Arthais101
08-11-2006, 22:41
At my college newspaper, I was editor in chief while in my senior year. The newspaper has a tradition of inviting back past editors to write an editorial now and then about some topic of noteworthiness. About a month ago I was approached to write one about the election, regardless of outcome, having completed it, I would like some feedback.
It is rather long, but if you can, read the full thing, I'd love to hear what people think. It's only partially edited so forgive any roughness.
The sound you just heard is that of the walls coming crashing down. While as of this writing two senate seats and thirteen house seats remain “too close to call” the truth is that we awoke this morning to a political landscape vastly different than the one in place twenty four hours before. The Democrats have taken the House, and may well take the Senate. As of the time of this writing, the race in the state of Virginia will decide the outcome of the Senate. Jim Webb is in a slight lead over the Republican incumbent. It is likely to go down to a hand recount, which bodes generally well for the Democrats on two counts. First is because historically hand recounts rarely change the outcome of an election, and second because a recount if anything would favor the Democrats, as for whatever reason, votes that tend not to get counted on election day but would turn up on a hand recount tend to be from Democrat leaning districts. It appears then that a Democrat controlled Congress may very likely be what happens when the dust settles. However, allow me to say I don’t really care that much.
And I’m sure some of you are wondering why would I, an admitted leftist, not really care about the outcome of the Senate? It is because, simply, that a Senate win would be the frosting on the political cake, and while the frosting is always nice, it’s the cake that fills you up. The honest truth is that this election was never about winning the Senate. In fact most analysts would have told you that such a win was extremely unlikely. Not only were Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia considered the lands of no hope but many political strategists conceded the very real (and believe me, as much as it pains me to say, it was very real) chance that the Democrats would lose their seats up for election in Maryland and New Jersey, especially with the recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision whipping the conservative base there into a frenzy. Fact is, we were only expected to pick up three, and it was recognized that there was a very real possibility of losing two. This would have left us somewhere between three and five votes short of the majority, assuming the Independent Senators caucus with the Democrats, which seems highly likely considering one is Joe Lieberman and the other is Bernie Sanders from Vermont, a Socialist who has a voting record that matches the Democratic party line better than most Democrats have. The fact is though every major political analysis recognized that the Democrats were likely to come up short with the wins necessary to take the Senate. If that proves to be wrong, great. But like I said, this election wasn’t about winning the Senate, this election was about winning the House, and we did, massively.
Like any good politically active person, my Tuesday evening was with CNN on and my computer cursor poised ready on the “refresh” button checking out the up to the minute predictions, and like any good Democrat, I relished every win, and suffered a bit at every loss. Also I, like many of you I suspect, was watching the results come in and thinking to myself “OK, they’re winning their seats back, but they aren’t gaining any, where was this 15-20 seat gain I was promised?” As I watched the East Coast polls come in (of course in my frenzy I forgot to realize that most East Coast spots are Democrat heavy anyway, and wouldn’t be seeing much of a change) I saw the number of seats gained drift slowly upwards. As those polls closed out and the result came in, I was distressed to see that half of the House seats had been calculated, and there were only six Democrat pickups. Based on that math, if it held consistent, Democrats would pick up 12, and be a minority party yet again. Then the results starting coming in from the Southwest, Midwest, Southern, and Central States. And that, as they say, was that. It was, for lack of a better term, a massacre. Twenty eight pickups, and eleven left to go. All of them Republican seats, all of them potential pickups, except for Georgia 12, where the Democrat incumbent is winning slightly. When all is said and done, Democrats will be likely to have gained thirty seats or more. Many predict that this will end up in a total reversal, that the Republican party will be left with as few or fewer seats than the Democrats had prior to the election, some have even speculated that the Republican party will not break 200 (unlikely however). Even if the Republicans manage to pick up all eleven seats (and destroy our nice record of not losing a single seat this election) they’ll be 21 votes behind the Democrats. Whatever the end result, it was clear long before the polls officially closed and the debate about who won in states with razor thin margins began that the Democrats would carry the House. We did what we intended to do. Now two questions remain, how do we keep it, and what in the world are we going to do with it?
