel with classic Clintonian triangulation. Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax — and now a Democratic congressman.
The result is that both parties have moved to the right. The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past, the Rockefeller Republican. And the Democrats have widened their tent to bring in a new crop of blue-dog conservatives…Moreover, ballot initiatives make the claim of a major anti-conservative swing quite problematic. In Michigan, liberal Democrats swept the gubernatorial and senatorial races, yet a ballot initiative to abolish affirmative action passed 58-42. Seven out of eight anti-gay marriage amendments to state constitutions passed. And nine states passed referendums asserting individual property rights against the government’s power of eminent domain…
The electorate threw the bums out in disgust with corruption and in deep dissatisfaction with current Iraq policy. Reading much more into this election is a symptom of either Republican depression or Democratic wishful thinking.
Whether or not this analysis is correct only time will tell, but it does not offend most of the facts as we know them today. Bob Casey said he was pro-life and against gay marriage in the popular Pennsylviania scion’s successful bid against Rick Santorum. Jim Webb of Virginia is a Marine veteran and former Reagan cabinet member who wrote rather nasty things about women in combat (and women generally) — hardly the profile of a San Francisco Democrat. In Congress, it is said, Blue Dog Democrats will rise to at least 44 in the next session. (We doubt the likelihood of long-term peaceful co-existence of the Blue Dog legislators with Pelosi-Schumer-Reid-Conyers-Frank-Kennedy-Dingell-Rangel leadership — this is a waystation on the road to realignment in our opinion.)
Finally, we are a little surprised that Iraq turned out to be the critical issue it apparently was in the election. Given the existence of the volunteer army, and the potentially huge dividends if a reasonable and democratic Iraq could be created, we thought perhaps more voters would continue to cut the President additional slack. However, on reflection, we realize that voters already gave their opinions in 2002 and 2004, as we have written.
It may well be that voters turned on President Bush and the GOP because of what they see as duplicity and incompetence in Iraq. But the American public may have made a deeper judgment as well. It is certainly possible that Americans have come to believe, after watching the witless daily carnage in Iraq, that the Islamic world is utterly beyond repair or redemption, and is simply not worth the effort or blood or treasure. If Americans have made this more fundamental judgment, that would represent a far-reaching and profound turning point in public opinion. Such a conclusion would by no means favor the Left over the long term.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Jim Webb has been thinking about realignment and the Scots-Irish:
The decline in public education and the outsourcing of jobs has hit this culture hard. Diversity programs designed to assist minorities have had an unequal impact on white ethnic groups and particularly this one, whose roots are in a poverty-stricken South. Their sons and daughters serve in large numbers in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question. In fact, the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.
Apparently he’s been thinking along such lines as far back as his 1990 speech at the Confederate Memorial:
…And I would also like to say a special thanks to my good friend Nelson Jones for sharing this day with us. Nelson is a fellow Marine, a fellow alumnus of both the Naval Academy and the Georgetown Law Center, and like so many others here a child of the South. The last twenty five years in this country have shown again and again that, despite the regrettable and well-publicized turmoil of the Civil Rights years, those Americans of African ancestry are the people with whom our history in this country most closely intertwines, whose struggles in an odd but compelling way most resemble our own, and whose rights as full citizens we above all should celebrate and insist upon.
Webb says that a realignment could be forged by ‘the right national leader’…hmmm…