The 2006 election was the crash of the permanent Republican majority. The 2000 election, in which Gerorge Bush came to power after a 5-4 vote by an intrusive Supreme Court, Republican party members ignored the fact that the Democratic ticket had won the popular election. Instead they seized power, boasted that their party was going to rule for the next several decades. At least that was Karl Roves target. They claimed on election night 2000 that Democrats had stagnated into a party bankrupt of ideas and a continuous Republican leadership was eminent.
The sentiment, which seemed to stem from beltway spin ministers in conjunction with the RNC, was political sloganing to support the impending imperial presidency who “refused to compromise on legislation, bullied their own party’s senators and ignored leaders of the opposition.”
Now, six years later the Republican leadership have been sent packing in favor of a Democratic congress who have been swept into power on a demand for oversight.
“Exit polls showed that about 37 percent of the voters who cast their votes against Republican candidates did so as a protest against Bush personally. Voters seemed to conclude that after six years of ‘’staying the course’’ with unbendable will, while showering even the most benign critics with contempt and derision, Bush and his Congressional allies had simply lost the capacity to fix their own mistakes. More interested in being right than in being reasonable, they seemed unable to respond to a range of emerging threats, from a hurricane on the gulf coast to an underground explosion on the Korean Peninsula. When the president finally cut loose his defense secretary on the day after the election, he seemed at last to have embraced some small measure of humility - and yet it came too late, and perhaps too defiantly, to restore much of the confidence he had squandered.”
‘’They were totally obstinate in the end,’’ John Kasich, one of the leaders of the 1994 Republican revolution, told me after the election. ‘’To keep going around and saying that everything’s great and how it’s all going well in Iraq was ridiculous. There’s such a thing as being firm, and then there’s such a thing as ignoring reality.’’
Thoughtful and dynamic leadership, after all, requires a willingness to negotiate and a tolerance for dissent - which is the main reason that Republicans now find themselves glumly packing boxes rather than gleefully packing the courts.”
The block quote above comes from:
The Last 20th-Century Election?
By MATT BAI the New York Times Magazine
November 10, 2006
Matt Bai continues in the article to suggest that the new Democratic leadership has a choice of perpetuating old values or turn to a new generation of pragmatic leaders.
“The growing frustration of voters with the Washington crowd of both parties, who seem stuck in the same ideological debate they were having in 1975, while the rest of the country struggles mightily with the emerging economic and international threats of 2006.
It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins.
The era of baby-boomer politics - with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all - is coming to a merciful close.
This is why the new Democratic majority in Washington may fare no better in addressing the nation’s modern preoccupations than the Republican majority that preceded it. The party remains reluctant to make room for its next generation, a pragmatic and talented group - led, perhaps, by Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist behind the House elections - that includes many lesser-known names:
Artur Davis of Alabama
Adam Smith of Washington
Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida
Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota
Anthony Weiner of New York
Chris van Hollen of Maryland
Adam Schiff of California
Tim Ryan of Ohio
Read full article below
Back in February 2002, some colleagues and I sat down to lunch with Tom Daschle, who was then the Democratic majority leader of the United States Senate. This was in the months just after the fall of the twin towers and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, when most of America - and at least publicly, most Democrats in Washington - seemed eager to support the president. On this day, however, Daschle, a mild South Dakotan whose idea of being confrontational is to interrupt without saying ‘’excuse me,’’ seemed to have lost patience with George W. Bush and his entire administration. He talked with very little prompting about the way the president and his political adviser, Karl Rove, refused to compromise on legislation, bullied their own party’s senators and ignored leaders of the opposition. Daschle said he hardly ever spoke to anyone at the White House. I asked him whether he thought this kind of arrogance would eventually come back to hurt Bush’s presidency.
‘’I’d like to think so,’’ Daschle said, ‘’but I just don’t know.’’
I put the question to him another way: in all his years in politics, I asked, had he ever seen anyone act so imperiously and not eventually lose power as a result? Daschle shook his head. ‘’No,’’ he said. ‘’I never have.’’
