Tuesday, January 25 2005
A GOP REALIGNMENT OR NOT? Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson took a look at this question in yesterday's New York Times. The article makes a few decent points, but from the title ("Some See Risks as Republicans Revel in Power") to the selection of quotes ("this conservative cycle is long in the tooth") to the conclusion at the end by Yale political science Professor David Mayhew ('"I do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms of building coalitions") it's hard not to view the entire thing as The Times' best effort at offering a Xanax pill to anxiety-ridden Democrats.

So are we in the midst of a political realignment in favor of the GOP? Clearly, we are in the middle of something. Some, like Professor Andrew Busch argue that we are experiencing a "rolling realignment" which began as far back as 1968 and has been punctuated over the decades with victories in 1980, 1994, 2002 and now 2004.

Karl Rove also uses the term "rolling realignment" to describe the significant Republican gains in recent years, often likening results of the 2000 and 2002 elections to the era of GOP dominance ushered in by the election of William McKinley in 1896. Fred Barnes argued in the Weekly Standard last November that the 2004 election was the exclamation point on a decade-long realignment toward the GOP: "Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."

Many Democrats continue to argue that the rough seas they find themselves sailing are the result of a tempest created by 9/11 rather than a shifting of the political tides. They point to pieces of evidence (the difference of a hundred thousand votes in Ohio this year, for example) and cling to theories of an "Emerging Democratic Majority" to suggest that things aren't really that bad.

With the impending election of Howard Dean as head of the DNC and members in Congress digging in their heels on everything from cabinet members to judges to Social Security, Democrats hope, as Nagourney and Stevenson wrote yesterday, that by killing Bush's agenda history will view the 2004 election as "little more than a fleeting alignment of the political stars: the short-lived victory of an incumbent president running for re-election in wartime against an unsteady opponent and a weakened opposition party."

It's possible that a scorched earth opposition to the President is the quickest road back to power for the Democratic party. Then again, absent at least the perception of a positive agenda to offer as an alternative this is a strategy that could, at least in the short-term, send Democrats sailing even further out to sea. - T. Bevan 9:15 am Link | Email | Send to a Friend