We need to look back 12 years. If 2006 can be seen as a vote against the Republicans, then 1994 can be seen as a vote against the Democrats. In almost the exact same situation, just the names reversed, the Democrats lost control of Congress during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton. It was then when Newt Gingrich stood on the steps of Congress and talked about his “Contract With America”. He talked about reigning in Democrat spending, he talked about conservative policies, he talked about fiscal responsibility, he talked about small government. And the people bought it, and for the first time in 40 years, Republicans held the majority and held it for over a decade. Flash forward to last night, and we ask, what went wrong? What went wrong is, the Republicans held the majority. Or, it should be stated, the Republicans held the majority without learning from the mistakes the Democrats made that put them in the majority in the first place. And that is a mistake we can not afford to make.
Many, especially in the Republican party, have said that the Democrats did not win this election, it was the Republicans who lost it. In a two party system such as ours, it may seem like there is no difference between these two statements, and practically there is not. Ideologically however there is a fundamental difference between winning an election, and your opponent losing it. And this election served just that point. While many Democrats, liberals, and social moderates rallied against the Republican party in general, and the Bush administration specifically, and while the issues with growing discontent with the war drew massive retaliation, even causing now former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to fall on his sword not even a day after the election, what happened here was a shocking phenomenon
I remember a fable, once told to me. A family sits by the fire cooking dinner. The youngers, a mere baby, enticed by the flames, crawls towards it to touch it. The mother (or father, or guardian, or mothers, or fathers, we are Democrats here after all) scoops the child up and protects it from harm. The child tries again, and again the mother averts injury. Over and over the child reaches for the flames and over and over is pulled away. Finally the child is too quick for the mother, and his outstretched fingers reach out and are burned. The child cries and cries in the pain, but in the end, the child realized that putting your hand to the flame will hurt, he has suffered the pain, learned his lesson, and never does it again.
Several voters watched with growing discontent as their party strayed from what they considered its core values. The sentiment was that the Republicans had gone to Washington in 1994 to change government, but the government changed them. The Republican party, for many conservatives, represented a party of small government, limited spending, modest foreign policy, secure boarders and honest governance. Instead they got a government balloon wildly out of proportion. They got a massive deficit, the largest in history. They got (in their eyes) a weak immigration reform. They got Ney, Foley, and DeLay. They got Iraq. What happened in this election is a huge number of discontented Republicans not only stayed home, or cast ballots for third parties (this would not be so unusual, and the Left has certainly had their share of votes lost due to discontented Democrats simply staying at home or supporting a third party candidate like Nader), they actually, shockingly, voted Democrat. Not because their core beliefs changed, or because they no longer believed in the Republican ideology, but because the Republican party in power was seen as moving away from that ideology. That voting block saw the Republican party, their party, become drunk with their majority, and it needed some comeuppance. It needed some punishment for this. It needed to be shocked back into reality. It needed Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It needed to be told that when you abandon the core values of your constituents, your constituents will abandon you. To those loyal conservatives, the Republican party strayed too close to the fire, and it needed to learn its lesson. And what happened was that conservatives in this country came out to vote for their own opposition, casting votes not for the Democrats, but against the Republicans. They voted to punish their own party. They voted to put them back in the minority to remember what it’s like to be a minority, so that when 2008 comes around again, they can have a repeat of 1994, and this time, they’re going to stay away from the fire, because they would have learned what happens when you get too close.
This of course paints a not as rosy picture for the Democrats and their win. The question becomes, if we won last night due to Iraq, and an effort by conservatives to teach their party some humility as they spend their next two years in the minority, what happens when and if the Iraq war turns in our favor, and the Republicans shape themselves up and re-attract the disenfranchised conservative blocks? Some Republicans, including Tom DeLay are already downplaying the Democrat win for just this reason (although we should take anything DeLay of all people says with the appropriate amount of salt). He called many of the newly elected Democrats in historically Republican areas “one term congressmen”. The sentiment is there that much of the country didn’t really want Democrats that much, they just wanted the current Republicans even less. So how do we hold on to it?