I have found myself recalling that exchange many times since, and it was very much on my mind as I stood in the offices of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on election night, watching young aides with markers erase and replace the latest election numbers on a white board, effectively wiping away what remained of Bush’s influence in Washington. The next day, I called Daschle at his law office and reminded him of our conversation. ‘’No doubt about it,’’ he said. ‘’I think the American people got really tired and fatigued with the arrogance and style of this administration. Someone told me early in my career: ‘If you want to get elected, learn to speak. If you want to stay elected, learn to listen.’’’
This, perhaps, was the larger lesson of an election that drastically reshuffled the existing order in Washington. The war in Iraq had a lot to do with the fall of the Republican majority. Congressional corruption, epitomized by the Republican lobbying scandal and the Mark Foley affair, played a significant role, too. And voters continue to feel anxious about an economy that generates higher returns for shareholders and less opportunity for everyone else. But ruling parties and presidencies are almost never felled by issues alone. Rather, it is the more general perception of a creeping chaos - the sense that leaders no longer have a firm grasp on events or the credibility to unite disparate constituencies - that causes political powers to come undone. It wasn’t inflation or hostages that destroyed Jimmy Carter’s presidency; it was the realization that he had grown too isolated and too besieged to see his way clear of either crisis.
Similarly, exit polls showed that about 37 percent of the voters who cast their votes against Republican candidates did so as a protest against Bush personally. Voters seemed to conclude that after six years of ‘’staying the course’’ with unbendable will, while showering even the most benign critics with contempt and derision, Bush and his Congressional allies had simply lost the capacity to fix their own mistakes. More interested in being right than in being reasonable, they seemed unable to respond to a range of emerging threats, from a hurricane on the gulf coast to an underground explosion on the Korean Peninsula. When the president finally cut loose his defense secretary on the day after the election, he seemed at last to have embraced some small measure of humility - and yet it came too late, and perhaps too defiantly, to restore much of the confidence he had squandered.
‘’They were totally obstinate in the end,’’ John Kasich, one of the leaders of the 1994 Republican revolution, told me after the election. ‘’To keep going around and saying that everything’s great and how it’s all going well in Iraq was ridiculous. There’s such a thing as being firm, and then there’s such a thing as ignoring reality.’’
If this election was about the cost of arrogance, though, then it should also be viewed as a vindication of the much-maligned American voter. Since Bush’s disputed victory in 2000, many liberals have been increasingly brazen about their disdain for the rural and religious voters; one popular e-mail message, which landed in thousands of Democratic in-boxes in the days after the 2004 election, separated North America into ‘’The United States of Canada’’ and ‘’Jesusland.’’ The populist author Thomas Frank won widespread praise for his thesis that unsophisticated rural types had been manipulated into voting ‘’against their economic self-interest,’’ while the celebrated linguist George Lakoff posited that conservatives had rewired the brain synapses in these unsuspecting voters. Two eminent liberal political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, wrote a more scholarly book, arguing that Bush could govern as an extremist without paying a price, because Republicans had gamed the electoral system and deceived voters.
But this election, in which conservative incumbents in states like Kentucky and Indiana went down to defeat, should discredit such alarmist (and elitist) theories. As it happened, despite all these neurological and structural impediments, ordinary voters proved perfectly capable of recognizing failed governance when they saw it, and seemed plenty capable of defending their own interests.
Of course, when moderate Americans finally did revolt, even leading Democrats had to admit that the election had everything to do with Republican failures and almost nothing to do with them. They had avoided offering new ideas, fearing that bold proposals on health care or retirement security might have taken the focus away from Republican failures. This was probably a smart electoral tactic - at least it seems that way now - but it comes with a cost; having recaptured Washington, Democrats now have only vague slogans (‘’a new direction’’) around which to build a governing agenda. As Andrei Cherny and Kenneth Baer, editors of the new policy journal Democracy, warned in the days after the election: ‘’Democrats had a good day. To have a great decade, they need an agenda that captures the public imagination and responds to the looming challenges facing the country.’’
