Jonah predicts.
For the record, Jonah Goldberg says in his Los Angeles Times op-ed today:
If you average out the spikes in the political Richter scale, the trends have been obvious for more than a decade: The Democrats are becoming a minority party.
When Bush got "re-elected", one of the worst emotional parts of it was knowing that this bit of cant would be repeated ad-nauseum for the next four years, and that the lower Bush's numbers inevitably went, the shriller those making the claim would get.
There are, in my opinion, smart arguments in favour of the minority-party argument that Jonah doesn't make, relying instead on the trope that Bill Clinton moved the party to the right as evidence (I guess) that liberalism is dead (by contrast, Bush's "I'm a liberal too" 2000 campaign, which he lost to a slightly more authentic liberal, apparently doesn't prove anything), and pretending he's never heard of the word "Dixiecrat". Nevertheless, the "minority party" allegation is false. Maybe I'm wrong, but if so, I'm saving my false prediction on the record here: the Dems, who are more uniformly liberal than they've ever historically been, are in good long-run shape, even if they lose the 2008 election (which I think likely, but only because of the that New York Times-pleasing "maverick" Jonah complains about).
Jonah is wrong, and someday I'd like to see his quotes preserved in history books the way Rick Perlstein saves Schlesinger et al's "liberal concensus" quotes in Before the Storm.
If you average out the spikes in the political Richter scale, the trends have been obvious for more than a decade: The Democrats are becoming a minority party.
When Bush got "re-elected", one of the worst emotional parts of it was knowing that this bit of cant would be repeated ad-nauseum for the next four years, and that the lower Bush's numbers inevitably went, the shriller those making the claim would get.
There are, in my opinion, smart arguments in favour of the minority-party argument that Jonah doesn't make, relying instead on the trope that Bill Clinton moved the party to the right as evidence (I guess) that liberalism is dead (by contrast, Bush's "I'm a liberal too" 2000 campaign, which he lost to a slightly more authentic liberal, apparently doesn't prove anything), and pretending he's never heard of the word "Dixiecrat". Nevertheless, the "minority party" allegation is false. Maybe I'm wrong, but if so, I'm saving my false prediction on the record here: the Dems, who are more uniformly liberal than they've ever historically been, are in good long-run shape, even if they lose the 2008 election (which I think likely, but only because of the that New York Times-pleasing "maverick" Jonah complains about).
Jonah is wrong, and someday I'd like to see his quotes preserved in history books the way Rick Perlstein saves Schlesinger et al's "liberal concensus" quotes in Before the Storm.
1 Comments:
Re: 2008 - I'm all for a Democratic House and Senate and a GOP pres. The last thing we need these days is more power to the presidency. We need to smack that office down a notch, IMHO.
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