"Tinkerntom" wrote in message
m...
Tinkerntom previously wrote:

riverman, I think you are getting it. Finally! There is a new show in
town!


I found this article, and thought it would clarify some of what I have
been saying.

Democrats' Choice: Dig in or Work With GOP

Nov 20, 9:25 PM (ET)

By TOM RAUM

WASHINGTON (AP) - Outpolled, outmaneuvered and out of power, Democrats
are suffering an identity crisis.

They could dig in for the long haul as an opposition party similar to
many European semi-permanent parliamentary models, and espouse popular
positions without worrying about governance. Or they could try to
reach across party lines in hopes of achieving accommodation with the
Republicans for the public good.

There are pluses and minuses to each approach, and finding a happy
medium will be difficult.


Nice. And I found this:

http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm

I'm reprinting it here, in full, and against Usenet protocol (sorry, folks)
because its very good reading. FYI, TnT, and from now on, posting links is
the standard format.

In 2004, The Country Didn't Turn Right -- But The GOP Did
By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal

© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004

A quick post-post-election exit poll: Which of the following two statements
more accurately describes what happened on November 2?

A) The election was a stunning triumph for the president, the Republicans,
and (especially) social conservatives. Because the country turned to the
right, President Bush received a mandate, the Republicans consolidated their
dominance, and the Democrats lost touch with the country.

B) Bush and the Republicans are on thin ice. Bush barely eked out a
majority, the country is still divided 50-50, and the electoral landscape
has hardly changed, except in one respect: The Republican Party has shifted
precariously to the right of the country, and the world, that it leads.


Usual answer: A. Correct answer: B.

For the record, only time will tell, the truth is somewhere in the middle,
and all that. Still, level-headed analysis -- which is not what this year's
post-election commentary produced -- shows that every element of Statement A
is suspect or plain wrong.

Begin with that stunning triumph. "Stunning" implies surprising. Any
observers who were stunned this year lived in a cave (or on Manhattan's
Upper West Side). All year long, month after month, opinion polls averaged
to give Bush a lead in the low-to-mid-single digits, depending on when the
poll was taken and who took it. Only toward the end, after the debates, did
the gap narrow to that now proverbial "statistical dead heat." Even then,
the statistically insignificant margin generally favored Bush. Another
indicator was the University of Iowa's electronic election market, which
lets traders bet on election outcomes; it consistently showed Bush winning
with a percentage in the low 50s. Rarely has an election been so
unsurprising.

A triumph? Only by the anomalous standards of 2000. By any other standard,
2004 was a squeaker, given that an incumbent was on the ticket. The last
conservative, polarizing Republican incumbent who slashed taxes and
campaigned on resolve against a foreign enemy won 49 states and received 59
percent of the popular vote. That, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who did not
need to scrounge for votes to keep his job.
Most incumbent presidents win in a walk. The prestige and visibility of the
White House gives them a powerful natural advantage. Bush enjoyed the
further advantage of running against a Northeastern liberal who had trouble
defining himself and didn't find the battlefield until September. By
historical standards, Bush in 2004 was notably weak.

The boast that Bush is the first candidate to win a popular majority since
1988 is just pathetic. Bush is the first presidential candidate since 1988
to run without effective third-party competition, and he still barely won.
No one doubts that Bill Clinton would have won a majority in his re-election
bid in 1996 if not for the candidacy of Ross Perot.

A new political era? A gale-force mandate for change? More like the
breezeless, stagnant air of a Washington summer. Despite much higher
turnouts than in 2000, only three states switched sides -- a startling
stasis. Despite Bush's win, the House of Representatives barely budged. In
fact, the Republicans might have lost seats in the House had they not
gerrymandered Texas. The allocation of state legislative seats between
Republicans and Democrats also barely budged, maintaining close parity. The
balance of governorships will change by at most one (at this writing,
Washington state's race was undecided). If that's not stability, what would
be?

