Clinton should have gone with welfare reform first then health care. Unfortunately, the first 100 days of his presidency was about Somalia, AG nominees and getting whacked on don't ask.

I think Obama will run again in 2010. he'll be free to run for anything.

Apparently Obama has been pressured to sit down tomorrow night with Bill O'Reilly, such is the panic in the Obama campaign.

Obama insisted on tomorrow night or he wouldn't do it... tomorrow night because he fearing Fox News would allow McCain to crash the interview and demand Obama have more debates.

About the first paragraph: Beinart, for some reason, is comically reluctant to discuss foreign policy. He says that G.W. Bush fired up the GOP base with the 2001 tax cut. But after the 2001 tax cut he was pretty unpopular with the country as a whole. What got the GOP base fired up, and made him popular as a whole, was 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, and the beginning of the Iraq war. If not for 9/11, 2006 might have come four years earlier.

Anyway it's not too surprising to see Beinart ordering the Democrats to be vewy vewy careful if they gain power. Wouldn't actually want them to do something liberal.

And the conversion of the Dixiecrat south to the Republican south was long overdue. In 1994, there were 53 Democratic house seats in districts that had voted for President Bush in 1992 -- a year when Bush got merely 37 percent of the vote. As Mark Schmitt has written, "Many of these districts had been voting reliably for Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and even Barry Goldwater while never quite shedding their allegiance to a local Democratic representative.

It's been ages since I've waddled through this, but Dave Leip's page is a good place to start to confirm what we all think we remember.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

The south had been largely democratic, with Dem congressmen and governors, and yet often voting GOP for many years. Gingrich and Rove didn't move the needle as much as merely taking credit for it.

Dem and GOP really mean nothing beyond the context of the year in question.

Someone mentioned Woodrow Wilson a minute ago... lucked into office thanks to Taft and Teddy.

Anyway, Leip's site is worth bookmarking. Tons of info in there.

And here's the one PJ O'Rourke used in one of his excellent Atlantic articles:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

Cheers.

...but George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold and conservatives loved him despite it.

Oh, how little you understand Conservatives!

They didn't like any of this. They also didn't like Bush's out-of-control spending.

Oh, how little you understand Conservatives!

They didn't like any of this. They also didn't like Bush's out-of-control spending.

Rank and file or pundits/philosophizers?

They didn't like any of this.

ElV, do you read Ezra's posts at all? He explicitly said that the base loved GW despite this. And they did, and they do. Something like 93% of Republicans voted for Bush in 2004, and he, to this day, has a 70% approval rating among Republicans.

As you yourself explained earlier, issues of spending, Medicare D, and NCLB are simply not that important to the base, compared to Bush's other right-wing credentials (why they're not furious with him for running his party into a ditch is beyond me, though-- they still support him).

Something like 93% of Republicans voted for Bush in 2004, and he, to this day, has a 70% approval rating among Republicans.

So, with Bush's approval rating of 30.4%, how does that even add up?

What Ezra said, and Right-Wing Troll #3 lamely echoed: 1994's Big Idea, the Contract With America, seemed to have precisely no resonance in that election for any but the prototypically enraged 30%-of-the-electorate GOP base. Finally voting for the same party for Rep and Senator that you had been electing since the Southern Strategy really took hold, that had resonance -- mostly among newly unemployed Dem staffers.

But on the off-chance the GOP minority in Congress things it can repeat the trick with an Illinois Project, more power to 'em. I'd be interested to see a nice, loud, drawn-out fight against, say, health care. Polling would suggest that the GOP does best the less voters actually know about the Republican platform or the party's policy preferences, but if they want to squawk, I'm all for it.

RWT#3: self-identified Rs are roughly one-third of likely voters. 70% of roughly one third is roughly one-fifth. The remaining W. approvers are mostly R leaners, I assume.

El-V: I don't feel like looking up the most recent numbers, but doing a quick Google of the system of tubes turns up Gallup's April 11, 2008 poll results. On that date, Bush had an overall 28% approval rating, with a 66% approval rating among Republicans, a 24% approval rating among independents, and a 6% approval rating among Democrats. Presumably those numbers haven't changed much.

I agree with your larger point, Ezra, but right now the Democrats are capitalizing on Republican discontent to elect Dems in conservative districts. These congressman could be ripe for the picking in a 2010 rollback.

