by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Ross Douthat makes an effort. It's close to convincing. "Given the state of the economy and the post-impeachment unpopularity of the Congressional GOP, 2000 should have been a banner year for Democrats, and the fact that George W. Bush did as well as he did had a great deal to do with his (Rove-crafted) image as a 'reformer with results,' particularly where education policy was concerned." It's true that Bush lost Latinos and education voters by lower margins than Bob Dole, but Dole's platform included abolishing the Department of Education and making English the official national language. That said, Bush's ability to hold down the margin among ed voters and "cares about people like me" voters, while racking up huge margins in the "honest and trustworthy" category, all while claiming to offer what Clinton called "the same government, only smaller and with a bigger tax cut" is certainly to his credit. How much blame to ascribe to the media for their hideous coverage, or the Gore campaign to their paranoia surrounding "Clinton fatigue" (which Mark Penn (!) showed was an unfounded fabrication of Washington insiderism), is unclear. So the initial Rove campaign strategy seems to have been somewhat effective, even if some of his tactics (e.g. trips to California) were based on faulty assumptions.
On the other hand, the Bush/Rove governance strategy seems to be a miserable failure. You cannot staff the federal government with political hacks from top to bottom and expect various branches of government to function effectively. At some point, policy and expertise matter. See Katrina, staffing Iraq reconstruction jobs with Young Turks, etc. You can get away with this when it comes to the small stuff like mine safety or consumer products from China as long as it stays out of the public eye, but at some point, something big will happen and the federal government has to be in a position to respond. Meanwhile, the 2001 and 2003 tax shifts will expire; the occupation of Iraq is a mess (see also "something big"), and the immigration bill simply won't happen, leaving only No Child Left Behind and Medicare expansion. NCLB was basically a Kennedy bill with a few changes to attract Republican votes, so that means that the only real success story is the fact that seniors are mostly happy with the Medicare drug benefit, even though the federal government is overpaying by a ridiculous margin.
As for the 2000 House and Senate results, the Dems won 5 of 19 GOP-held Senate seats while losing one of their own. Yes, they failed to knock off some weak sisters from the class of 1994, most notable Mike DeWine and Rick Santorum. But overall, for the party that includes the urban coasts to get a 50-50 split in the Senate is a substantial win, when one considers the small-state bias of the institution. I suspect a population count of the Senators' constituents will reveal that the Democrats represented a clear majority of the public. The House is another matter, though, and the relatively small gains for either party in the post-1994 environment seem to reflect a bipartisan consultant consensus to spend $3 million in the top 10 House races more than anything else.
