- For conservatives, it's back to basics:
Recalling a line Woody Allen used to break up with a girlfriend in the movie “Annie Hall,” Mr. Mehlman said, “If a shark doesn’t keep moving he dies.” He added, “I think the same is true of political parties.”- For those wanting to run for president in 2008, especially those in the Senate, the election had some lessons.
Thirty years after the birth of the conservative movement, some stalwarts worry the shark may be heading into shallow waters. At the coalition meeting, one organizer after another complained that their Democratic opponents had staked out moderate to conservative stands on what had been the movement’s most potent issues — abortion, gun rights, religious expression, income taxes and the federal deficit.
Perhaps most of all, a movement once galvanized by a shared determination to end Soviet Communism now finds itself deeply divided over the Iraq war.
“Our successes are killing us,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who convenes the weekly meeting. He compared Tuesday’s election to the story of the princess and the pea, with the pea being liberal governance.
“Whenever we solve a problem — like cutting taxes or destroying the Soviet Union — we are in effect adding another mattress,” he said. “We have to go back to the voters and convince them, ‘you still can’t sleep because the goddamn pea is killing you.’ ”
In some ways, the midterm election of 2006 was the first big event of the 2008 race — much like an early debate or an Iowa straw poll. It helped shake out and shake up the field. Some lessons were instantly apparent: you probably won’t hear more talk of Republican candidates wrestling for the mantle of President Bush, and Democrats are looking hungrily at Ohio and Colorado, states that went Republican in 2004 and 2000.- Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Clinton, chimes in with his thoughts on how the Democrats should govern.
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Trying to run for the White House from the Senate has never been easy, because voting records are big fat targets for the opposition to research and exploit. Here’s a new problem: the 51-49 split. Senators who are running for president are going to find themselves chained to their desks whenever a close vote comes up, ceding the advantage to the class of non-senators, like Mr. Romney, Mr. Vilsack and John Edwards, the Democratic former senator from North Carolina, not to mention leaving the door open to a surprise outsider.
“If you are a Democrat, are you going to explain to organized labor that the minimum wage lost by a single vote in the Senate because you were at the Polk County Fish Fry?” said Ron Klain, who worked as a senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore when he ran for president. “And if you are a Republican,” Mr. Klain continued, “are you going to explain to the pro-life groups that federal funding for Medicaid abortions passed by a single vote because you were busy at the Greenville Chamber of Commerce? When I worked for Gore, we had a number of times we had to pull him off the campaign trail because of the risk of a tie vote on a key issue.”
There are a lot of senators likely to run for president: Mrs. Clinton, Mr. McCain and Mr. Kerry, along with Evan Bayh of Indiana, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. Democrats at least have the advantage, albeit a small one, of heading committees or being able to pass legislation they can run on. Then again, the advantage vanishes if the new Congress, like the current one, is viewed as a failed one.
There are those who believe that the best political strategy for 2008 is for the Democrats to continue to confront President Bush and seal his fate as a failed president. The danger, however, is that if the Democrats become nothing more than a party of obstruction, it will be only a matter of time before they too will lose the trust of the American people. The lesson of this election is that the public will no longer tolerate incompetence and gridlock, whether it comes from the Republicans or the Democrats.- Ramesh Ponnuru tries balance "values voters" and economic issues.
Twelve years ago, President Clinton suffered a similar defeat when Republicans captured both houses of Congress. As chief of staff to the president at the time, I was asked to comment on the implications of that midterm election for the president and the future of the nation. My response was that the real question was whether a party that had been a minority in Congress was now prepared to work with the president to govern the nation.
Today it is fair to ask the same question of the Democrats.
In 1994, the Republicans decided they would directly challenge the president with their Contract With America. The result was the shutdown of the federal government. Badly damaged by the public outrage over such antics, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich decided that Republicans had to work with the president if they were to survive. This led to a period of cooperation that produced, among other achievements, a balanced federal budget and welfare reform. The Republicans held their majority in 1996.
In the wake of this election, the Democrats and the president face the same choice: gridlock or cooperation?
While both sides are speaking the words of reconciliation, nothing will really change until they can trust each other. After six years of partisan trench warfare, that will not be easy. It begins with a cease-fire on the rhetoric of cheap shots and ultimatums. Karl Rove and other political consultants need to take a long vacation. Both sides need to speak honestly with each other and be willing to compromise.
The real message of the last few elections is that, for the most part, social issues help the Republicans and economic ones the Democrats. Did talking about energy policy, and keeping quiet about gay marriage, help Senator George Allen of Virginia survive Jim Webb’s challenge?- The Year of the Macaca: Frank Rich on what defined the election.
The lesson for the Democrats, meanwhile, is not that they all need to move right on social issues. It is that they can be a lasting majority if they are an economically liberal party with socially conservative and socially liberal wings. Because if they choose to be a socially liberal party with economically liberal and economically conservative wings, they will soon find themselves back in minority status.
The Republicans, meanwhile, can prosper if they can find ways to address the economic concerns of working-class cultural conservatives — many of them unmoved by free-market bromides — without doing violence to their own limited-government principles.
Of course, the “thumpin’ ” was all about Iraq. But let us not forget Katrina. It was the collision of the twin White House calamities in August 2005 that foretold the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush.- Doonesbury: Getting bearings.
Back then, the full measure of the man finally snapped into focus for most Americans, sending his poll numbers into the 30s for the first time. The country saw that the president who had spurned a grieving wartime mother camping out in the sweltering heat of Crawford was the same guy who had been unable to recognize the depth of the suffering in New Orleans’s fetid Superdome. This brand of leadership was not the “compassionate conservatism” that had been sold in all those photo ops with African-American schoolchildren. This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.
It’s the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s symptoms to score partisan points. It’s the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as predatory animals. It’s the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to “tolerance” but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.
This kind of politics is now officially out of fashion. Harold Ford did lose his race in Tennessee, but by less than three points in a region that has not sent a black man to the Senate since Reconstruction. Only 36 years old and hugely talented, he will rise again even as the last vestiges of Jim Crow tactics continue to fade and Willie Horton ads countenanced by a national political party join the Bush dynasty in history’s dustbin.
Elsewhere, the 2006 returns more often than not confirmed that Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are far better people than this cynical White House takes them for. This election was not a rebuke merely of the reckless fiasco in Iraq but also of the divisive ideology that had come to define the Bush-Rove-DeLay era. This was the year that Americans said a decisive no to the politics of “macaca” just as firmly as they did to pre-emptive war and Congressional corruption.
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That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”
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The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith.”
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that the base did turn out for Mr. Rove: white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71 percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78 percent of last time. But his party was routed anyway. It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can’t-miss strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent Republican majority.
What a week this was! Here’s to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart of our political darkness. If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen: Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.