In the Senate, the Democrats were routed in the South and their leader was
evicted. Those were bruising blows, to be sure; but it was no secret that
the Democrats had more Senate seats to defend, that most of those seats were
in Republican states, and that five were open. "Early predictions were that
the Republicans would pick up three to five seats overall," notes my
colleague Charlie Cook. (See NJ, 11/6/04) In the end, the Republicans picked
up four.

Here is the abiding reality, confirmed rather than upset by the election
returns: America is a 50-50 nation. According to the National Election Pool
exit poll (the largest and probably most reliable such poll), voters
identified themselves this year as 37 percent Republicans, 37 percent
Democrats, and 26 percent independents. That represents a shift in
Republicans' favor, from 35-39-27 in 2000 -- but it is, of course, a shift
to parity, not to dominance.

The political realignment that Republicans wish for is real, but it has
already happened. Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American
Enterprise Institute, notes that Democrats enjoyed a roughly 20-point
party-identification lead in the 1970s; that lead diminished to about 10
points in the 1980s and to single digits in the 1990s. Now the gap is gone.
"If you see the closing of that kind of gap," Bowman says, "that is
something very significant." The significance lies, however, not in either
party's imminent domination but in both parties' inability to dominate.

Republicans do, obviously and importantly, dominate in Washington. That,
however, has less to do with any tectonic shift in the country's partisan
structure than with mechanical factors that have helped the GOP: the House
gerrymander, the favorable 2004 Senate terrain, and Bush's two squeaker
victories.

Has the electorate turned right? A bit. In the National Election Pool
survey, the share of voters identifying themselves as conservative increased
by 5 points over 2000, to 34 percent -- which, however, returned the
conservative-identified share of the electorate to the level of 1996 (33
percent). A plurality of voters consistently describe themselves as
moderate.

Social conservatives and the media ballyhooed the National Election Pool
survey's finding that "moral values" topped the public's list of voting
issues, at 22 percent (narrowly edging out the economy and terrorism). In
particular, the Religious Right spun the "moral values" answer as endorsing
their agenda (against gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research).
Actually, the concern with "moral values" is neither new nor, for most
voters, specific. Bowman notes that the Los Angeles Times exit poll has
regularly included "moral/ethical values" on its list of "most important
issues," and that this choice emerged on top in 1996, 2000, and 2004. In
2004, the same proportion chose it as in 1996. Clearly, those 1996 voters
were not up in arms against gay marriage and stem cells.

Most voters who plump for "moral values" seem to equate that term not with a
particular policy agenda but with plain speaking, solid values, and a clear
moral compass, all of which Bush offered. In 2004, the electorate barely
moved on abortion, which only 16 percent of voters think should always be
illegal; and 60 percent of voters supported gay marriage or civil unions
(predominantly the latter).

Religious conservatives boast that they won the election for Bush. True,
their turnout rose in 2004, but so did everyone else's. According to Luis
Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, evangelical
Christians made up about 23 percent of the electorate in both 2000 and 2004.
What happened in 2004, Lugo says, is that evangelicals and Catholics shifted
more of their support toward Bush; about 78 percent of evangelicals voted
for Bush this year, as compared with about 72 percent in 2000. Those votes
certainly mattered, but only because the election was so close. In other
words, marginal evangelical votes were important because the center did not
move.

More precisely, the electorate's center did move, but only about 3
percentage points. That was about how much Bush improved his showing over
2000 in the average state he won twice, and it is also about the size of his
margin of victory this year. It was enough to win him a close election, but
hardly a breakthrough.

If anything structurally important happened in 2004, it was that the country
moved to the right a little, but the Republican Party moved to the right a
lot. John Kerry's Democrats aimed for the center and nearly got there,
whereas Bush pulled right. He won, of course, but in doing so he painted his
party a brighter shade of red -- especially on Capitol Hill, and above all
in the Senate, some of whose new Republican members seem nothing short of
extreme.

The upshot is that Washington's governing establishment has moved further to
the right of the country, and of the world, that Washington seeks to lead. A
50-50 country has produced a lopsided government and a sore temptation for
Republicans to overreach. If they steer hard to starboard, they may capsize
the boat.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where
"Social Studies" appears.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No commentary necessary.
--riverman