WaPo:

John Paul’s orthodoxy, I fear, will quite overwhelm the humanistic aspects of his legacy. In Africa, John Paul’s church is a tribune for economic justice — for debt forgiveness, for a global economic order that seeks to enhance, not destroy, workers’ rights. It is also a vehement opponent of birth control and condom distribution, even as an AIDS epidemic ravages the continent. That such a church could call itself “pro-life” is sophistry of the highest order…..

The opposition to liberalism — Jeffersonian liberalism, with its belief in science and, correspondingly, human equality — extends well beyond the backwaters of Islam. It includes the church that the pope bequeaths us, the Protestant Christian Right, the Orthodox rabbis of Israel…..

A specter is haunting modernity. Powered by tradition, by a misogyny and homophobia for which a future pope will one day apologize as surely as John Paul did for the church’s anti-Semitism, the Orthodox International marches forth to do battle against liberalism, invoking ancient beliefs against the claims of a common humanity.

We couldn’t disagree with Meyerson more, but clarity is a lot more important than agreement, so we appreciate his clearly stated views. Meanwhile, here’s what happened to a girl in WWII, courtesy of Roger Cohen in the NYT:

Separated from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the Germans, she could scarcely walk. But walk she did, to a train station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved slowly, the wind cut through her. When the cold became too much to bear, she got down at a village called Jedrzejow. In a corner of the station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, “very good looking,” as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to be a priest. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What are you doing?” Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents. The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. They talked about the advancing Soviet Army. Edith said she believed that her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.

“Try to stand,” the man said. Edith tried and failed. He carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak and made a small fire. His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla.

“A specter is haunting modernity?” Jeeeesh. The specter is the radical atheistic humanism that is one of the root causes of communism and the European wars of the twentieth century. The culture of death proceeds in great numbers, backed by fancy intellectual justifications. The culture of life proceeds one small life at a time.

LGF has a video apparently compiled by opponents of Bolton’s nomination to be our ambassador to the UN. It’s terrific! It’s nice to live in such clarifying times.

Are the Yankees going to become Red Sox fans all of a sudden? Will Ohio State lie down with Michigan? Will the Harvard faculty figure out it is the elite of the elite and stop using phrases like “speak truth to power?” Not bloody likely. And the MSM are not going to stop being Democrats who are 12-1 in the tank against the Bush administration.

Which is why we take our blood pressure medicine and try to no longer do stories like John Hinderaker did on the Presidential news conference today, all about unpopular social security reform, unpopular Wolfowitz, unpopular judicial nominees — unpopular with the reporters, and how!

The Old Media or MSM are going to do what they do until they shrink to a size more fitting to their minority views, and we just have to put up with it. For example, O’Reilly had some twit from UVa on tonight who insisted that the NYT was not liberal, for gosh sakes (transcript link when available), so there’s a long road ahead.

Here’s what the NYT wanted to write today, so it did:

Americans say President Bush does not share the priorities of most of the country on either domestic or foreign issues, are increasingly resistant to his proposal to revamp Social Security and say they are uneasy with Mr. Bush’s ability to make the right decisions about the retirement program, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

I don’t want to get into the misleading questions — like the one where 69% oppose the overhaul of Social Security “if respondents were told that the private accounts would result in a reduction in guaranteed benefits.” Rather, consider this: the weekend poll is of 1111 adults who disapprove of the way Bush handles foreign policy 46/44, and disapprove in landslide proportions of the way he handles the economy 54/38. Yikes!! This has to be one of the most unpopular presidents of all time.

And it’s not just Bush. The poll has a 44/41 disapproval of Congress as well, and it also registered disapproval in the pre-election poll. This is of course absurd in an election in more than 300 of the 435 House seats were won by over 10 points, and the President’s party actually picked up a few seats in 2004.

Yet these numbers are not much different from those produced by the poll (details here) just prior to election day. Therefore we ask the Times: would it be too much trouble to do a poll of the people who actually matter in the country, i.e., the one who get off their duffs to vote?

