Shakes here, with some post-election thoughts...
This is freaking hilarious. Check out this story lead in the WaPo today:
After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP's various factions all agree: This wouldn't have happened if the party had listened to us.
That. Is. Awesome.
In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.
Welcome to the club!
The rest of the article lays out all the various finger-pointing, which provides some amusement—especially for someone like me, who's been accused of being "why the Democrats can't win" after every election for years, for reasons generally in the area of "being too liberal" and "having the unreasonable expectation that Democrats not be sexists and homophobes."
In any case, there are obviously a whole slew of reasons why the GOP lost—corruption, greed, out-of-control spending, unprecedented expansion of government, undermining civil rights, inflexible partisanship, cronyism, base pandering, corporate welfare, redistributing wealth upwards, ignoring the environment, wretched prejudices, the Iraq War, Katrina, Terri Schiavo, etc. The American voters had a litany of complaints, and they encompassed interests of all the factions who are now pointing fingers at each other. It was, in the end, everything.
And all of it goes back to a single mistake the GOP made: They forgot that Americans hate their government.
