08/11: Morning After Quick Thoughts
Category: Politics
Posted by: an okie gardener
1. I hate to see Santorum leaving the Senate. Perhaps, though, this will free him up to take a presidential run in 08. The other Republican names most talked about are not that exciting to conservatives.
2. I also hate to see Talent go. He was an able Senator.
3. We'll see what Pelosi & Co. do in the next two years, but if the left demands payment for services rendered, then it could become harder for Hillary or whomever to run as a Democrat in 08.
4. I see this election as being more about rejection of the Republican incumbants than than an affirmation of a Democrat message: they basically offered no message except that Bush and the Republicans were bad people. If Democrats start acting like they have a mandate for a liberal turn in government, then they will overplay their hand.
5. A victory for Big Biotech in Missouri with the narrow win for the amendment that guarantees patentable, profitable opportunities for biotech companies. (Not that the amendment was marketed this way.) One firm provided 97% of the funding behind this amendment.
6. John Kerry is probably sleeping off a very satisfying drunk: had the Dems not done as well as predicted, he would have become the scapegoat. As is, he can continue to entertain presidential fantasies.
2. I also hate to see Talent go. He was an able Senator.
3. We'll see what Pelosi & Co. do in the next two years, but if the left demands payment for services rendered, then it could become harder for Hillary or whomever to run as a Democrat in 08.
4. I see this election as being more about rejection of the Republican incumbants than than an affirmation of a Democrat message: they basically offered no message except that Bush and the Republicans were bad people. If Democrats start acting like they have a mandate for a liberal turn in government, then they will overplay their hand.
5. A victory for Big Biotech in Missouri with the narrow win for the amendment that guarantees patentable, profitable opportunities for biotech companies. (Not that the amendment was marketed this way.) One firm provided 97% of the funding behind this amendment.
6. John Kerry is probably sleeping off a very satisfying drunk: had the Dems not done as well as predicted, he would have become the scapegoat. As is, he can continue to entertain presidential fantasies.
Tocqueville wrote:
The middle in American politics, the non-ideological voters, were always changeable. If the war went well, they would support it; if the war went poorly, they would lose patience. But even that is insufficient to explain yesterday’s election results. The fact is that conservatives, too, were changeable on the war, and they varied as the result seemed to prove or disprove the foreign-policy theory under which we went to war.
Only the left wouldn’t change. The war, I believe, has gone better than news reports suggest, but even if the war were working out easily, the people on the far left would oppose it in exactly the same numbers they now do. It isn’t that they reject American foreign policy, although that’s the effect. They reject the notion that this is a foreign-policy question. It’s a culture war, and they are looking to win here the battles in the culture wars they believe they have lost elsewhere.
Perhaps they will, but the imbalance in views of the war means that yesterday’s Democratic victory is much less of a mandate than it appears. The general victory of conservative referendum measures across the country seems to say the opposite: Conservatives are tired of the war, not tired of conservatism. They’ve lost patience with Republican corruption and incompetence, not with the right in general. They’ll live to regret that, I think, particularly if Justice Stevens retires from the Supreme Court next year, as it is rumored he will. But, whatever the Democrats attempt over the next two years, the presidential election of 2008 was not settled yesterday.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.firstthings.com/...