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The election of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts's "Kennedy" Senate seat is a resounding victory for common sense and reality. It is also the first shot in the electoral wars of 2010. Before we have the opportunity to go to the polls in November to choose the next Congress, both parties will need to sort out some significant issues.
For the Democrats, the problems are more overt and basically amount to whether or not Barack Obama can morph into Bill Clinton II. Obama is much more a prisoner of his Ivy educated ideology than the more pragmatic Clinton was, so such a metamorphosis would be correspondingly more difficult. However, if the Democrats are to have any hope of maintaining their control of both Houses of Congress, such a shift will be of great benefit.
For the Republicans, the problem is a bit more subtle, if just as significant.
The election of Barack Obama, following the repudiation of the old guard represented by Hillary Clinton, infused youth and energy into the Democratic party. Obama squandered his gift by running as a moderate and then attempting to govern as a far left ideologue. The results from Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massachusetts have underlined the folly of his approach.
The disasters of 2006 and 2008 have allowed a similar revolution within the Republican party, however, the old guard and the base have not yet accepted a completely new direction for the GOP. They have not had to address the tensions within the GOP and have been able to be content being the party of "No." This is not a long term strategy for success. Exhibit "A" would be the Democrats of 2004-2008. By gaining power before sorting out whether ideological or pragmatic Democratic policies would rule the party, the Democrats ended up with their current evolving disaster. If the Republicans are to avoid a similar fate in the next few years, they will need to find their lowest common denominator of acceptable Republican behavior.
Cassandra approvingly quotes Dennis the Peasant (and isn't that a wonderful name for a blog?):
This isn't about supposedly lilly-livered senators like Evan Bayh. This is about bad legislation that voters do not want. The pros are coming to the conclusion that biting the bullet for the sake of Bambi's ego is simply no longer a viable alternative politically.
Cassandra adds some very insightful points that should be taken to heart by our politicians:
It never ceases to amaze me that the very same folks who jumped on the Dede Scozzofava is a big fat RINO bandwagon have been going gaga over a candidate who is arguably even more liberal than Scozzofava
Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country!Shor’s research shows us that even compared to Dede Scozzafava, Scott Brown is a very liberal Republican.
The point is that the "base's" support for Brown is a bit ironic in light of their continual excoriation of so-called RINOs. It's also a vindication for what many moderates (including yours truly) have been saying all along: rigid ideological litmus tests and a small tent approach are a sure fire prescription for staying out of power.
Now that we've won, I'll be happy to tell you what I think. Any party that thinks they can ignore what voters want (even if what voters want isn't entirely rational, which it often isn't) is doing politics wrong. The Dems were just handed a stinging reminder of the truth of that principle. But it applies to us as well.
The Republican Revolution began with us winning back 4 key seats. Three of the victors who returned us to power were liberal or moderate Republicans. In other words, what Ace said.
No one's going to like me for saying this, but so much for purity. I prefer being in a position to fight idiotic ideas like ObamaCare.
To repeat Dennis the Peasant's point: Voters do not want bad legislation. That should not be so difficult a concept for our political class to comprehend, and as soon as they discover that we do not appreciate when our "betters" (the Democrat and Republican Political-Industrial Complex) treat us as the peasants they seem to imagine us to be, the better off we will all be.
Glenn Reynolds offers worthwhile advice to the Republicans:
But while Scott Brown could get elected as the anti-Obama figure — and while others will be able to pull that off in the fall — the GOP needs to be sure that it doesn’t just look like it’s lining up for its turn at the trough. Polls show that most Americans want smaller government, even with fewer “services.” Running on a platform that money’s better kept in voters’ own pockets, rather than handed over to special interest logrolling and vote-buying, will work: If it’ll work in Massachusetts, it should work pretty much anywhere. It is a fashionably-gloomy line among some on the right to say that the country’s too far gone in statism and the government-handout parasite culture to support such an approach — but again, if you can make it with this in Massachusetts, you can make it pretty much anywhere.
Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the Tea Party movement, to a much greater degree than he got them from the RNC. Smart candidates will realize that, too.
And lies don’t work as well as they used to. Obama promised transparency and pragmatic good government, but delivered closed-door meetings and outrageous special-interest payoffs. This made people angry. If Republicans promise honesty and less-intrusive government, but go back to their old ways, the likelihood that the Tea Party will become a full-fledged third party is much greater. Are the Republicans smart enough to realize this? I don’t know. The Democrats weren’t smart enough to look at Virginia and New Jersey and realize that what they were doing was a mistake that would backfire.
Read the whole thing, as the man says.
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