The party’s leaders in Congress immediately vowed to put together just such an agenda, and they promised to work with Bush and the Republicans to implement it. There will be significant obstacles to doing that, however, and not only because the new Democratic caucus, as many observers have noted, is ideologically disparate. For one thing, the party’s infrastructure has changed substantially since Democrats last held power. Twelve years ago, the Democratic Party was still captive to a series of single-issue interest groups - big labor, the environmental lobby, civil rights groups - that pressured the party to pursue their own parochial agendas, making it difficult to challenge some liberal orthodoxies. These groups still matter on Capitol Hill, of course, but since Bush’s election they have been giving way to a new array of powerful actors: MoveOn.org, liberal philanthropists, crusading bloggers. These new forces don’t care so much about litmus-test policies, but they are adamant about confronting the president. The influence of the netroots, as the growing Web-based Democrats have come to be called, is likely to stifle any inclination toward compromise or creativity, making it difficult for Democrats to transition from an opposition party to a governing one. Thoughtful and dynamic leadership, after all, requires a willingness to negotiate and a tolerance for dissent - which is the main reason that Republicans now find themselves glumly packing boxes rather than gleefully packing the courts.
Then there is the 2008 presidential season, which began within hours of the election (Iowa’s Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, jumped into the race before the week was out), and which will most likely act as a disincentive for either party to give ground on the issues that divide them. To a rare degree, the midterm elections appear to have indirectly reshaped the presidential landscapes of both parties. On the Republican side, two formerly top-tier candidates - George Allen, the Virginia senator who lost his seat, and Bill Frist, the soon-to-be-retired Senate leader who lost his majority - now seem irreparably damaged. The party’s presumed frontrunner, John McCain, also faces a more troublesome environment, given his strong support for a war that many of his moderate supporters clearly oppose. On the Democratic side, the elections dealt a blow to John Kerry - his mangled joke about Bush’s intellect would have been, even had he delivered it perfectly, inexcusably smug - while perhaps opening the door further for Al Gore, whose defiant, antiwar fervor would seem well suited to the moment.
Depending on how you interpret the elections’ results, they may also boost the prospects for some younger candidate who can credibly claim distance from the establishment of both parties - a candidate much like Barack Obama. Washington pundits still persist in portraying our recent elections as a series of waves, alternately sweeping in the proponents of a blue team or a red team; by this theory, first came the Republican surge 12 years ago, and now comes the Democratic countersurge. But in fact, these two waves are more accurately viewed as part of the same continuous seismic disturbance: the growing frustration of voters with the Washington crowd of both parties, who seem stuck in the same ideological debate they were having in 1975, while the rest of the country struggles mightily with the emerging economic and international threats of 2006. After the midterms, that tidal resentment has now washed away both of our old governing philosophies: the expansive and often misguided liberalism that dominated American politics up through the 1970s, as well as the impractical, mean-spirited brand of conservatism that rose up in reaction to it.
It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins. Or, as Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist, recently put it in making much the same argument, ‘’Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century.’’ The era of baby-boomer politics - with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all - is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological - and not a moment too soon.
This is why the new Democratic majority in Washington may fare no better in addressing the nation’s modern preoccupations than the Republican majority that preceded it. At week’s end, Democrats were preparing to name two 66-year-olds, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, as Senate majority leader and House speaker. In the House, Pelosi will be supported by new committee chairmen including longtime liberals like Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Charles Rangel of New York. They are, most of them, honorable public servants, warriors steeped in the battles of the last century. But the party remains reluctant to make room for its next generation, a pragmatic and talented group - led, perhaps, by Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist behind the House elections - that includes many lesser-known names: Artur Davis of Alabama, Adam Smith of Washington, Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota, Anthony Weiner of New York, Chris van Hollen of Maryland, Adam Schiff of California, Tim Ryan of Ohio. It might be too much to expect the paragons of Democratic politics to look to younger members when the reins of power are once again within their grasp. But the party that controls the next era of American politics may well be the one whose long-serving leaders can eventually summon the wisdom to step out of the way.
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