Tom Watson offers his take on the election, Republicans, Democrats and the meaning of Ned Lamont’s challenge to re-elected Senator Joe Lieberman. Part of it:
There’s a myth out there a-growin’ that this historic election of 2006 pushed the Democratic Party “back to the center,” that the big winners were Democratic “conservatives,” that Americans will only elect right-leaning candidates. It’s all as false as the south in George Allen’s twang, as empty as the pages in David Brooks’ reporters notebooks. Further, it tosses the economic underpinnings of the switch-over, particularly in the House races, where the big wave predictions came horribly true for the GOP. Reagan Democrats and their children are starting to peel away, move back to the party of their grandparents, finding the promises have all be broken.
Truth is, this is not the end of the Revolution of 1994. It’s the end of the Revolution of 1980, a permanent splintering of the ties between the religious right and their stranger, icky social issues and classic top-down conservative economics. Entirely lost in that divorce are the Republican libertarians, who people like Dick Cheney despise with the very fiber of his power politics being.
Read the entire post.
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.