Of course that wouldn’t help the New York Times write the story it wants to write, that the American people oppose Bush and all his works. However, it might just help the Times with another annoying statistic. The Times has lost 22% of its circulation in its home market over the last decade. You would think it might want to stem that tide by offering news, rather than opinion, on its news pages.

Michael Barone’s article on the 2004 Presidential election combines electoral, political, and industrial history, demographic analysis, and the skillful wielding of statistics — creating the single most insightful prism through which to view the possibilities that exist for the Republican Party. Make no mistake: the piece aims to be scrupulously fair; but it is refreshing to read a deep analytical piece for which the subtext is not “what the Democrats need to do right next time.”

In 2004, Kerry got 16% more votes than did Gore, and Bush did 23% better than in 2000. Barone uses the industrial metaphors of command and control versus network management to contrast the success of the efforts of each of the camps, which is clever but begs the question: what if Democrats use a network model. More importantly, he say this:

Over the 110 years preceding 2004, again disregarding 1916 to ’28, turnout increased by more than 14 percent in only four elections. Two of those four elections resulted in a new national majority for the winning party.

The four elections were 1896, 1936, 1952, and 1992. Read the piece for the complete analysis, but the short version is that the GOP has the opportunity, created by the enormous increase in its voters, to replicate the generational majority creations of 1936 and 1896. Obviously this is Rove’s goal; he has spoken of doing what McKinley did in 1896. Is it Bush’s goal?

They teach you at Harvard Business School that they best thing to create is a monopoly, and second best is a strong oligopoly. But George Bush can’t repeal the 22nd Amendment. Therefore, don’t be surprised when, sometime in the next two years, Bush’s pal, Condi Rice , whom he has reportedly been calling “44,” starts giving speeches in Spanish.

We have talked about Tom Friedman’s cautious exuberence about People Power in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East before. Let’s rejoin that program, already in progress:

Something really is going on with the proverbial “Arab street.” The automatic assumption that the “Arab street” will always rally to the local king or dictator – if that king or dictator just waves around some bogus threat or insult from “America,” “Israel” or “the West” – is no longer valid. Yes, the Iraq invasion probably brought more anti-American terrorists to the surface. But it also certainly brought more pro-democracy advocates to the surface.

Call it the “Baghdad Spring.”

But we have to be very sober about what is ahead. There will be no velvet revolutions in this part of the world. The walls of autocracy will not collapse with just one good push. As the head-chopping insurgents in Iraq, the suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia and the murderers of Mr. Hariri have all signaled: The old order in this part of the world will not go quietly into this good night. You put a flower in the barrel of their gun and they’ll blow your hand and your head right off.

I write all this not to suggest that we are on a fool’s errand in Iraq. I write it to underscore that we are on the first step of a long, long journey. The fact that the extremists and autocrats have had to resort now to unspeakable violence shows how much they have failed to win the war of ideas on the Arab street.

Wars of ideas are indeed hard things to win. And it is not like the starting point for the Arab Street is the Enlightenment. We are all familiar with the crazy superstitions said to be on the Arab Street, some taught even in religious schools, about how the Jews and Christians are pigs and dogs and enemies of God, and how the Jews make passover matzohs with the blood of Arab children, and various other nonsense. It seems to us that the United States has made a good start on both the practical and philosophical levels in Iraq by a demonstration that the commitment to liberty is our highest goal, and we want them to share in that bounty. That should generate the very best sort of cognitive dissonance.

Dozens of people got killed voting in Iraq, and it looks like a hundred or more will meet the same fate practicing a bit of freedom of Shi’ite religion not permitted under Saddam Hussein (though it must be said that Ashura is not our favorite religious ritual).

Retailing wing-nut conspiracy theories in the way that the likes of Michael Moore and Cynthia McKinney do is far worse than poor citizenship, as well as an affront to people paying the price for freedom in Iraq and elsewhere. It is, above all else, a decision not to take the serious things of life seriously, a decision not to grow up.

There may be no emptier existence.