Simply by being better. We are Democrats because we believe in the Democrat ideology, because we think our system works better than the Republican ideology. We believe that social welfare, broad human rights, a degree of wealth redistribution and controlled immigration help this country. We, presumably, hold these ideologies for a reason. We have two years to prove ourselves right. And in doing so we can not fall prey to the problems that fell upon the Republicans. We need to clearly, directly articulate our message and then fervently stick to it. I promise you, those conservatives who voted for us this time won’t be there when the Republican party gets its act together. 2006 for the Republicans was our 1994, we can not let their 2006 become our 2008. Speaker Elect Pelosi has promised this to be the most honest and moral governance in American history, for our sake, and for hers, I hope she proves to be correct. We can not repeat the mistakes of the Republican party. Our leadership needs to be open to criticism, responsive to suggestions. When scandal erupts we need to move swiftly, decisively, and purge it from our ranks. The next Mark Foley may well be a Democrat, but Pelosi shouldn’t be taking the role of Hastert in the cover up. If the people voice their concern that we stray from our ideological message, respond to them, talk to them, if we need a change in tactics explain why, work with the people that put us there. They elected us in 2006 because the public was mad at Republicans, but in doing so severely limited the Republican party’s ability to do anything to get mad at before. We won because people voted against the Republicans, we will not have that advantage in two years. We must insure that we get our message across so that instead of voting against them, they vote for us.
So how? Some say it should be easy since we’re now “in power”, however this represents not only a fundamental disconnect with the American political system, but our own party as well. First, there are a good two dozen or more “Blue Dog Democrats” (socially conservative Democrats) who have a history of occasionally bucking the party line in the House now, which means that although we may hold the majority, acting as a unified force will be difficult at times. Third, we need a majority in both houses, not just one to pass legislation, although the idea of a Democrat Senate is becoming increasingly likely. And third, let us not forget there’s one big old hunk of veto power held by a Republican president.
So if the Republicans can’t pass legislation with a minority vote, and the Democrats do not have enough votes to overcome the veto hurdle, who exactly is in power? The answer, of course, is nobody, and that’s exactly what we need.
What cost us our majority in 1994 is exactly what cost the Republicans in 2006. A majority in Congress, and a party president. What angered so many people is the rubber stamp the current Congress has become. With a firm majority Bush has been able to push forth his own agenda in almost every instance. However in doing so irritated two groups. Although Bush won in 2004, the margin was small, and although Republicans controlled Congress, it was only with a small majority. The views of the Republican party represented only half of the country, yet they were able to run the country entirely on their views, without need for any compromise. And when they did so, they ran against traditional conservative values. So in the end, the Republican party ran into the Democrats who grew tired of six years of disenfranchisement, and their own conservative base left feeling betrayed and angry.
But now it’s a Democrat Congress (or at least the House), and the rubber stamp is gone. What happens now is what democracy should be. Neither side can get exactly what they want, neither side can push their own agenda fully. Both have to actually work together. The Democrats do have a bit of an advantage, it’s true, they can pass popular centrist legislation and add on their own left leaning agendas as riders, forcing Bush to either allow it all, or veto popular law. This in fact should be a strategy used, well, strategically. The question becomes what concessions are the Democrats willing to make in order to see their projects pass, and which issues are they willing to risk a veto on?
But this is not a sound strategy for good governance overall however, and should not form the basis for Democrat action. The problem with a rubber stamp administration is that one side inevitably will have issue with the other, but the majority will hold the attitude of “go ahead, argue all you want, we don’t care.” Now they have to care, now the Democrats have the power to say “no, you’re going to listen to what we have to say, and we are going to reach an agreement here, or this is going nowhere.” And so do the Republicans. Thus the beauty of the system, Nobody gets everything they want, but everybody gets something. A true democracy should never be a straight tyranny of the majority. The essence of representative democracy is that you recognize that people do not agree with you, and they get to have their voice too. A rubber stamp administration that utterly disregards the viewpoints of a substantial minority of the populace isn’t a representative democracy, because it only represents half (or slightly more than half) of the perspective. We’re not going to get everything we want, and that’s ok. If we did, we’d end up with the same backlash the Republicans just ended up with. The fact is the American people have spoken, and they are fed up with partisanship, they are fed up with being ignored, and they are fed up with administrations that simply do not listen. Right now, George W. Bush is good for the Democratic party, because it forces us to remember how to compromise, and it forces us to learn how to listen to the opposition. The Republicans have shown that they forgot that lesson pretty fast, and it cost them dearly. Let us not make the same mistake.
