Paul Krugman hits on a favored hobbyhorse of mine, the media's tendency to report Republican wins as conservative triumphs while Democratic wins show centrism on the march.
it's quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote.
In 2006, Time's cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact, Democrats had an 8.5 percentage point lead, substantially bigger than the GOP win in 1994.
Of course, there's a formidable corps of media-savvy Democrats whose careers are based off spinning every Democratic victory as an uprising of moderate, swing voters. Mark Penn, the DLC, Third Way, and all the rest are always available for a quote or some post-election insta-analysis. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist will happily expound on the import of the most recent Republican wins. So Republican wins get the Norquist spin, while Democratic wins are interpreted, at least in part, through the lens of professional moderates. This led to the bizarre post-2006 analysis in which Democrats like Heath Shuler, who wanted to repeal NAFTA, were suddenly centrists. It's silly, but it serves various folks agendas, and the rest of the party is so scared of being called liberal that they think it's a good thing to be spun this way.
