To those of us who are lifelong political junkies, the narratives are familiar. The Republican Party is dead and will never be a majority party again (1964 after LBJ’s landslide against Goldwater and whopping GOP defeats)…The Democratic Party is decimated and the beginning of a new, long Republican era has begun (after Bill Clinton faced huge Democratic losses in his party’s first mid-term while he was in office).The Republican Party is shattered and conservatism and Bush style Republicanism has been discredited and virtually dismembered as the U.S. enters a post partisan era (after Barack Obama’s 2008 and Democratic victories). And now today: the Democrats totally blew it…Barack Obama due to the polling numbers, likely electoral votes and lose of independents, centrists and seniors is One Term President Walking. (Read this).
But could there be another force in play here? The political conventional wisdom is always solid, until something happens and it isn’t.
And the New York Times’ Charles Blow notes that the Republicans are now exactly assuming a big, fat chunk of power in January with a mandate. In fact, if the Democrats were on probation it could be argued that compared to the numbers for the Democrats and Obama in 2008 the Republicans are going to be more closely watched on their probation:
Democrats still searching for a silver lining to the waxing they took last Tuesday can cheer up a bit. According to a new poll, the public may already be experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse about the choices they’ve made, and Republicans seem to have unrealistic expectations about what their leaders will be able to accomplish.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that people are considerably less happy about the Republicans’ victory than they were about the Democrats’ victory in 2006 or about the Republicans’ victory in 1994. They also approve much less of the “Republicans’ policies and plans for the future” than they did of the Democrats’ plans in 2006 or the Republicans’ plans in 1994. (I must say that that question threw me a bit because I didn’t know that Republicans had “policies and plans” for the future. Silly me.)
About 60 percent of the respondents thought that the Republicans in 1994 and the Democrats in 2006 would be successful in getting their programs passed into law. This year, just more than 40 percent believed this about the Republicans. In fact, unlike in 2008 and 2006, more people than not believed that relations between Republicans and Democrats in Washington would now get worse.
That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement to me. It sounds like a Congress of Low Expectations.
And then he writes this:
Furthermore, about half of the respondents said that President Obama still should take the lead in solving the nation’s problems. Only 39 percent said the same about Bill Clinton in 1994 and only 29 percent said so about George W. Bush in 2006. This seems to be at odds with what Republican respondents want. By more than 2 to 1, Republicans think that their leaders should “stand up to Obama” as opposed to working with him, and most think that those leaders should stick to their positions as opposed to making compromises. (This is stunning. Compromise is how democracies function. Are they saying that they don’t want a functioning democracy?)
Some thoughts:
The other side of the coin is this: if over the next two years the Republicans seem more adult-like and issue oriented than the Democrats, then they are likely to keep much of this support that they have — particularly if under the Obama administration’s watch the economy remains tepid or worsens. But this time around the GOP is unlikely to not pay a price if its basic response is “No.” This poll does not suggest a ringing mandate — but yet another party being put on probation by a very jaded electorate.
FOOTNOTE: Read THIS by Larry Sabato. I originally missed the irony and took it seriously. But that is the point: the conventional wisdom often looks silly once it has been loudly (in announcing it) and quietly (announced without announcing that the old one is one big “NEVER MIND!) replaced.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.