It is rather long, but if you can, read the full thing, I'd love to hear what people think. It's only partially edited so forgive any roughness.
The sound you just heard is that of the walls coming crashing down. While as of this writing two senate seats and thirteen house seats remain “too close to call” the truth is that we awoke this morning to a political landscape vastly different than the one in place twenty four hours before. The Democrats have taken the House, and may well take the Senate. As of the time of this writing, the race in the state of Virginia will decide the outcome of the Senate. Jim Webb is in a slight lead over the Republican incumbent. It is likely to go down to a hand recount, which bodes generally well for the Democrats on two counts. First is because historically hand recounts rarely change the outcome of an election, and second because a recount if anything would favor the Democrats, as for whatever reason, votes that tend not to get counted on election day but would turn up on a hand recount tend to be from Democrat leaning districts. It appears then that a Democrat controlled Congress may very likely be what happens when the dust settles. However, allow me to say I don’t really care that much.
And I’m sure some of you are wondering why would I, an admitted leftist, not really care about the outcome of the Senate? It is because, simply, that a Senate win would be the frosting on the political cake, and while the frosting is always nice, it’s the cake that fills you up. The honest truth is that this election was never about winning the Senate. In fact most analysts would have told you that such a win was extremely unlikely. Not only were Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia considered the lands of no hope but many political strategists conceded the very real (and believe me, as much as it pains me to say, it was very real) chance that the Democrats would lose their seats up for election in Maryland and New Jersey, especially with the recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision whipping the conservative base there into a frenzy. Fact is, we were only expected to pick up three, and it was recognized that there was a very real possibility of losing two. This would have left us somewhere between three and five votes short of the majority, assuming the Independent Senators caucus with the Democrats, which seems highly likely considering one is Joe Lieberman and the other is Bernie Sanders from Vermont, a Socialist who has a voting record that matches the Democratic party line better than most Democrats have. The fact is though every major political analysis recognized that the Democrats were likely to come up short with the wins necessary to take the Senate. If that proves to be wrong, great. But like I said, this election wasn’t about winning the Senate, this election was about winning the House, and we did, massively.
Like any good politically active person, my Tuesday evening was with CNN on and my computer cursor poised ready on the “refresh” button checking out the up to the minute predictions, and like any good Democrat, I relished every win, and suffered a bit at every loss. Also I, like many of you I suspect, was watching the results come in and thinking to myself “OK, they’re winning their seats back, but they aren’t gaining any, where was this 15-20 seat gain I was promised?” As I watched the East Coast polls come in (of course in my frenzy I forgot to realize that most East Coast spots are Democrat heavy anyway, and wouldn’t be seeing much of a change) I saw the number of seats gained drift slowly upwards. As those polls closed out and the result came in, I was distressed to see that half of the House seats had been calculated, and there were only six Democrat pickups. Based on that math, if it held consistent, Democrats would pick up 12, and be a minority party yet again. Then the results starting coming in from the Southwest, Midwest, Southern, and Central States. And that, as they say, was that. It was, for lack of a better term, a massacre. Twenty eight pickups, and eleven left to go. All of them Republican seats, all of them potential pickups, except for Georgia 12, where the Democrat incumbent is winning slightly. When all is said and done, Democrats will be likely to have gained thirty seats or more. Many predict that this will end up in a total reversal, that the Republican party will be left with as few or fewer seats than the Democrats had prior to the election, some have even speculated that the Republican party will not break 200 (unlikely however). Even if the Republicans manage to pick up all eleven seats (and destroy our nice record of not losing a single seat this election) they’ll be 21 votes behind the Democrats. Whatever the end result, it was clear long before the polls officially closed and the debate about who won in states with razor thin margins began that the Democrats would carry the House. We did what we intended to do. Now two questions remain, how do we keep it, and what in the world are we going to do with it?