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, and Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of The American Thinker, show just how close some liberal and conservative thinkers are in describing objective conditions in the United States. Of course, their perspectives are completely different.

Marty Peretz, about whom we have written in the past, is very upset about the decline of the liberal project, comparing it to the disarray in the conservative movement in the early 1960′s. Peretz does not offer a blueprint for the future — far from it. He believes that liberals first have to shed romantic illusions of the past:

American liberals no longer believe in the axiomatic virtue of revolutions and revolutionaries. But let’s face it: It’s hard to get a candid conversation going about Cuba with one. The heavily documented evidence of Fidel Castro’s tyranny notwithstanding, he still has a vestigial cachet among us. After all, he has survived Uncle Sam’s hostility for more than 45 years. And, no, the Viet Cong didn’t really exist. It was at once Ho Chi Minh’s pickax and bludgeon in the south. Pose this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism … because Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into the brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.

One of the issues where the Democratic Party is out of step is in the matter of race; in this area, conservatives, and particularly President Bush, get some recognition:

But, in the Democratic Party, among liberals, the usual hustlers are still cheered. Jesse Jackson is still paid off, mostly not to make trouble. The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. Early in the race, it was clear that he–like Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich–was not a serious candidate. Yet he was treated as if he just might take the oath of office at the Capitol on January 20. In the end, he won only a handful of delegates. But he was there, speaking in near-prime time to the Democratic convention. Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman.

This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis “the other,” the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you’re a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.

Peretz does not see an immediate path to a set of ideas to turn the tide in favor of liberals and Democrats. As he says, “liberals like to blame their political consultants. But then, if you depend on consultants for your motivating ideas, you are nowhere.”

And nowhere is where Democrats would stay, if this piece by Thomas Lifson is any indicator. He drives home the criticality of the race issue to Democrats:

African-Americans, who provide roughly one-fourth of the national vote for Democrats, are meanwhile watching Condoleeza Rice perform as the most accomplished Secretary of State in at least a century, while being subjected to overtly racist mockery by white leftists among the Democrats. Attacking a Clarence Thomas or even a Colin Powell as sellouts is one thing. Attacking a powerful, brilliant, and superbly accomplished multi-dimensional black woman is quite another. Condoleeza Rice is the embodiment an ethic of working harder and being better which has particular appeal to African-Americans, but which is quite universal. What mother does not dream such dreams for her progeny? Sociologists long ago noted that women are the bedrock of the African-American community. No one who wishes to influence that community can trample upon their dreams for very long and retain influence.

In his first term, President Bush appointed African Americans and Hispanics to powerful positions never before open to members of these groups. In his second term, he is upping the ante. The message is getting through. Actions speak louder than the words of a Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or a Charlie Rangel. The GOP share of the black vote went from 8% to 11%. Three incremental points may not be that impressive, but it is a 37.5% increase in the share previously won. The fluid which seeps out of the first cracks in a dam is not that impressive a volume of water, either. But if the cracks are not rapidly stanched, they quickly grow. Such a prospect of a widening rift in the voting patterns of black Americans is not unrealistic, given the disarray of today’s Democrats.

It is fascinating that both Peretz and Lifson are correct. Democrats are in thrall to the entertaining carnival barker Sharpton, willingly so, and Peretz recognizes this as a big problem. From the other side, Lifson recognizes the historic opportunity available to Republicans. We, of course, agree with both these fine thinkers.

Here are our two cents. George Bush got 23% of the gay vote in 2004, after taking an explicit position against gay marriage. John Kerry got 22% of the vote of people who thought abortion should be illegal under all circumstances, despite his refusal to support a ban on partial birth abortion. Union members split 60/40 Kerry; veterans split 60/40 Bush. Other than the 90% or so of votes that African-Americans give Democrats, the highest interest-group totals are around 75-80% for one candidate. Based on the problems identified by Marty Peretz, and the possibilities highlighted by Thomas Lifson, why should 20-25% of the African-American vote not be realistic for Republicans over the next few national election cycles?

