THE WAR'S LATEST CASUALTIES. Of course, our own high chief, Harold Meyerson, is dead-on in his latest Prospect/WaPo piece about the conversion (finally!) of the North to blue. Indeed, the big story of 2006 will be the fulfillment of the partisan realignment that started with the Brown v. Board decision a half-century ago. That transformation started in the South at the presidential level, worked its way all the way down to sheriffs (see David Lublin's compelling book, The Republican South), and is now beginning to purge the Rust Belt of many of the remaining Ford-Rockefeller Republicans who found themselves playing second banana to the GOP's southernized, evangelized, big-government-conservatism wing. But watch for Republicans, and conservatives in particular, to paint 2006 as some validation of their principles by focusing incessantly on western North Carolina Democrat Heath Shuler, or either Harold Ford or Jim Webb, should they win. (Or even if they lose.) These same folks will ignore the fact that there are three candidates named Murphy alone in the Northeast who are running to the progressive left of moderate Republican incumbents, and all three are either leading or have an even chance of winning. (Thanks to Meyerson's colleague E.J. Dionne, today's Post finally has some coverage of two of the three Dropkick Murphys.) Elsewhere, more ambitious conservatives will just disregard 2006 as any kind of Democratic victory -- or, certainly, anything but a repudiation of Bush's policies or performance. Because this trick requires a special rhetorical dexterity, it falls to folks like Charles Krauthammer, who dazzles us this morning with claims that the election "will be a referendum of sorts on Iraq." Yes, of sorts -- the sorting out of a pack of Rust Belt Republicans whose careers will be swept away by an ill-fated war promoted and engineered by the southern wing of their party, which long ago seized away control from their ideological ancestors in the Northeast and Midwest. The great irony of 2006 is that those most deserving to account for Iraq will survive, while the more passive Rockefeller Republicans will be added (in a far less tragic and serious way than most, of course) to the war's growing list of casualties.
--Tom Schaller
