When He Gets A Chance to Sit and Think

No progressive blogger is sharper or more on target than Chris Bowers. Very few bloggers give me the lovely "wish I'd said that" shivers as often as Chris. And almost none of them give the "wish I'd said that as elegantly as he said that" shivers of this fine 2005 election analysis:

I think what happened yesterday is the result of conservative Republicans believing their own falsified "mandate" hype. They somehow believed that 2004 gave them a mandate similar to those enjoyed by Democrats from 1932-1978. They believed that with turnout and a message directed at their base, they would continue to win elections indefinitely, much in the same way that Democrats did for decades. The problem for Republicans is that the Republican base was never a mandate, never a majority like the Democratic base was...

Massive base turnout worked in 2004, but just barely. Further, it also forced them to govern from their base, as their catastrophic failures on Social Security and Miers revealed. They owed their position to extremists, and they had to appease them in order hold their flimsy coalition together. The result has been an entire year of declining approval ratings from for the Republican junta in Washington, and independents moving over to Democrats en masse.

You cannot run a strategy designed to destroy our national consensus and then hope that you will one-day hold the national consensus, especially when the other side catches on and starts building their own Noise Machine. The narrow presidential and congressional victories for Republicans from 2000-2004, often secured without even winning the popular vote, represent the apex of the existing Republican governing coalition. There is absolutely no room for this coalition to grow.

They have already effectively demonized everyone who is already voting against them (and many people who are voting with them). Bush's approval rating among Democrats and Independents are now identical to Nixon's. They live in a different world with a different reality produced by a different set of media outlets. You can never become a natural governing majority when that is the case. They have rejected reality, and now reality is rejecting them.

They live in a different world with a different reality produced by a different set of media outlets.

Chris speaks, and the big picture comes easily and effortlessly into focus. He started his fine essay saying that he had a difficult time knowing what to write. Heaven help us if he ever gets over that difficulty! If he does, nobody else will have anything left to say.

I'm so green with envy!