Patrick Ruffini on Iraq:

Michael Barone sums the last year up in a few paragraphs of great clarity.

Left:

[T]ake a look at dailykos.com, run by Democratic consultant Markos Moulitsas, which gets 400,000 page views a day–far more than any other political weblog–and which received funding from the Dean campaign (which Moulitsas disclosed). It seethes with hatred of Bush, constantly attacks Republicans, and excoriates Democrats who don’t oppose Bush root and branch. When four American contractors were killed in Iraq in April 2004, dailykos.com wrote, “I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” This repulsive comment produced no drop-off in page views. This was what the left blogosphere wanted. Kos was an early enthusiast for Dean’s campaign for Democratic chairman and disparaged other candidates.

Right:

The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.

The right blogosphere’s greatest triumph came after CBS’s Dan Rather on September 8 reported that Bush had shirked duty in the National Guard and the network posted its 1972-dated documents on the Web. Within four hours, a blogger on freerepublic.com pointed out that they looked as though they had been created in Microsoft Word; the next morning, Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com relayed the comment and asked for expert views. Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs.com showed that the documents exactly matched one he produced in Word using default settings. CBS defended the documents for 11 days but finally confessed error and eased Rather out as anchor. MSM tried to defeat Bush but instead only discredited itself.

Exactly correct. But don’t forget the community aspect of the blogosphere.

This Mattis / Jordan business is so outrageous. Hugh’s entry sums it up:

Type “Mattis” into the search engines of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times and you will find stories here, here, here, and here on United States Marine Corps General James Mattis’ remarks on war fighting made this past Tuesday.

Type “Eason Jordan” into those same search engines and you will get nothing concerning Jordan’s scandalous accusation at Davos on January 27 that the American military “targeted” and killed a dozen journalists in Iraq. Zip. Nothing.

The elite media instantly saddles up to ride to the condemnation of a speech given by a warrior much beloved and respected by his troops –a genuine hero and charismatic war-winner who believes in closing with and killing the enemy before they kill his troops and more civilians, and for whose ideology of fascism he has complete contempt.

But let the speech be given by a MSM big, and let the subject be a slander on the entire American military, and the result is total MSM silence.

This is why there is near complete contempt for the MSM among center-right people. Think about it. Every major paper has an anti-Mattis story. Not one has even mentioned Jordan.

No one seems to have picked up yet on a further element of the CNN / Eason Jordan scandal, namely the propaganda for the Saddam Hussein regime put out on Eason Jordan’s watch, as we discussed here, here and here. We hope that will become an additional element in the story of the appalling Mr. Jordan.

Let’s start with this: there are about 380,000 results for “Democrat social security no crisis,” including a few dozen featuring Charlie Rangel in various venues on 1/8/05 alone. Nancy Pelosi of the dinosaur wing of the party said after the SOTU: “We can solve this long-term challenge without dismantling Social Security and without allowing this administration’s false declaration of a crisis justify a privatization plan that is unnecessary.” But now we have contrary views from other liberals, such as Nick Kristof saying this today:

Liberals are making a historic mistake by lining up so adamantly against Social Security reform. It’s impolite to say so in a blue state, but President Bush has a point: there is a genuine problem with paying for Social Security, even if it isn’t as dire as Mr. Bush suggests.

As Bill Clinton declared in 1998 about Social Security reform: “We all know a demographic crisis is looming. … If we act now it will be easier and less painful than if we wait until later.” Mr. Clinton then made Social Security reform a central theme of his 1999 State of the Union address, saying, “Above all, we must save Social Security for the 21st century.”

Already the Old Media have been driven to gambit 1A: looking for Republicans who oppose the President’s plan. Nanny Bloomberg isn’t on board. Yawn.

How did this happen in such a short time? Ask FDR or LBJ. It’s the oldest trick from the very old Democratic playbook of generations ago. George Bush has set his mind on getting a new benefit for the American people. Sure, there are plenty of problems with the specifics, but overall the plan is easily understandable and the benefits familiar and attractive to a majority of the people. “66 percent of people who watched his State of the Union speech said his Social Security proposals will move the country in the right direction,” according to Gallup. And the fact is that because Social Security has real problems, it will be reformed, sooner or later: it’s on the table and it isn’t going anywhere. Therefore, the Democrats are in the position that Republicans were in a generation or two ago.