We need to look back 12 years. If 2006 can be seen as a vote against the Republicans, then 1994 can be seen as a vote against the Democrats. In almost the exact same situation, just the names reversed, the Democrats lost control of Congress during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton. It was then when Newt Gingrich stood on the steps of Congress and talked about his “Contract With America”. He talked about reigning in Democrat spending, he talked about conservative policies, he talked about fiscal responsibility, he talked about small government. And the people bought it, and for the first time in 40 years, Republicans held the majority and held it for over a decade. Flash forward to last night, and we ask, what went wrong? What went wrong is, the Republicans held the majority. Or, it should be stated, the Republicans held the majority without learning from the mistakes the Democrats made that put them in the majority in the first place. And that is a mistake we can not afford to make.
Many, especially in the Republican party, have said that the Democrats did not win this election, it was the Republicans who lost it. In a two party system such as ours, it may seem like there is no difference between these two statements, and practically there is not. Ideologically however there is a fundamental difference between winning an election, and your opponent losing it. And this election served just that point. While many Democrats, liberals, and social moderates rallied against the Republican party in general, and the Bush administration specifically, and while the issues with growing discontent with the war drew massive retaliation, even causing now former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to fall on his sword not even a day after the election, what happened here was a shocking phenomenon
I remember a fable, once told to me. A family sits by the fire cooking dinner. The youngers, a mere baby, enticed by the flames, crawls towards it to touch it. The mother (or father, or guardian, or mothers, or fathers, we are Democrats here after all) scoops the child up and protects it from harm. The child tries again, and again the mother averts injury. Over and over the child reaches for the flames and over and over is pulled away. Finally the child is too quick for the mother, and his outstretched fingers reach out and are burned. The child cries and cries in the pain, but in the end, the child realized that putting your hand to the flame will hurt, he has suffered the pain, learned his lesson, and never does it again.
Several voters watched with growing discontent as their party strayed from what they considered its core values. The sentiment was that the Republicans had gone to Washington in 1994 to change government, but the government changed them. The Republican party, for many conservatives, represented a party of small government, limited spending, modest foreign policy, secure boarders and honest governance. Instead they got a government balloon wildly out of proportion. They got a massive deficit, the largest in history. They got (in their eyes) a weak immigration reform. They got Ney, Foley, and DeLay. They got Iraq. What happened in this election is a huge number of discontented Republicans not only stayed home, or cast ballots for third parties (this would not be so unusual, and the Left has certainly had their share of votes lost due to discontented Democrats simply staying at home or supporting a third party candidate like Nader), they actually, shockingly, voted Democrat. Not because their core beliefs changed, or because they no longer believed in the Republican ideology, but because the Republican party in power was seen as moving away from that ideology. That voting block saw the Republican party, their party, become drunk with their majority, and it needed some comeuppance. It needed some punishment for this. It needed to be shocked back into reality. It needed Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It needed to be told that when you abandon the core values of your constituents, your constituents will abandon you. To those loyal conservatives, the Republican party strayed too close to the fire, and it needed to learn its lesson. And what happened was that conservatives in this country came out to vote for their own opposition, casting votes not for the Democrats, but against the Republicans. They voted to punish their own party. They voted to put them back in the minority to remember what it’s like to be a minority, so that when 2008 comes around again, they can have a repeat of 1994, and this time, they’re going to stay away from the fire, because they would have learned what happens when you get too close.
This of course paints a not as rosy picture for the Democrats and their win. The question becomes, if we won last night due to Iraq, and an effort by conservatives to teach their party some humility as they spend their next two years in the minority, what happens when and if the Iraq war turns in our favor, and the Republicans shape themselves up and re-attract the disenfranchised conservative blocks? Some Republicans, including Tom DeLay are already downplaying the Democrat win for just this reason (although we should take anything DeLay of all people says with the appropriate amount of salt). He called many of the newly elected Democrats in historically Republican areas “one term congressmen”. The sentiment is there that much of the country didn’t really want Democrats that much, they just wanted the current Republicans even less. So how do we hold on to it?
