At the risk of overposting - do people really care about the midterms? - I was going to break up the coverage with a few fun links to the best of the 30 second spot ads this cycle. But i'm going to hold fire on that until i can actually figure out why it is that we in the UK don't allow TV ads. I feel an article coming on. Anyway - instead i thought i'd just post on one more interesting thing about this election, namely how it sits in the grand sweep of American politics. This thought prompted by an article in yesterday's Washington Post by the new editor of the American Prospect Harold Meyerson. (I posted on this over at NDN, so apologies for cross posting a little.) It is worth reading, especially for this frankly jaw slackening quote from Republican Susan Collins.
Most of the House seats that the Democrats are expected to take from Republicans are in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, heartland of the old Republican Party of Lincoln, McKinley and Eisenhower. Many of the Republicans holding these seats are a distinct minority in a party now dominated by Southerners who are more supportive of executive branch authoritarianism and yet also more government-phobic. And the Republican moderates, judging by their own comments, are boiling mad that the Democrats are going after them. "There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee," Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told the New York Times of her Rhode Island colleague, who is trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the polls. "Yet that didn't stop them from going after him with everything they had."
Right. Riiiiiiiight. Of course she is correct. Sensible democrats do prefer Chafee republicans to, say, Brownback republicans. That said, reflect on the cheek of it. After 8 years of being divided, wedged, spun, polarized, split up, pilloried and pounded by a Republican attack machine that asks and receives no quarter - hell, not even a nickle - Collins has the gall to criticize Democrats for going on the attack? Its enough to leave one stammering in amazement.
My boss here in DC is a guy called Simon Rosenberg. He is a what people tend to call a Democratic strategist; someone with the "vision thing". Over the last two days i've heard him in meetings telling friends of NDN that this is the "last election of the 20th century." In this sense he is quite on. There is a different sort of America politics coming. You can see the case for it being made, for instance, in this piece from scarily smart political scientist Thomas Schaller on why the Dems no longer need the South. And you can see it, as this WSJ piece from yesterday notes, in the battle for the Mountain West:
Despite a Republican edge in registration, Democrats are discovering the Mountain West — and Colorado in particular — to be a new political frontier as the party benefits from a potent mix of changing demographics, anger over the war in Iraq, resentment toward conservative social initiatives and millions of dollars’ worth of advocacy advertising.
But in addition to these signs of the future we also have signs of the past. This election is about a cosolidation, a closign of business, of an older sort of American politics. We have GOP further wiped out in the north. We have Democrats winning in the rust-belt. We have conservatives holding firm in the south. We even have Bush and Kerry attacking eachother. Its all a bit old fashioned. And at the same time this election has seen an intriguing glimpses of how this could all change quickly - the importance of hispanic voters being just one factor, the battle over colorado and the west being another. And we've also seen a glimpse of some of the future stars of the Democratic party. This will be a party run not by Pelosi, Clinton, and Kerry, but a party lead by bright stars of the future with names you might know less well: Spitzer, O'Mally, Brown, Obama, Fenty, Patrick, Schweittzer and Emmanuel. Nonetheless, in the end, if that means this election that this election the Democrats have to take out the last of the Rockerfeller Republicans, the Republican party only have themselves to blame.
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