Like Kevin, I'm often a bit surprised by how bought in liberals are to the myth of the unstoppable adversary. Conservatives are always better organized, better funded, more ruthless, more strategic, have larger institutions, are protected by better messaging, get to campaign on simple and unanswerable fear-mongering, and are able to fight without food or water for days on end. How can they be beat? Meanwhile, get around conservatives and you hear much the same story. Liberals are better organized, better funded; more ruthless, get to campaign on cookies and ice cream and government giveaways, are protected by Hollywood and academia and culture and Brookings, and have rocket launchers where their legs should be. How can they be beat?Meanwhile, the past couple of years have been impressive for how unstoppable both sides proved not to be. George W. Bush lost one election by a tiny margin and won another by an extremely small margin. His party presided over the greatest rallying event in modern American history and got no more than a handful of congressional seats out of the deal. Domestically, his popularity and political skill helped him pass a couple rounds of tax cuts and two massive expansions of the state (NCLB and Medicare Part D) that were essentially capitulations to the liberal agenda. Social Security Privatization was a huge failure. By 2006, liberals were up against the most unpopular president in modern American history. His administration's failures were beginning to seem more like cautionary fable than actual history. Congressional Republicans were alternately going to jail and being caught molesting pages. Democrats won a load of seats, and managed to do extremely little with their majority. They couldn't get out of Iraq, couldn't pass minor changes to Medicare Part D (much less health care), couldn't pass cap-and-trade, couldn't pass much of anything. Running against an incumbent Republican with Genghis Khan-like numbers and his 700-year-old successor, they're ahead by a handful of points, not by landslide numbers. All of which is to say, both parties have had their moments over the past decade or so, but neither has demonstrated much in the way of insurmountable structural advantages or total political dominance. Politics remains close, and the two parties relatively evenly matched. There's a tendency to try to explain elections in terms of political skill, because that's how we like to understand politics, but in reality, the major forces have been external events: Crudely speaking, the Republican ascendance was powered by 9/11, and its decline by Iraq and Katrina and congressional scandals. And if Democrats win big this year, it'll probably be because of the economy and Iraq, not because, or not just because, Barack Obama is an uncommonly talented politician.Photo used under a Creative Commons license from TCM Hitchhiker. THE MYTH OF THE UNSTOPPABLE ADVERSARY.
Like Kevin, I'm often a bit surprised by how bought in liberals are to the myth of the unstoppable adversary. Conservatives are always better organized, better funded, more ruthless, more strategic, have larger institutions, are protected by better messaging, get to campaign on simple and unanswerable fear-mongering, and are able to fight without food or water for days on end. How can they be beat? Meanwhile, get around conservatives and you hear much the same story. Liberals are better organized, better funded; more ruthless, get to campaign on cookies and ice cream and government giveaways, are protected by Hollywood and academia and culture and Brookings, and have rocket launchers where their legs should be. How can they be beat?Meanwhile, the past couple of years have been impressive for how unstoppable both sides proved not to be. George W. Bush lost one election by a tiny margin and won another by an extremely small margin. His party presided over the greatest rallying event in modern American history and got no more than a handful of congressional seats out of the deal. Domestically, his popularity and political skill helped him pass a couple rounds of tax cuts and two massive expansions of the state (NCLB and Medicare Part D) that were essentially capitulations to the liberal agenda. Social Security Privatization was a huge failure. By 2006, liberals were up against the most unpopular president in modern American history. His administration's failures were beginning to seem more like cautionary fable than actual history. Congressional Republicans were alternately going to jail and being caught molesting pages. Democrats won a load of seats, and managed to do extremely little with their majority. They couldn't get out of Iraq, couldn't pass minor changes to Medicare Part D (much less health care), couldn't pass cap-and-trade, couldn't pass much of anything. Running against an incumbent Republican with Genghis Khan-like numbers and his 700-year-old successor, they're ahead by a handful of points, not by landslide numbers. All of which is to say, both parties have had their moments over the past decade or so, but neither has demonstrated much in the way of insurmountable structural advantages or total political dominance. Politics remains close, and the two parties relatively evenly matched. There's a tendency to try to explain elections in terms of political skill, because that's how we like to understand politics, but in reality, the major forces have been external events: Crudely speaking, the Republican ascendance was powered by 9/11, and its decline by Iraq and Katrina and congressional scandals. And if Democrats win big this year, it'll probably be because of the economy and Iraq, not because, or not just because, Barack Obama is an uncommonly talented politician.Photo used under a Creative Commons license from TCM Hitchhiker. 
