The midterm election campaigns have been strange. The Democrats say nothing, just Iraq is quagmire and Bush is inept and time for a change. Here in Pennsylvania, Santorum is going mental because he can't get Casey to answer a question and the voters don't seem to care. He has never dented Casey's double digit lead. And the Republicans say nothing, have never tried to explain themselves or rally support. They are not trying to appeal to voters, just trying to retain power. It leaves one dispirited. Peggy Noonan agrees.
The Republican establishment, the Republican elite, is quietly supporting those candidates and ideas they think should be encouraged. They are thinking about whom they will back in '08. But they're not thinking of this, most of them, with the old excitement. Because they sense, in their tough little guts, that the heroic age of the American presidency is, for now, over. No president is going to come along and save us, and Congress isn't going to save us. Events will cause a reckoning, and then we'll save ourselves. And in this we will refind our greatness.
The base probably thinks pretty much the same. They go through the motions, as patriots are sometimes called to do. As for the election, it reminds me not of 1994 but 1992. That year, at a bipartisan gathering, I was pressed for a prediction. I said it was a contest between depression (if Republicans win) and anxiety (if Democrats win). I said Americans will take anxiety over depression any day, because it's the more awake state.
Al Gore was later told of this, and used it on the campaign trail. Only he changed "anxiety" to "hope." Politicians kill me.
It seems more and more likely that the Republican machine is about to take a beating, in part for abandoning the base, alternately defined as not doing the major things they said they were going to do, on which basis people voted for them.
Democrats doing surprisingly well in traditionally GOP territory; no reverse instances of Republicans doing well in traditionally Democratic territory: If you multiply each of these stories by the number of similar narrative lines describing other Senate and House races, the impression you could get is that the floor is indeed falling out from under the Republican Party.
Deservedly so. And the fact that the alternative is worse is no longer sufficiently motivating to bring some formerly reliable voters to the polls.
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