The Democrat gains appear to be right on target as far as history is concerned. Since 1914, the average gain for the opposition party in a President’s sixth year is 34 House seats and six Senate seats.
There have been several reasons being attributed to the Democrats’ victory, such as anti-war sentiment, anti-Bush sentiment, and anti-GOP sentiment. I have yet to hear “pro-Democrat sentiment” listed as a reason for the Democrats’ win.
One caveat is that since Democrats have won the House and Senate, as per some of their TV advertisements (especially in Missouri, where Democrat Claire McCaskill beat Senator Jim Talent), we can expect sufferers of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and spinal cord injuries to finally be cured. I’ll be holding the Democrats to this one.
According to another liberal theory, since Bush/Cheney manipulated gas prices to help sway the election, we can look for a return $3 per gallon gasoline. However, two days after the election, regular unleaded was still $2.07.
And we can also look for optimistic reporting on the economy with Democrats now in power. Even if there is no change in economic indicators, the mainstream press will suddenly discover that the U.S. economy really is in good shape.
In the grand scheme, however, the GOP cannot blame the news media for their defeat, since the mainstream press no longer monopolizes the flow of information. We cannot blame the voting machines, voter fraud, voter intimidation, complicated ballots, and all the other factors Democrats blame when they lose. At least this conservative is willing to recognize a legitimate Democrat victory.
Although the political climate did not favor the GOP this time around, you can still look to the fact that Republicans abandoned the conservative ideology that swept them to power in 1994 as the primary reason for their defeat in 2006. While conservatism continues to prosper, big-government Republicanism has been defeated.
Even though the Democrats gave the American people nothing to vote for, instead choosing to campaign against President Bush and the GOP rather than on behalf of liberalism, the Democrats did rely on a handful of conservative candidates (Jim Webb in Virginia, and Heath Shuler in North Carolina, for example) as a front to help elect to power a Democrat leadership (Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) that really is far left.
In short, conservatism won in 2006 when it ran as a Democrat.
As I wrote in this newspaper exactly three years ago “Because the Democratic Party has shifted so far to the left, Republicans have felt obligated to shift leftward, too, in order to co-opt the center of the political spectrum. This is misguided for two reasons. First, Republicans win by being conservatives. In becoming invertebrate centrists, they risk alienating conservatives into either not voting, or voting for third-party candidates. Second, by blurring the lines between themselves and Democrats, left-leaning Republicans present an indistinguishable alternative between themselves and their opponents, giving Democratic voters no reason not to vote for the candidate with the ‘D’ beside his name.”
I’m not going to say that it’s a good thing that the GOP lost, because it means we’re now going to be subjected to a Democrat Congress for the next two years, and that’s NEVER a good thing. However, good things can come out of the GOP’s defeat IF the result is a period of honest introspection by Republicans that produces a leader who can refocus the party on conservatism in the mold of, say, Newt Gingrich. When displayed unabashedly, conservatism wins elections. We know this, because we saw it happen in 1980, 1984, and 1994, and it will happen again.
Until then, conservatives can distinguish themselves from our fellow countrymen across the aisle by not falling into the derangement that envelops liberals when they’re out of power, and that is to not allow politics to affect our God-given joy and optimism. To do otherwise would be to allow the government to determine our outlook, and that would be the antithesis of conservatism.