Reform will happen, legislation will be passed, with or without the Democrats. So they can either take part of the credit, or whine and oppose. If they help pass the bill and take part of the credit, fine for them, but they are “Republican lite” in the sense that they approved the scenario of reform if not all of the particulars. If they block reform legislation, Republicans have a good issue for the midterm elections — which is of course why President Bush is beginning his campaign swing to include Red State Democratic senators, such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Make no mistake: the President will not be happy if the legislation does not pass promptly. But an issue with 66% approval that is defeated by the minority is not a bad place to be in 2006 either.

We are only at the beginnings of the election fraud disaster for the Democrats. East St. Louis, Milwaukee, King County — we’ve asked if Cuyahoga and Summit counties in Ohio may be on the list, and no doubt there will be others. People will go to jail when this is over.

There could be a twofold impact of the voter fraud prosecutions, particularly if Condi Rice is on the 2008 ticket. As we’ve demonstrated in dramatic fashion with electoral maps, the Democratic vote is particularly largely concentrated in central urban areas. Suppose it turns out that prosecutions send a number of black city election officials to jail for turning out 12 of every 10 voters in their areas of administration. That would undoubtedly have a chastening effect on shenanigans in 2008, and, as is noted in Taranto today, the inner city votes are critical to Democratic presdiential prospects. Suppose further that Rice were on the ticket.

Not a pretty scenario, or perhaps the perfect scenario. We’ll see.

Yeaterday we focused on East St. Louis and the appalling Charlie Powell. Now it’s Milwaukee’s turn, from the Journal Sentinel:

This week, the newspaper reported finding that more than 1,200 votes Nov. 2 came from invalid addresses, with nearly 75% of those coming from people who registered at the polls. Of those, a sample showed about 20% could be explained by data entry errors, such as transposed digits. In addition, the newspaper found that 186 votes from invalid addresses were among about 5,600 addresses challenged before the election by the state Republican Party as non-existent.

Meanwhile, the newspaper’s latest review of the city’s records shows several hundred cases in which the same person is recorded as voting twice from the same address, though it appears to be the result of already-registered voters who re-registered to vote and consequently are listed in the database twice. The Journal Sentinel found 314 cases where this may have occurred with the same address listed twice, and many others cases where people with identical and uncommon names are listed as voting at two addresses – perhaps due to reregistering at their new address on election day.

The new Boss Tweeds need to go to jail ASAP.

Fred Barnes thinks the two ideas were conflated in Bush’s speech. Peggy Noonan unhappily sees mission creep. EJ Dionne asks, “Do we want Sept. 11 to dominate how we define ourselves indefinitely?” (Answer: yes.) But Safire has the best line in the midst of his explication:

Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make “peace” and “the peace process” the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us – formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists – put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace.

It takes guts to take on that peace-freedom priority so starkly.

Contemplate this: imagine that in a few generations George W. Bush is revered as the Martin Luther of the 21st century.

It turns out that the exit pollsters were young, untrained kids, who apparently found it easier to talk to girls, or were brushed off by men, or just avoided entirely by Bush voters. Mickey Kaus, quoting Mystery Pollster:

The report confirms that interviewers were often young mostly inexperienced. Interviewers were evaluated and hired with a phone call and trained with a 20-minute “training/rehearsal call” and an interviewer manual sent via FedEx. They were often college students — 35% were age 18-24, half were under 35. Perhaps most important, more than three quarters (77%) had never before worked as exit poll interviewers. Most worked alone on Election Day….

What assumptions might a voter make about a college student approaching with a clipboard? Would it be crazy to assume that student was a Kerry supporter? If you were a Bush voter already suspicious of the media, might the appearance of such an interviewer make you just a bit more likely to say no, or to walk briskly in the other direction? Would it be easier to avoid that interviewer if they were standing farther away? What if the interviewer were forced to stand 100 feet away, among a group of electioneering Democrats – would the Bush voter be more likely to avoid the whole group?

