After the recent elections where Dems recaptured the Senate and House after 12 years of being in the minority we’ve seen the GOP bickering over what went wrong. This cartoon does a great job of capturing the GOP mood:
Time.com has a put together a handy list debunking the top five myths of these past elections:
MYTH: Joe Lieberman’s victory proves the netroots don’t matter.
REALITY: The netroots had some key victories.MYTH: Democrats won because they carefully recruited more conservative candidates.
REALITY: Democrats won because their candidates were conservative about their message.MYTH: The losses Republicans suffered this election were no different than what you usually see in a President’s sixth year in office.
REALITY: Redistricting minimized what might have been a truly historic shellacking.MYTH: The election was all about the war.
REALITY: It’s the dishonesty, stupid.MYTH: Republicans lost their base.
REALITY: The base turned out, they just got beat.
Here are some fun excerpts:
The Netroots Had Some Key Victories
[I]n the midst of a Democratic wave, the netroots candidates failed to sweep, causing some pundits to claim that the netroots’ influence continues to be overstated: “The Netroots Election? Not So Fast,” editorialized The Nation. When Rick Perlstein tried, in The New Republic, to claim the election as a netroots triumph, Ryan Lizza replied in the magazine’s blog that in addition to having the netroots’ support, winning candidates also had the national Democratic party to thank, as it “dumped tons of money, strategic advice, and fundraising assistance into their races.” What’s the real takeaway? Of the 19 candidates that three of the biggest liberal blogs (Daily Kos, mydd.com and Swing State Project) raised money for, eight of the candidates won. This improves on the blogs’ record from 2004, when Daily Kos picked out 16 campaigns to strongly support and raise money for, all of which lost. This cycle, bloggers may have been most strongly linked to Lamont, but they actually donated more money to Jim Webb of Virginia.Democrats Won Because Their Candidates Were Conservative About Their Message
Washington will see an influx of unorthodox Democrats: congressmen-elect Heath Shuler in North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth in Indiana are pro-life and pro-gun. But liberals won in some relatively conservative areas as well, and often after being largely ignored by national Democratic strategists. In the House, they include Kentucky’s John Yarmuth (who supports universal health care and affirmative action), New Hampshire’s Carol Shea-Porter (she was once escorted out of a Bush event for wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt) and Dave Loebsack (an anti-war liberal academic) in Iowa. The same is true of the Senate, where the new Democratic members include Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, a socialist.Redistricting Minimized What Might Have Been A Truly Historic Shellacking
Republicans spent most of the year boasting about how the redistricting of the past decade had made them all but bulletproof. Absent those new district lines, says the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, “it could easily have been 45 or more.” And there are other results that break with past patterns, Ornstein adds. Democrats did not lose a single seat — a feat the party had not accomplished since 1922. Even in the Republican sweep of 1994, the G.O.P. lost four of its open seats to Democrats. What’s more, the wave swept all the way down the ballot — for instance, handing the New Hampshire House to the Democrats for the first time since 1922.It’s The Dishonesty, Stupid
74% of voters surveyed in exit polls ranked corruption and ethics as important in determining their votes; by comparison, 67% said that about Iraq. The lack of progress in Iraq helped nationalize the elections, but multiple scandals (Abramoff, Foley) appear to have driven home an urge for massive change.The Base Turned Out, They Just Got Beat
[T]he White House’s political director Sara Taylor, the difference between base turnout in 2002 and 2006 is within the margin of error. And independent exit polls show the same percentages of voters who called themselves “evangelicals,” “white born-again Christians,” “weekly church-goers,” “Republicans” and “conservatives” as in 2006 as in 2004. “The base turned out,” says Taylor, “but independents made up a larger share of the electorate and they broke very heavily Democratic.”
My favorite debunked myth is the one about the influence of the grassroots and how we’ve used the web to make our voices heard. I’m tremendously enthusiastic about what we’re building, and can’t wait to see the impact that we’ll have in two years — and in the time in between. Additionally, while I’m nervously anxious about seeing the results of our newly elected Congressional majority (given the mess that Republicans left behind), as a Democratic Party supporter you just gotta feel good about the opportunities before us and the possibility of a permanent Democratic majority.
From Salon.com:
If you were a little suspicious of the way in which gasoline prices just happened to dive just before this month’s midterm elections, this bit of news won’t exactly put your mind at ease: After dropping 84 cents between Aug. 11 and Nov. 3, gas prices are up five cents in the first Lundberg Survey released after the Nov. 7 election.
Trilby Lundberg tells CNN that the reversal in the 12-week pre-election slide shows that the market has “soaked up” a “mini-glut” of crude oil from August, causing a “normalization” of supply and demand.
Our so-called liberal media can never tear itself away from conventional wisdom, nor from sucking conservative-talking-points ass. This so-called liberal-main-stream-media is all too content with simply parroting the conservative attack lines against Democrats. Here’s one example from Newsweek’s CW feature:
Old CW: First woman Speaker will be Rayburn redux.
New CW: Botox bumbler blows first play.
Digby has more on the "Botox" attack line being directed against Democratic women representatives:
This particular Mean Girlz theme didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s coming directly from Frank Luntz:
LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, "You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go."
This must have focused grouped well among their target wingnut pigs because, as I previously noted, Queenbee Dowd generously shared this one with the whole world today (before she went off on a sexist rant of her own):
Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and eloquent Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, was warming up the rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox.
The new Congress could amuse itself, he said, by “searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi’s forehead.” The Senate, he added, would be entertained by “the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton.”
Thank god for commentators like Arinna Huffington, who chimes in on the sexist conservative attack lines being parroted by our so-called liberal media:
The only thing surprising about the current mainstream media narrative regarding Nancy Pelosi is its relentless predictability. Practically since the day the Iraq war started to go bad, Democrats have been derided in the press for not having a plan, and choosing pragmatism over principle.
