I Cogitate

"But I thought about the game, the game! Yes, I thought about the game!"

Lance Mannion
http://lancemannion.typepad.com/
November 13, 2006

A whole lot of people inside the Beltway who've been spectacularly wrong about everything for the last 15 or so years, and I mean everything---about Whitewater, Travelgate, Newt, the Impeachment, Gore's "lies," Bush's compassionate conservativism, Dick Cheney's and Don Rumsfeld's statesmanship, the War in Iraq, this last election, everything---have been busy, busy, busy since Wednesday trying to prove that despite all the evidence they still know what they're talking about and the conventional wisdom that drove all their thinking down blind alleys for the last decade and a half still prevails.

These pundits, journalists, TV talking heads, analysts, and consultants have been pushing the idea that the Democrats didn't actually win Tuesday nor did Bush exactly lose.  Nothing changed but a few labels.  The product, the center-right big business-friendly surrender to Karl Rove when push comes to shove politics the Media Insiders love, is just now more easily identifiable and socially palatable.

On Tuesday, they've been quick to assure us, the country moved squarely to the right of the middle where it's always been and where it belongs, and even though a lot of Right Wing hardliners lost their seats in Congress, the election proves that the Democrats don't have to pay any attention the the Progressives in their party.  The Center-Right holds.

Which is probably news to the likes of Sherrod Brown and John Hall.

It's probably a bit of a surprise to Rick Santorum too.

And Harold Ford, the DLC poster boy who is now out looking for work, might be asking his patron Rahm Emanuel to explain it to him:  "How is that my losing proves that you were right for choosing me to run?"

And how the election was a victory for conservativism and timidity and continuing the status quo needs to be explained to the people of Arizona who decided they don't want their state to officially hate gay people and the people of South Dakota who rejected the Religious Right's dream of changing the state motto to The Coathanger State and the people of Kansas who got rid of their creepy, misogynistic Attorney General and the people of Missouri who decided that they prefer to let scientists work on curing diseases than listen to the preachers tell them to value zygotes over living people and the people of the Western and Rocky Mountain States who in just three years have turned over their governorships, state houses, and Congressional delegations to from red to blue.

The six new Democratic governors, including Eliot Spitzer and Deval Patrick, might be wondering how their victories are victories for the Washington Establishment's conventional wisdom too.

I can tell them.

Inside the Beltway, state governments don't matter.

For that matter, government doesn't matter.

The reason that the Club of the Spectacularly Wrong can be so insistent that they're right to be Right is that there was only one race that truly mattered to them this fall, Joe Lieberman's.

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