And the networks paid a million dollars for this.

We discussed David Brooks’ NYT piece on Gingrich Democrats below, and it turns out we can put a number to them, from the recent WaPo poll:

Which of the following comes closer to your views: Because the election was close, Democrats in Congress should not compromise with Bush on major issues, even if the result is nothing gets done on some of these issues OR because Bush won the election, Democrats in Congress should find ways to compromise with him on major issues, even if the Democrats have to agree to things they find objectionable.

Democrats SHOULD NOT compromise 28%
Democrats SHOULD find ways to compromise 69%
DK/No opinion 2%

One presumes that the 28% of people who want no compromise from Democrats are themselves Democrats. Since Democrats (and Greens) got 49% of the vote in 2004, roughly 57% of Democrat voters would appear to favor obstruction in a Bush second term. Indeed, if those opposed to compromise were all registered Democrats, as opposed to Democrat voters, over 75% of Democrats would appear to favor no compromises with the Bush administration (assuming 37% D and R in 2004). We couldn’t be happier.

David Brooks has a fascinating article in the NYT today about the hopes of some Democrats for a re-realignment on the scale of 1994:

They feel that Social Security is to Bush what health care reform was to Clinton – the big overreach that will allow the opposing party to deliver a devastating blow to the president, and maybe even regain control of Congress. Their core belief is that Republicans have won of late because they have been ruthless and disciplined while Democrats have been responsible and wimpy. It is time, the neo-Gingrichians say, to scorch the earth. “I believe that the Republican majority has acted in such a dictatorial fashion that a full-scale revolt is the only solution,” the Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson told Michael Crowley of The New Republic.

That means waging a Gingrich-style war on the entire Congressional power structure. That means furiously opposing every other Bush initiative. That means giving up any hope of trying to work with Republicans, but staging an all-out effort to crush and delegitimize them.

The problem with the neo-Gingrichians is that they have their history backward. Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 with only 43 percent of the vote. When Gingrich began his assault, there already was a potential conservative majority in the country; it’s just that many of these conservatives, for historical reasons, tended to vote Democratic in Congressional races.

Brooks is entirely correct; 57% voted Bush-Perot in 1992, and the 1994 results confirmed the 1992 results — it was Clinton, with gays in the military, the tie vote tax increase, and HillaryCare, who was the aberration. It was a terrible tactical blunder on President Clinton’s part to govern left. President Bush’s situation is entirely different, with Republicans continuing to increase their margins in the House and the Senate. We hope the neo-Gingrichians run their party.

Overview

The GOP dominates politics at all levels in the United States. The Democrats helped the GOP achieve this dominance, first, by not taking the 1994 election results seriously, and second, by pursuing tactics utterly inappropriate to trying to win back market share. The Democrats’ continued strategy of insulting the majority bodes ill for their future.

Background: Revolution or Temper Tantrum?

In the 1992 election, 258 Democrats were elected to Congress and only 176 Republicans, about the same as in the previous few elections. In 1994, the so-called Republican Revolution took place — a swing of about 100 total votes from Dem to Rep, with 230 GOP Congressmen elected versus only 204 Democrats. Peter Jennings on 11/14/94:

“Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week….Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”

Some temper tantrum. Ten years later the total of Congressional Republicans is 232, Democrats 201, a little better than in 1994; and this is after substantial Democratic counterattacks, which had reduced the GOP number to 221 two Congressional sessions ago. And yet, Jennings was more correct than many conservatives give him credit for; the 1994 election can fairly be seen as a protest against the Clinton decision to govern from the left, with gays in the military, HillaryCare, and a tie vote tax increase in the face of a Bush-Perot vote of 57% to 43% for Clinton, clearly more of a mandate for conservative rather than liberal policies.

