Wednesday, November 15, 2006

What will victory mean?

On Open University, Eric Rauchway charts the makeup by party of the Congress since the New Deal and wonders what it means in terms of interpreting what happened last Tuesday. In one interpretation, he says, it was a classic throw-out-the-bums victory, or rather loss, a comment on what the GOP has done on Capitol Hill since they took over with Newt Gingrich at the helm in 1994. Seen another way, it was the Republicans' anomalous 12-year reign that was the result of a purge of an unsuccessful regime.

Rauchway sees more legitimacy to the second reading than might be apparent. The GOP, he thinks, never really had a mandate for a radical reshaping of government, despite what Newt thought. They were just the beneficiaries of a voter-driven coup. As such, they couldn't really succeed in overturning the fundamental tenets of US governance. They had to speaking of "saving" or "strengthening" Social Security -- even though they meant radically altering it, and uninsuring it -- and not of jettisoning it entirely, even if that's what they had in mind.

The question is whether the Dems now find themselves in a similarly restrictive majority position. For one thing, they don't control the White House (and neither did the GOP for the first six years). For another, America may not be ready for a radical legislative program. Already we have a barometer in the nation's reaction to the Democrats' proposal of a withdrawal from Iraq to begin within 4-6 months. It hasn't been met with open arms.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:28 PM

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