On 11/3/2010 5:07 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Nov 3, 2010, at 4:55 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> The bottom line is that *the TP has already succeeded*. You have to put your head in the sand not to see it . On the one hand, they've elected scores of people to Congress (though not some of the fringiest ones).
> But this was an entirely predictable midterm result: normal losses plus premium for shitty economy. The TP extremists mostly lost. How is this so extraordinary?
First of all, no, it's not a predictable midterm result:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/11/two-lessons-election
> Live by the model, die by the model. Lots of Democrats, including me,
> have been pointing out that structural factors alone predicted a
> 45-seat loss in the House this year. In other words, the bulk of the
> expected Democratic losses weren't due to healthcare reform or Obama's
> remoteness or liberal overreach or anything like that. It was baked
> into the cake all along.
>
> But the model I wrote about, which comes from Douglas Hibbs, only
> predicted a 45-seat loss, and it looks like Dems are likely to lose at
> least 60 seats. That means Democrats underperformed the Hibbs model by
> 15 seats or so, which is a record for them. (See chart below.) They've
> underperformed by ten seats a couple of times in the postwar era, but
> never by more than that.
But the point is, you're confusing two totally different things - the number of seats picked up and the ideological profile of the victorious opposition. Okay, the GOP picked up ~60 seats in a bad economy. But they conceivably could have done that *either* by playing it safe and running to the center *or* by running to the right. In 1966 they did it by running mostly to the center. I think the Dems did the same thing in 1982. Obviously this year the GOP did the opposite.
Why did that work? If the shoe was on the other foot, would a Dem opposition have been able to pick up 60 seats running candidates promising a new WPA and single-payer? If they did, that would represent a major shift to the left. (And it would still be a major leftward shift even if the Dems had picked up only 40 seats on that kind of platform.) Numbers of seats and ideological profile are two different things.
On the TP "extremists," I really think you're defining extremism down here. Okay, the mentally ill candidates who denounce water fluoridation and witchcraft are the "extremists." That makes Rand Paul, Marc Rubio, and Pat Toomey "moderates"? Sounds sort of like clutching at straws. The GOP was extremely right-wing this year.
>> Go back and read what the pundits were saying. The centrist Broder types believed Obamism was the wave of the future.
> Every election is the wave of the future - until the next one.
Except the ones that really are the wave of the future, like Reagan '80 or Gingrich '94.
In early '09, people were saying Obama fell in that category. The TP helped make it not so.
SA