Persistency of the 1994 results should have warned Democrats

1994′s 230 Republican Congressmen was followed by 1996′s 228, 1998′s 223, 2000′s 221 and 2002′s 229. You’d think that somewhere along the way, Democrats would have understood that the Republican majority was real and legitimate. Still, myths had to be debunked, such as that the GOP majority is a trick owed to redistricting. Charlie Cook:

In comparing House and presidential results, Abramowitz and his colleagues found that from the 1950s to the ’80s, the number of marginal House districts (ones that a presidential nominee won by 5 points or less) exceeded the number of safe seats (districts where the winning House candidate’s margin was at least 10 points). But from 1992 to 2000, the number of safe seats exceeded the number of marginal seats. In 2002 and 2004, that trend became even more dramatic. If redistricting were the prime cause of the lack of competitive House races, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning argue, the number of safe seats would rise immediately after redistricting. Yet they’ve found that “redistricting did not cause a substantial increase in the number of safe districts or a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts in 1982, 1992, or 2002.”

The Emory political scientists maintain that increased polarization along partisan and ideological lines is more responsible for the lack of competitive districts. They say that, as a result of “powerful social forces at work in American society, including internal migration, immigration, and ideological realignment within the electorate,” Democratic districts are getting more Democratic and Republican districts are growing more Republican. On the ideological side, they suggest that Stanford University’s Matthew Levendusky was correct when he substituted “sorting” for “polarization,” meaning that voters are bringing their policy and partisan preferences into alignment. Conservative Democrats, many of whom are in the South, are increasingly voting Republican, while liberal Republicans, many of whom are in the Northeast, are increasingly voting Democratic.

These voting patterns fit Walter Dean Burnham’s definition of realignment: “a sudden transformation that turns out to be permanent.”

Depth of the changes since 1994 should have warned Democrats

In business there’s something called the Dow Theory. Dow Theory posits a bull market trend as having several characteristics. Among them is a major leg upwards and survival of two bear runs on the market; an example of such a bear run in the midst of the upward Republican trend might be the 1998-2000 GOP Congressional and Senatorial losses. Another related concept is the confirming of the performance of one index (eg, the Dow Industrials) by another (eg, the Transport Average), the idea being if one part of the economy is doing well, you may see it confirmed in other sectors. Fred Barnes gives us some confirming data from the 2002 election:

The same Republican trend is true for state elections. In 1992, Democrats captured 59 percent of state legislative seats (4,344 to 3,031 for Republicans). Ten years later, Republicans won their first majority (3,684 to 3,626) of state legislators since 1952. In 1992, Democrats controlled the legislatures of 25 states to 8 for Republicans, while the others had split control. Today, Republicans rule 21 legislatures to 16 for Democrats. Governors? Republicans had 18 in 1992, Democrats 30. Today, Republicans hold 27 governorships, Democrats 23.

Clearly the trend continued at the national level into 2004, with net gains for the GOP in the House and Senate as well as governorships. So it’s pretty hard to deny that a serious and persistent trend has taken hold at all levels of government over a long period of time. Dow Theory would say that there’s been a bull market going for the Republican Party since 1994. The majority positions enjoyed by the GOP are not a fluke; they have been confirmed by the passage of time and their spreading throughout all layers of the American electoral structure.

In business terms, Democrats’ market share has suffered great losses

Imagine that Republicans are Ford, and that Democrats are Volvo. They are each trying to sell their Congressional candidates to the public. Here are the charts of your sales trends over the last two decades in S-Class (Senate) and C-Class (Congressional) units. You will see that the Democratic Party’s market share has declined precipitously in the last decade:

The sales trend is unmistakable. Ford continues to take share from Volvo in our example, even though Volvo outspent Ford $935 million to $822 million in last fall’s presidential sales drive. If politics were a business, the chief sales executives on the Volvo side would have been fired years ago, instead of being rehired again and again to lose.

