Mickey Kaus asks, “What does it tell you about a political party if in a year of epic disaster for their opponents the best they can hope for is a 51-49 majority in the Senate?”
Meanwhile, in Opinion Journal, Arthur C. Brooks picks up on a theme that Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward discussed with me in our TCS Daily pre-election podcast:
By all rights, the Republicans left in Congress after this election should be able to pool to work in one minivan. Instead, they are probably facing a 10% setback in House seats–hardly a disaster by midterm election standards. What’s more, many of the Democrats at the vanguard of today’s political “revolution” are not exactly left-wing zealots. Robert Casey, who leads incumbent Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, opposes abortion rights. On issues of gun control and immigration, Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee sounds like a Republican. James Webb, who seeks to unseat Virginia Sen. George Allen, actually used to be a Republican. The lesson is that Democrats can win modestly if the Republicans implode, and preferably if they look more or less like Republicans. This is hardly a mythic victory for the American left; indeed, the larger cultural picture–in which the election is but a minor political datum–remains strikingly bleak for American liberalism.
Read the rest for Brooks’ thoughts on why that is; this sort of over-the-top fearmongering and hyperbole is a big reason, in my book.
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