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A Blue Wave? Or A Blue Tide?
Picture from the Doomsday Guide.
The Washington Post reports that:
Two weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans are losing the battle for independent voters, who now strongly favor Democrats on Iraq and other major issues facing the country and overwhelmingly prefer to see them take over the House in November, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The new poll underscores how much of a drag the war threatens to be on Republican candidates in competitive races. With debate underway in Washington about possible course changes in Iraq, Americans cite the war as the most important issue in determining their vote next month more often than any other issue, and those who do favor Democrats over Republicans by 76 percent to 21 percent.
In web marketing there's a number called a conversion ratio which measures how many first time visitors to a web site come back. Barring a huge October surprise, there's little doubt the Republicans are about to be taken out behind the shed and given the beating they so dearly deserve for taking the US into an illegal war based on lies and getting thousands of Americans - and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killed by so doing. It's not really a moral issue, if they'd won the war and the oil had flowed, and there were only 20,000 American soldiers in a new Democratic Iraq today, manning peaceful bases from which they could threaten Iran with a good beating, why there'd be no problem and those of us who pointed out before the war that it was based on lies and was deeply immoral would be left muttering to ourselves, embittered outcasts ignored by all the right thinking Americans who love splendid cheap foreign adventures.
More After the Jump
And that's the real problem. At this point what is being rejected isn't really Republicanism per se... it isn't the idea that you can spend as much as you like while lowering taxes (which isn't really a tax cut, as Kash points out); nor the idea that the President can torture people and ignore the bill of rights; nor the basic idea that public policy should be made and justified based on the truth rather than on big lie after big lie. No, it's just that Republicans were complete incompetents who forgot that you while you don't have to deliver much, you do have to deliver a little. The best marketers in the world, the best flacks, the best propagandists, cannot make Katrina into anything more than a disaster. They cannot clean up Abu Ghraib. They cannot make dead soldiers buried by their families and friends come back to life.
In the end, they need something, anything, to work with. Some good news. Something effective that was done.
And Bush gave them nothing, zero, nada, zip - not a single accomplishment worth talking about. After a while pointing behind the public and yelling "orange alert" just doesn't produce enough of that old time Pavlovian cowering, drooling and voting Republican.
But at this point the basic tenets of Republicanism haven't been rejected. Americans would go to war again, they would and will vote for tax cuts they can't afford; they aren't all that worked up about losing the entire bill of rights and having the President become judge, jury and executioner in the country.
They've reject Republicans, and they've rejected Bush, but they haven't rejected their program.
The job of Democrats - and this means you, Nancy Pelosi, because Reid, while an admirable man, isn't going to do this job even if does wind up in the majority, is to spend the next two years making the case that Republicans weren't just incompetent, but that there very way of thinking - of spending money America doesn't have; of lying to the public about matters of war and peace; and of demanding an end to America's liberties, is the wrong thing to do whether it is done competently or incompetently.
There will be a lot of pressure on Nancy, and on many others, to let bygones be bygones. If they do so, if they let either individuals or the movement they represent off the hook for what they have done, not only will all those American soldiers and the over half a million Iraqi dead still cry out for justice unmet, but the Democrats will have let both their country and themselves down. It isn't enough to beat Republicans once, it is required to beat this brand of Republicanism - of irresponsible spending and warmongering based on lies, for good.
The goal is to take non Democrats who vote this election for Democrats and make sure they vote Democrat next time. And they'll only do that if they really reject not just this set of Republicans, but Republicanism and if they see that Democrats don't just believe in doing things more competently than Republicans but believe in doing different things than Republicans.
So Speaker Pelosi - what will your conversion rate be?