Simply by being better. We are Democrats because we believe in the Democrat ideology, because we think our system works better than the Republican ideology. We believe that social welfare, broad human rights, a degree of wealth redistribution and controlled immigration help this country. We, presumably, hold these ideologies for a reason. We have two years to prove ourselves right. And in doing so we can not fall prey to the problems that fell upon the Republicans. We need to clearly, directly articulate our message and then fervently stick to it. I promise you, those conservatives who voted for us this time won’t be there when the Republican party gets its act together. 2006 for the Republicans was our 1994, we can not let their 2006 become our 2008. Speaker Elect Pelosi has promised this to be the most honest and moral governance in American history, for our sake, and for hers, I hope she proves to be correct. We can not repeat the mistakes of the Republican party. Our leadership needs to be open to criticism, responsive to suggestions. When scandal erupts we need to move swiftly, decisively, and purge it from our ranks. The next Mark Foley may well be a Democrat, but Pelosi shouldn’t be taking the role of Hastert in the cover up. If the people voice their concern that we stray from our ideological message, respond to them, talk to them, if we need a change in tactics explain why, work with the people that put us there. They elected us in 2006 because the public was mad at Republicans, but in doing so severely limited the Republican party’s ability to do anything to get mad at before. We won because people voted against the Republicans, we will not have that advantage in two years. We must insure that we get our message across so that instead of voting against them, they vote for us.
So how? Some say it should be easy since we’re now “in power”, however this represents not only a fundamental disconnect with the American political system, but our own party as well. First, there are a good two dozen or more “Blue Dog Democrats” (socially conservative Democrats) who have a history of occasionally bucking the party line in the House now, which means that although we may hold the majority, acting as a unified force will be difficult at times. Third, we need a majority in both houses, not just one to pass legislation, although the idea of a Democrat Senate is becoming increasingly likely. And third, let us not forget there’s one big old hunk of veto power held by a Republican president.
So if the Republicans can’t pass legislation with a minority vote, and the Democrats do not have enough votes to overcome the veto hurdle, who exactly is in power? The answer, of course, is nobody, and that’s exactly what we need.
What cost us our majority in 1994 is exactly what cost the Republicans in 2006. A majority in Congress, and a party president. What angered so many people is the rubber stamp the current Congress has become. With a firm majority Bush has been able to push forth his own agenda in almost every instance. However in doing so irritated two groups. Although Bush won in 2004, the margin was small, and although Republicans controlled Congress, it was only with a small majority. The views of the Republican party represented only half of the country, yet they were able to run the country entirely on their views, without need for any compromise. And when they did so, they ran against traditional conservative values. So in the end, the Republican party ran into the Democrats who grew tired of six years of disenfranchisement, and their own conservative base left feeling betrayed and angry.
But now it’s a Democrat Congress (or at least the House), and the rubber stamp is gone. What happens now is what democracy should be. Neither side can get exactly what they want, neither side can push their own agenda fully. Both have to actually work together. The Democrats do have a bit of an advantage, it’s true, they can pass popular centrist legislation and add on their own left leaning agendas as riders, forcing Bush to either allow it all, or veto popular law. This in fact should be a strategy used, well, strategically. The question becomes what concessions are the Democrats willing to make in order to see their projects pass, and which issues are they willing to risk a veto on?
But this is not a sound strategy for good governance overall however, and should not form the basis for Democrat action. The problem with a rubber stamp administration is that one side inevitably will have issue with the other, but the majority will hold the attitude of “go ahead, argue all you want, we don’t care.” Now they have to care, now the Democrats have the power to say “no, you’re going to listen to what we have to say, and we are going to reach an agreement here, or this is going nowhere.” And so do the Republicans. Thus the beauty of the system, Nobody gets everything they want, but everybody gets something. A true democracy should never be a straight tyranny of the majority. The essence of representative democracy is that you recognize that people do not agree with you, and they get to have their voice too. A rubber stamp administration that utterly disregards the viewpoints of a substantial minority of the populace isn’t a representative democracy, because it only represents half (or slightly more than half) of the perspective. We’re not going to get everything we want, and that’s ok. If we did, we’d end up with the same backlash the Republicans just ended up with. The fact is the American people have spoken, and they are fed up with partisanship, they are fed up with being ignored, and they are fed up with administrations that simply do not listen. Right now, George W. Bush is good for the Democratic party, because it forces us to remember how to compromise, and it forces us to learn how to listen to the opposition. The Republicans have shown that they forgot that lesson pretty fast, and it cost them dearly. Let us not make the same mistake.