The Democrats’ approach to getting market share back: insult the customer

Many Democrats will undoubtedly voice strong objection to the following. However, if you are a Republican, or one of the 3-4 million Democrats who voted for George Bush, this is the way Democratic opinion leaders often sound. We’ll continue a bit longer with our Ford/Volvo metaphor, since it seems to work well here:

The Ford/Republican sales pitch:
– Fords are stronger than Volvos
– Ford will save you money over Volvo
– You can’t avoid going to dangerous places, so you are better off going in a Ford
– Volvos have transmission problems which cause them unexpectedly to flip into Drive before they flop into Reverse
– Colin Powell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, Condi Rice, Zell Miller, Alberto Gonzales, and Mary Cheney drive Fords: so should you

The Volvo/Democrat sales pitch:
– Fords ruin the environment
– Ford executives are greedy, cruel and stupid
– People who buy Fords are ignorant
– Fords are not well respected in Europe
– Ford’s guidance system will take you to dangerous places
– Fords are so poorly designed that when you get in the dangerous places, you can’t get out
– Fords are not safe for women, gays and minorities

It is not an exaggeration to say that people who drive Volvos often hold precisely these opinions of both Fords and Republicans. This is the essence of the Democrats’ marketing problem.

Conclusion: the Democrats’ Lost Weekend

What is going on in the elite salons of the Democratic Party has almost nothing to do with Republicans. We don’t even figure into the universe that many of the Democrat thought-leaders now occupy, except as caricatures, as in “that crooked bunch.” One ought to credit the sincerity of things like the Boxer Rebellion — those were real tears — and Bob Herbert’s analysis-free, unhinged rant against “Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby.” Many among the Democrat elites honestly believe that their opposition is intellectually and morally inferior to them. Until these Democrats are ousted from positions of power, or until they begin to respect the customers they need to woo back, the Party will not have hit bottom.

We hope one of the two results comes reasonably soon; their act, while still entertaining, and great fodder for the New Media, is beginning to get tiresome.

That was a prediction made here just after November 2, and it is nice to see some evidence. Hmmm, popular (check) governor (check) of an important (check) red state (check), with a large hispanic population (check), who speaks Spanish (check), is religious (check), in the largest Christian denomination (24.5%, check), which also has the largest number of Democrat voters (check) to pick off in the states that were barely blue (check) in 2004.

We don’t practice Dowd-ism here, but gee, don’t you think that the current president, and his dad, would like to see another family member get a chance, over, say, Tom Frist or, heaven forfend, John McCain.

So what does the current Florida governor lack? The veneer of some foreign policy experience. You don’t think he’s going to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, the fifth largest country in the world (check), and the one with the largest Muslim (check) population with Colin Powell (check) because he knows something about about hurricanes, do you? Even the New York Times figured this out.

Expect some more personal diplomacy, endorsed today by David Ignatius in the WaPo, featuring Jeb in the next several years.

Oh wait, he said this in TNR in January 2005. I thought it was a campaign speech from last year:

[O]n the critical issues of our time–our national and economic security–the Democrats can proudly and assertively lay claim to an agenda that reflects the values and priorities of a clear majority of Americans. On domestic policy, it’s safe to say that most Americans prefer, for example, the steady hand of Robert Rubin and the track record of sound fiscal policy, social equity, expanded economic opportunity for all working Americans, and sustained prosperity that are part of the Democratic legacy to the reckless and destructive accumulation of debt and net loss of jobs of the Bush administration.

On national security, we Democrats offer a compelling message of a stronger, more focused battle against terrorism abroad: implementing the 9/11 Commission’s urgent and bipartisan recommendations on enhanced intelligence-gathering and integration, providing our troops in Iraq with the equipment they need rather than excuses, and filling in the dangerous vulnerabilities in homeland security related to chemical facilities, air cargo, port and border security, and other areas that inexcusably remain unaddressed. A serious security gap exists between the Bush administration’s words and deeds in ensuring that our nation possesses the military assets, appropriate troop strength, strategic partnerships, scope and depth of intelligence, and longer-term vision that are absolutely necessary to eliminate both the branches and the roots of terrorism.

Ummm, didn’t we just vote on this two months ago?