The Republican establishment deserves a great deal of credit for its ability to spin just about any disaster, but sometimes, facts are just hard to get around. Just as the GOP thought it was in the midst of building a “permanent majority,” Dems take back the House, the Senate, a majority of the nation’s governors, and most state legislatures. If you’re the Bush White House, where’s the silver lining?
Never fear, the right has come up with a new line that conservatives have embraced with two arms: the Dems who won yesterday are actually conservative Dems, which proves that the right is still the dominate ideology.
“Three dozen blue dogs have voted against [Pelosi] on various issues,” [White House Press Secretary Tony] Snow said, using a nickname for conservative Democrats. “And it’s the conservative Democrats who made real gains.”
The gains by conservative and moderate Democrats, which some analysts say will force the party to shift more toward center, is encouraging to Bush. The president believes they will support him in his fight for tax cuts, which Snow said the president has vowed not to give up.
Even at first blush, the argument is a bizarre tack for the right to take today. For the last several months, these guys have screamed at the top of their lungs that Dem candidates are radical, terrorist-loving liberals who’ll force Americans to marry illegal immigrants of the same gender. Today, after the elections, these same Dems are now “conservative.” How convenient.
But even if we move beyond the obvious flaw, a closer examination proves just how wrong the conservative push-back really is.
Ezra did a fine job debunking the entire line of reasoning, accurately labeling it “a myth.” It was simply a matter of looking at the Dems who won yesterday.
[E]very Democrat elected supports raising the minimum wage. They all support stem cell research. Only nine describe themselves as pro-life. And the most conservative Democrats, mainly those running in the South, largely went down to defeat. In Tennessee, Harold Ford, whose campaign focused on his church-going ways and conservative values, lost. Jim Webb is up by a few thousand votes.
Meanwhile, unabashed progressives like Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and former socialist Bernie Sanders cruised to victory. As Tom Schaller has noted, the flip-rate in the South was a meager five percent. The real transformations came in the liberal Northeast, where a slew of not-quite-left-enough Republicans were felled by a phalanx of progressive candidates, and the Rust Belt, where economic populists took out a series of traditional conservatives.
Sorry, Republicans, you’ll have to do better than this to spin yesterday’s results.