WP, Dionne: To Democratic centrists and liberals: STOP ancient feud; it's no longer relevant. [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Democrats' Real Victory
Self-Deluding Spin on Both Sides
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006; Page A31

LITTLE ROCK -- Elections provoke myth-spinning. Republicans are in danger of spinning away from a full appreciation of the magnitude of their defeat last week. Democrats could spin themselves into useless arguments rooted in the past and ignore the opportunity American voters have offered them....

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Republicans make a mistake if they dismiss the depth of the Democratic victory and the disintegration of their coalition. Democrats now control 28 of the 50 governorships, many of them in previously red states such as Arkansas, and they picked up legislative chambers in seven states.

Democrats converted one-time Bush voters in large numbers and cut into core Republican constituencies. As the National Journal's Tom Edsall has pointed out, Republicans lost ground among white men, married people and religious voters. Nationwide, one of every seven Bush voters from 2004 backed a Democratic House candidate. In Ohio, Brown won 20 percent of those who voted for Bush two years ago; in Montana, Democrat Jon Tester won 18 percent of the Bush voters. In the Ohio governor's race, Ted Strickland, the winning Democrat, won 30 percent of Bush supporters from 2004.

But victory has not prevented the revival of what feels like an ancient feud between Democratic centrists, who are emphasizing the importance of moderate voters in Tuesday's results, and those on the party's left who point to the centrality of economic populism and impatience with the Iraq war.

To which the only rational response is: Stop! Moderates were indeed central to the Democrats' triumph, because Republicans vacated the political center. But these are angry moderates. Many are unhappy about Iraq, less on ideological grounds than because the Bush policy is such an obvious failure. The new Democratic voters are a mix of social conservatives (especially in the South and parts of the Midwest such as Indiana) and social libertarians (especially in the West). Many (especially in the Midwest) are angry about the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas.

Holding this coalition together will require subtlety and an acknowledgment that the comfortable old battles of the 1980s and '90s are irrelevant to 2006 and 2008. The old arrangements are dead, a truth that both parties need to recognize.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/13/AR2006111301056.html?nav=most_emailed