Should've seen these election results coming years ago...

[SteppingRazor]

The more I think about it, the Democratic takeover should've been easy to see as early as 2002


The Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, and impeachment was on their brains not long afterward. After retiring from Congress in 2005, Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, one of the leading lights of the impeachment movement, was asked whether the Clinton Impeachment was retaliation for Nixon decades earlier.
"I can't say it wasn't," Hyde said. "But I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility."
Of course, Hyde's bit about "standing for something" is made ridiculous in light of the timeline of impeachment. Republicans were convinced of impeachment, and then went about looking for something to pin it on. For six years, they hounded and flogged Clinton, until he finally left office in 2000, enjoying approval ratings far higher than those of Congress.
Then came 2000 to the present day -- The Rove Years. Rove's basic election strategy, embraced by Republicans and derided by Democrats, was to get out the Republican vote and appeal to the conservative base, damn the mushy middle that, for the most part, didn't vote anyway. It was a good short-term route, but disastrous in the long-term.

(IMAGE)
Karl Rove, who will go down in history as a short-sighted, so-so campaigner

In the first six years in office, the Republicans in Congress ostracized Democrats with their witch hunts of Clinton, burning all bridges and ruining chances of reconcilitation, in some part because they were still smarting from the fact that their leader was caught committing multiple felonies 20 years earlier. This pattern of shooting the messenger -- of being angry at those who report atrocities, rather than those who commit them -- has become a hallmark of Republican thought (e.g. Why can't you all report the good news coming out of Iraq?).
Then, in the next six years, the Republicans ignored independent voters while whipping up the base into a frothy-mouthed, rabid group of Igors who looked at voting not as a democratic right, but as a necessity mandated by God. In other words, they spent 12 years completely ignoring the center, where most American voters lie.


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[SteppingRazor]

1. Shameless, ego-driven self-kick

:P