There was a time a few years or maybe just months ago when American politics seemed suffocating. Were we doomed to an endless stream of Bushes, Clintons, Doles, and McCains -- retreads, spouses and sons of the past? (I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling back in 2006 that the main reason to resist Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations was that the idea of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sounded, well, just not quite what the American Revolution was meant to deliver.)
And so one of the gratifying effects of tonight's results is that all of that is over. There are no more Doles. No more Bushes. (Unless Jeb rears his head, or one of the grandchildren, but I think they will have to campaign despite their name rather than because of it.) No more McCains. No more Sununus. And the ranks of mean-spirited cookie-cutter right-wing hacks who have seemed to embody the culture of modern Washington since the Clinton impeachment -- the Tom Feeneys, the Marilyn Musgraves, the Robin Hayeses -- are decimated, even if Michelle Bachmann and Norm Coleman survived.
The Republican Party now starts almost from scratch -- it's most prominent figures having either endorsed Obama (Colin Powell) or been disgraced or decisively rejected. Other than the complicated figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is there a well-known Republican who can speak for the party, or the conservative opposition? Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal -- you're all they've got tonight. (Perhaps the reelection of Mitch Daniels, a Republican who raised taxes, as governor of Indiana makes him a potential national figure.)
And on the Democratic side, besides Obama, we have a new generation of members of Congress and new Senators like Kay Hagan joining the stars of 2006 like Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar.
Last night I was at the BBC for a long while, for a short radio interview, and I saw John Bolton, who was on for a long TV segment in which he puffed about the coming backlash against Obama's socialist economics, the pointlessness of diplomacy, and voter fraud; and Mark Penn, who talked about the need for Obama to govern like the later Clinton, from the center-right. Each man is sort of despicable (although in very different ways and it's not fair to compare evil with shmuckiness) -- and once upon a time we all expended a lot of ink and energy on their failings. (Well, on Penn, I did!) And now, each is a relic, a figure from another era in American politics: the era of vicious conservatism and those who tried to tiptoe around it. We're done with that, and with them.
--Mark Schmitt.
