From big tent to big top in a dozen years
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Pending Senator George Allen's effort to contest his apparent loss in Virginia, the Democratic Party has evidently seized control of both houses of Congress and reversed a 22-28 disadvantage in gubernatorial offices. Most commentators view the result as a thorough repudiation of President Bush and the Republican Party. I agree.
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(To be sure, the Democratic politicians who were asked to respond to Katrina fared little better.)
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To me, one of the most revealing passages in journalistic accounts of the 2006 election comes from Carl Hulse's New York Times profile of newly elected Democrats in Congress:
In other words, the victorious Democrats are an ideologically diverse group. The donkey party pitched a big tent, and a wide variety of voters and candidates sought shelter underneath. I am no partisan, much less a partisan Democrat, but I do admire how the Democratic leadership finally cracked the congressional code after twelve years in exile.Carol Shea-Porter is a New Hampshire social worker who campaigned on the cheap and ran hard against the war in Iraq. Heath Shuler is a North Carolina football star who is pro-gun and anti-abortion. Jerry McNerney is a California alternative-energy entrepreneur with a doctorate in mathematics.
Representative-elect Carol Shea-Porter
Together they are part of the new mosaic of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives — incoming lawmakers who will make a diverse group of political officeholders even more eclectic. . . . [T]he scope of Tuesday’s Democratic surge makes for a more complex picture and a broader mix of ideologies.
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These diverse Democrats' Republican counterparts provide a stark contrast. As of now, several dozen hours after Election Day 2006, the Republican Party is an ideologically united band of partisans dedicated to a narrow set of causes, falling mainly into an explosive cluster of social issues (abortion, homosexuality, embryonic stem-cell research) and a jingoistic approach to managing terrorism at home and abroad. The Republican Party is historically the party of big business, but I am at a loss to explain what today's Republican Party offers by way of economic prescriptions besides a reflexive hatred of taxation. Tellingly, Wall Street no longer backs the GOP. Silicon Valley never did.
As of 2006, American politics has a name for a group this cohesive and this singularly focused in its pursuit of narrow ideological goals. That name is losers.
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1 Comments:
The classic phrase "democrats and republicans are two wings on the same bird of prey" comes to mind.
I think that it might be nice to have checks and balances again, for once, rather than the blank check we gave Bush for 6 years.
Fantastic post.
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