Cut to ’06. Hot on the heels of an electoral triumph, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi endorses as Majority Leader the member of the House most identified with speaking out against the war — the man whose courage in doing so fueled the nationalized campaign that gave Democrats the majority in the first place. I’m speaking, of course, about Jack Murtha.
Murtha then loses the Leadership race to Steny Hoyer. As Pelosi no doubt knew, it was an uphill battle from the beginning — Hoyer had been tirelessly campaigning for the job among Democratic caucus members for months. But Pelosi gave her support to Murtha because, as she put it in title of her blog this week on HuffPost: "Bringing the War to an End is my Highest Priority as Speaker."
It doesn’t get much clearer or more principled than that.
So what’s been the reaction in the media?
According to the Los Angeles Times, Pelosi is off to a "rocky start," while the New York Times says she’s "tempting disaster."
Disaster? If wanting to give a high-profile platform to the man most responsible for his party finally locating its spine regarding Iraq (and who, for his troubles, received the full brunt of the Bush/Rove/Mehlman slime machine) is a "disaster," what word do you use to describe the war itself? Disast-orrfic? Catastro-bacle-aster? Disaster-to-the-10th-power?
Maureen Dowd joined the bash-Pelosi-bash with a column entitled "Squeaker of the House," writing:
"Nancy Pelosi’s first move, after the Democratic triumph, was to throw like a girl. Women get criticized in the office for acting on relationships and past slights rather than strategy, so Madame Speaker wasted no time making her first move based on relationships and past slights rather than strategy… Ms. Pelosi offered an argument along the lines of: John Murtha’s my friend. He’s been nice to me. I don’t like Steny. He did something a long time ago that was really, really bad that I’m never, ever going to tell you. And I’m the boss of you. So vote for John."
Really? I don’t recall Pelosi ever saying — or even implying — anything of the kind. Again, how much clearer could Pelosi be than "Bringing the War to an End is my Highest Priority as Speaker"? If ending this disastrous war (and I’m using the term in its true sense and not its New-York-Times-editorial sense) doesn’t qualify as "strategy" then what does?
In their editorials this week, both the LA Times and the New York Times chided Pelosi for even considering not installing California Congresswoman Jane Harman as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a point also raised by Dowd:
"Everyone in Washington was perplexed at Ms. Pelosi’s ham-handed effort to sabotage not only Mr. Hoyer but her former friend and fellow Californian, Jane Harman."
Wait, so first Pelosi is criticized for "making her first move based on relationships," and then she’s criticized for not giving a chairmanship to a "former friend and fellow Californian?"
So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
As for the wisdom of "everyone in Washington," well, a walk around Baghdad should suffice as rebuttal.
I’m surprised that seniority as the be-all qualification for leadership still has so many ardent backers in Washington. Pelosi has made it clear that the highest priorities of the new Congress will be changing course in Iraq and the restoration of oversight. It is by these two yardsticks that she needs to decide who the Chair of the Intelligence Committee should be. And by nothing else.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a Democratic leader who would rather listen to the American people than to "everyone in Washington"?
During one of my blog excursions I came across the following:
Can someone please explain why it matters if a winger calls us the "Democrat Party"? I understand that it’s supposed to be a slur (I don’t really see how), but how does it impact anything? Why waste your breath on an "ic"?
which prompted me to write the following in response:
I find it quite amazing that a sophisticated observer of our national politics, as I’m certain you are, would ask the question as you did, "[H]ow does [use of the term 'Democrat Party'] impact anything?"
On its face your reflexive response on to the impact of the term ‘Democrat Pary’ seems quite reasonable. However, if one but takes one step back a larger and, admittedly, more complex image emerges. The image that emerges is control of the terms of the political discourse, where even seemingly inconsequential labels matter. Just to illustrate the point, look at the contentious press conferences that Rumsfeld held on what label should be used to describe the armed Iraqi opposition following the invasion: insurgents, terrorists, ‘dead-enders,’ etc. As long as Democratic Party supporters accept the labels that the opposition places on us, we concede ideological/public perception turf in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. And, in large part, this is what grassroots members of the Democratic Party are plain tired of: Democratic official and operatives that don’t stand up for the party and for the broad progressive principles that the party stands for. Democratic Party grassroots members simply want representatives that are willing and able to demonstrate some backbone when engaged by the opposition — even when it comes to seemingly innocuous issues such as the label of the party (which, by the way, is Democratic Party NOT Democrat Party).
Media Matters has a nice summation of the issue:
The ungrammatical conversion of the noun "Democrat" to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic" — or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, "to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation." In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans.
…
Further, Hertzberg wrote that "among those of the Republican persuasion," the use of " ‘Democrat Party’ is now nearly universal" thanks to "Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,’ and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz." While Hertzberg noted that Luntz "road-tested the adjectival use of ‘Democrat’ with a focus group in 2001" and "concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the … Democratic Party," he also wrote that Luntz had told him recently that "[t]hose two letters ['ic'] actually do matter," and that Luntz "recently finished writing a book … entitled ‘Words That Work.’ " [URL]
And from the Hendrik Hertzberg article directly:
There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. "Democrat Party" is a slur, or intended to be–a handy way to express contempt.
…
In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. "Democrat Party" is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com[.] [URL]
At the end of the day, it’s about who controls the terms of our national public discourse. Moreover, by using and accepting the derogatory label that the opposition bestows on the Democratic Party, we leave at the table whatever positive linguistic connotation we may gain in the public’s mind with the usage of the correct party label, Democratic Party.
