Amazing how bad a campaign the Democrats ended up running, wasn’t it? No message, no new ideas? No taking any stands. Another hapless gambit from the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Oh, wait, right, they crushed the GOP House majority and won control of the senate (by election rather than defection) for the first time in 12 years.
My point here isn’t to gloat on the Dems’ behalf. And political chatmeisters do routinely impute genius to campaign victories and vice versa. But over the last six+ years, as the capital has fallen under the spell of the Bush-Rove confidence cult, opinions about the Democrats have become particularly fouled by fatuous circular reasoning. And same with the Bush-Rove GOP.
Victory is its own defense. The Republicans won the 2004 election. But only just barely. Not through any particular genius. And, I suspect we’ll learn, much less through micro-targetting and data-mining mumbo-jumbo than we’d been led to believe.
The Rumsfeld defenestration justly dominated the news cycle yesterday. But beyond the numbers and policy changes a lot of things are going to need to be rethought in Washington now. A lot of people’s conceptual meal tickets just expired.
