Wall Street Journal gloated that Lucas lost an "ancestrally Democratic House seat" and exposed "several weaknesses in [the Democrats'] political playbook," there's a big difference these days between an "ancestrally Democratic House seat" and a liberal House seat. Lucas, a moderate liberal, ran a moderately liberal campaign premised on high black turnout. But though one-third of the 4th CD is black, it's increasingly a conservative district, dominated by a number of large military bases and several equally large defense contractors. So it's no surprise that Sisisky was a center-rPro-life, a member of the Blue Dog coalition, and a master of defense pork, Sisisky could survive pretty easily in the 4th. Any non-incumbent Democratic challenger with remotely left politics faced an uphill climb from the beginning.
Second, Virginia as a whole has been trending Republican for some years now. So -- Republican spin notwithstanding -- Lucas' loss was more the dénouement of an old trend than illustration of a new one. Conservative spinners gloat how just a few years ago, Virginians elected their first black governor, and gee, the Democrats must have really gone off the liberal deep end to lose this seat. But Wilder's victory was more than a decade ago, in 1989. In the intervening years, the GOP has won back the governor's mansion (in 1993), swept the rest of the statewide offic> the state house (in 1995), and finally taken the other of Virginia's two Senate seats (last year, when former governor George Allen beat out Democratic incumbent Chuck Robb). This trend is not irreversible -- the hidebound Virginia Democrats needed a shake-up, and the Democrat's candidate for governor in 2001 currently leads the GOP's -- but it does exist.
Finally, Forbes' victory means very little for George W. Bush. The same day the Journal was gloating over Lucas, in fact, the New York Times published a poll with very bad news for Bush. According to the Times, the fraction of voters who think that Bush cares about what they care about -- what my friend Josh Marshall might call Bush's empathy-meter -- is down to a dismal 25 percent. And Bush's personal approval rating has dropped seven more points since March, leaving them lower than Bill Clinton's at the same point in Clinton's first term.
But at this point in 1993, Clinton's political shop and P.R. operation were both in utter disarray -- which suggests two things for Bush. First, that the sheen is coming off Bush's famously disciplined press operation. (Only 33 percent of the public approves of Bush's response to the current energy "crisis," for instance -- a crisis that exists largely in the minds of Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer, and which now threatens to bite the Bushies in the ass.) And second, that perhaps Bush's policies are not nearly so popular as his cheerleaders in the conservative press would like
