The Blog from the Core - Behold the Future II

Behold the Future II

Typically, I'll be the Last Blogger on Earth to comment on the defeat of Grayson Davis and the victory of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I think Tuesday's election spells serious problems for the Democrats in next year's general election. Why? Because they haven't learned anything in the past decade, and they're not going to learn anything in the next year.

Bill & Hillary Clinton have been driving the Democratic Party further and further into the ground. When they took office, the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress. Two years later, the Republicans gained the majority in the House for the first time in decades. Since then, the Republicans have had, at times, the majority in both the House and the Senate, for the first time in more decades. Al Gore lost the presidency partly because he had to mollify his party's base by being seen as a Clintonite, but distance himself from Billary to reach the wider electorate — and he couldn't do both.

Billary still dominates the party. Not only did the party fail to reap the expected off-year payback in last year's general election — when the party in the White House usually loses seats in the Congress — they actually lost seats in both houses. They wanted to get Jeb Bush out of the Florida governor's mansion so badly they could taste it, but he was re-elected by a wide margin.

Similarly, they pulled every trick they knew to keep Davis in office in California. Not only did they fail to do that, they failed to keep a Republican getting elected in his place.

The idea that Davis's defeat spells trouble for George W. Bush next year — because an "anti-incumbent" mood got him — is simply risible. I don't think that folks like McAuliffe and Mulholland really believe it, but it does indicate that they think they can win by spinning things any way they want — never mind that they've been losing more and more elections by doing the same old spin thing.

That's because — unlike the Democratic Party leadership — voters have been learning over the past decade: talk radio, alternative sources of news on TV, and the Internet have been allowing more and more folks to understand that The Democratic Party Line does not equal Reality just because it's The Democratic Party Line. Old media never encouraged the populace as a whole to think otherwise.

Come next year's general election, the Democratic Establishment — politicos, pundits, academics, and the editorial staff at innumerable mainstream media publications — is going to be genuinely shocked when George W. Bush is re-elected. You see, they believe their own propaganda, and they hardly ever get out of their professional circles to see that (golly gee) lots of folks actually do not think that George W. Bush is Satan Incarnate.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to help. For one thing, some of the folks who voted for a Republican for the first time in their lives to get Gray out of office and Arnold into office (I suspect their number is legion) will discover that their arms and hands didn't wither and die because they voted Republican — and they'll realize that they could probably live if they did so again.

And I actually think Arnold is going to do a good job as governor over the next year, and that will buoy the Republicans' image both in California and across the country.