Listening to the morning natter on the radio driving in today and I came to this conclusion: It was not a victory for the Democrats so much as a failure by the Republicans.
If the Democratic Party lauds itself on the governors' wins in NJ and VA, they're kidding themselves. They were not an organized concern that helped defeat the GOP contenders. What happened on Thursday was two things: A) the voters are fed up with business as usual under the GOP, and B) The GOP failed to do its usual fear tactics to scare people into voting for them.
Me, I'm just glad that Kilgore in Virginia didn't get in, after sending out bogus Democratic/Progressive voting packets (paid for directly by his campaign committee) that urged voters to vote for the independent candidate, not Tim Kaine. Sigh....
If the Dems start thinking they're going to have an easy time taking back the Congress at mid-terms, they're only fooling themselves. They can take advantage of the weakening of the GOP bulwarks, as dissension among the ranks has started to show the GOP as three true parties--the fiscal, social, and religious conservatives--none of whom really agree with the others but have lock-stepped together for years in their mutual hatred of the Clintons.
Me, I just wish the Democrats could find a way to A) produce a consistent message, as opposed to the poll-driven mush-mouthed pablum they've spouted in hopes of never offending or challenging anyone; B) be the opposition party they should've been the past 5 years (and only Harry Reid, Russ Feingold, and scarce others really step up to the plate there); and C) realize they're not going to take the White House in 2008 unless they nominate a governor or someone who never had to vote on going to war in Iraq.
Anyone who gets up now in opposition to the war because it's now popular to be so is doomed by hypocrisy, and I don't care to hear the rationalizations. If you voted for it, you can't claim to have always been against it. And you undermine yourself even more if you whine about how the administration deceived you with bad intel; YOU are responsible for putting such power in their hands because YOU didn't do your job and investigate or even question the rightness of the actions. You ate up the trough of fear they fixed for you, and we're all paying for that.
If the Congress is starting to rethink the fixing of intel and how we got into Iraq, when's anyone other than Feingold really going to start asking the same questions on whether or not we were rooked into other bad decisions like the hypocritically named Patriot Act?
Steven Schend
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