Apparently Obama has been pressured to sit down tomorrow night with Bill O'Reilly, such is the panic in the Obama campaign. Obama insisted on tomorrow night or he wouldn't do it... tomorrow night because he fearing Fox News would allow McCain to crash the interview and demand Obama have more debates.

I, for one, am terrified of Obama being forced to debate McCain more often. Have you ever listened to Barack speak? He can barely put together a coherent sentence. As long as he keeps smiling and stops talking, we should be able to coast to November 4.

/better trolls plz

If you're talking about realignment in Congress, that's well under way.

Since 2006, there has been ONE Republican House member from New England. In this cycle, a dozen or more GOP seats in NY, NJ, VA, PA, OH, IL and WI are likely to fall to Democrats.

When the new Congress convenes, it's conceivable that Democratic dominance of House seats in major metro areas will extend well into the once-solidly Republican suburbs all over the country; and that GOP representation north of the Potomac and east of the Appalachians will be, at best, half what it was in 2004.

That looks like a realignment to me.

fuck you, peter beinart. The Republican's only chance electorally (slim as it is) is for someone like McCain to become president: foreign policy hawk, domestic reformer and conciliator. Beinart of course knows this, which makes his shilling for McCain at the expense of the progressive movement all the more appalling. With "friends" like these, who needs enemies?

Well I do not know about all of that but I could see the repubs fomenting an affirmative action rebellion if Obama wins. More that one staunch republican has told me that they will vote for Obama in hopes of ending the racial issue for once and all time.

George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold and conservatives loved him despite it

Well, I dunno about that. They may not have wanted to impeach or, or elect John Kerry, but most of those things didn't go over well with the base and, no doubt, impact his poll numbers today.

What prompted the Gingrich Revolution 1994 was that this was a right wing country that happened to elect a left-leaning president.

It didn't just happen. Perot acted as a spoiler, and Clinton ran a good campaign. He wasn't elitist or hostile to the folks in flyover country--aw, shucks, he loved those folks. There were a lot of reasons Clinton won, and (except for a billionaire 3rd party spoiler to get all sorts of media attention for ceaselessly attacking your opponent and being a kook), most of those could be repeated. And many of them are. Obama is running a very solid campaign.

I bet many on the Obama camp hope the distinction between their campaign, and the folks conducting constant attacks on the Palins, remains clear. He's running a classy campaign, even if those members of the press currently in the tank for him are not.

The 1994 "realignment" resulted from Clinton's tax hike (the true "3rd rail" of national politics). That got the wealthy to fund the right-wing noise machine and encouraged the congressional Republicans (including Mr. Maverick McCain) to vote as a unified block against every Clinton proposal. Remember, Dole voted against the healthcare bill that he had introduced !

Thornburg v. Gingles fell into Newt's lap.

Demographic shifts have lessened the impact, new districts don't get drawn until 2012 and the current court isn't likely to revisit the issue.

The 1994 "realignment" resulted from Clinton's tax hike (the true "3rd rail" of national politics). That got the wealthy to fund the right-wing noise machine and encouraged the congressional Republicans (including Mr. Maverick McCain) to vote as a unified block against every Clinton proposal.

Nah, I think that Ezra is closer to the truth about what happened then. Several Dixiecrat senators like Howell Heflin retired. The house had a bunch of scandals going. Jim Wright, the Speaker, had a bulk book sale (the Republicans were shocked, just shocked!), Dan Rostenkowski's Post Office scandal was unfolding, two of the Keating 5 Dems retired. None of that had anything to do with Clinton, he just took the blame for the realignment. He also got blamed for the mess Poppy Bush created in Somalia and dumped on Clinton on his way out the White House door. Bob Kerrey and his faction were still pissed at Uncle Bill for winning the primary (did you see the editorial from Kerrey about McCain in the LA Times on Monday? It'll make you barf.) and sticking a shiv in his back every chance they got, too.

That Clinton did as well as he did is a testament to his skill because he had a crappy, crappy set of conditions in which to work.

In what way did Clinton go for an unaffordable "Lexus" health care plan? Your article makes a couple of points about what went wrong, but they are along the lines of "he didn't consult Congress enough" and "his natural allies in the business community abandoned him."

The plan's lack of ambition --it's inability to promise anyone (except possibly small business owners and perhaps the uninsured) a significant improvement over the current system -- probably contributed as much as anything. It was far from from a Lexus plan-- it was more like being told you have to take transit, but don't worry the ride on bus system is really very good.