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As the Obama juggernaut looms like a tsunami on the horizon, we are witnessing nothing less than the final, well-deserved, and overdue destruction of the Republican Party in its current form.

Not only is Obama ahead by double digits in the polls, he is strongly ahead in ridiculously red states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia–and may have brought the polls to a draw in ultra-conservative states like North Dakota and Montana.

His Congressional coattails are a mile long. Democrats are poised to possibly take a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, and dire predictions for the House are that forty or more Republicans are about to be washed away.

McCain’s disastrously erratic campaign is now springing more leaks than a worm-eaten boat, with a long New York Times Magazine article detailing internal blow by blow accounts of how McCain’s campaign has careened from one campaign message to the next, unable to gain traction against Obama.

McCain, cracking under the pressure, let loose a barrage against the Bush administration that has been weighing him down like a millstone. Said the Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” [were among the issues cited by McCain].

It’s too little, too late. He needs to, and cannot, explain where he was and what he did while Bush and the GOP Congress unleashed these depradations on America. He was, under his own admission, voting for Bush’s wishes 90% of the time.

Bushites did not take McCain’s words lying down. A top Republican strategist issued a searing response:

“Lashing out at past Republican Congresses, … echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.

“The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish. I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races.”

How did the GOP get to this point, poised to lose all of the power it accumulated over the course of a generation? In my view, primarily because of the imposition of ideology over intellectualism.

E. J. Dionne perfectly captures how ideology and pandering took over the Republican Party:

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

The GOP became very good at convincing voters that their pocketbooks didn’t matter as much as God, guns, and gays. It degenerated from having thoughtful ideas about individual responsibility, limiting government intervention into citizens’ private lives, and a strong national defense–to a party dominated by bigots and ideologues hell bent on keeping power at any cost. Why come up with and sell good ideas when they could win elections by banning gay marriage, ending affirmative action under the guise of “quotas,” overturning Roe v. Wade, and the like?

Again and again, many Americans turned away from the cool intellectualism of Democrats like Dukakis and Kerry in favor of “sunny” and “folksy” actors who proudly proclaimed themselves to be the anti-intellectual, anti-elite Everymen. Even today, Sarah Palin pumps up her crowds by proclaiming herself to be proud to be a redneck.

The death of intellectualism in the GOP became a slippery slope, culminating in the twin debaucheries of slaughtering the economy on the altar of unfettered regulation on the one hand, and the evisceration of our Constitution and most profound ideas about human rights and civil liberties on the other.

People are finally waking up and realizing that rednecks and actors might make you feel good, but they have run our country into the ground. As the markets continue to plunge seemingly without end, we are remembering that there is a real value to ideas and the thoughtful men and women behind them.

In Obama, people see a mature, well-read, calm, intellectual opposed to McCain’s anger, inconsistency, and “shoot from the hip” gambler’s mentality. They realize that the gravity of the times needs a man of ideas, not a volcanically-tempered cowboy. And hopefully they have come to understand the connection between Republican ideology and the economic/cultural precipice upon which we now find ourselves.

Out of ideas and like rats abandoning ship, Republicans are now every man to himself. Like the last violinist on the Titanic, Charles Krauthammer eulogizes his movement as it faces the coming wave:

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

Well said, Charles. Too bad your party has not had the same integrity to risk losing elections over ideas, choosing instead to shred the Constitution, our economy, and our nation.

One Trillion Dollars. That’s how much the government’s plan to fix the financial crisis is going to cost.

One Trillion Dollars. An unimaginably large sum of money very roughly equivalent to the real cost of the Iraq war. One that is not news, as I said recently. I’m glad the government is being up front about the cost, but it doesn’t have a choice. Actually I think $1 trillion is understating the case, as I think that’s the cost for Fannie and Freddie alone.

Here’s what we could have bought for One Trillion Dollars (and could have bought twice, if you include the Iraq War):

–Doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American with heart disease or diabetes, and a global immunization campaign for children–combined, for two decades.

–Giving every man, woman and child in America $3400, or sending $150 to every single person on the planet.

–Five years’ worth of investment towards complete energy independence, along with associated new job creation and other benefits.

–Taking huge steps towards solving the impending insolvency of social security.

–Funding two hundred aircraft super-carriers for the US Navy.

–Securing loose nukes and fissile materials, and securing our ports, so as to prevent terrorists from ever exploding a nuclear weapon in an American city (cost: merely $315 billion over 10 years.)

–Funding the equivalent of 170 National Science Foundations and 200 National Cancer Institutes for one year. Alternatively, funding 28 Departments of Homeland Security and all the work they do securing the nation, for a year.

–Benedictine nun Joan Chittister’s view:

“you could buy a $100,000 house for every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Iowa and you could put a $10,000 car in the garage of every one of those homes. Then there would be enough money left to build 250 $10 million libraries and 250 $10 million hospitals for every city in those states. And after that, there would still be enough money left over to put in the bank and, from the interest alone, pay 10,000 nurses and 10,000 teachers and still give a $5,000 bonus to ever family in those five states. That’s what one trillion dollars will buy in this country today.”

One Trillion Dollars: the price for a failed conservative Republican ideology that pushed the phony ideas that markets are 100% efficient, that they function best completely unfettered by regulation, that government was nothing but a hindrance. Scads of laws, rules and regulations have been modified or repealed in pursuit of this ideology over the last decade.

I’ve never been a fan of excessive regulation, preferring the market to usually sort things out for itself. But in cases where failing to tell the truth, failing to disclose all facts, or failing to do something materially harms the consumer’s health or pocketbook then the government has a duty to step in and enforce truth and honest dealing. The market, left unfettered in these situations, will simply reward selfishness and people lying to one another.

This entire debacle happened in the absence of sensible regulation because of a failure of all parties to tell the truth. Everyone lied: banks lied to customers about their creditworthiness; customers lied to banks about their income and ability to support payments; banks lied to mortgage-buying financial institutions about the quality of what they were selling; financial institutions lied to the SEC and to investors by hiding financial toxic waste through accounting chicanery that allowed them to both mislead and operate their businesses with grossly undercapitalized debt.

One Trillion Dollars is the price the rest of us will now pay for all this lying, enabled by by the rabid and irrational deconstruction of common-sense “tell the truth” regulation pushed primarily by Republicans and George Bush.

One Trillion Dollars that will never be used to capitalize growth, or create new industries, or finance research for medical cures–those benefits will now be left to other countries.

One trillion dollars (and another trillion for Iraq): the price of Empire run amok. The bill is coming due.

Think about that, and about who is responsible, before voting in November.

“For Republicans to consistently refuse to engage in front of an African American or Latino audience is an enormous error. I hope they will reverse their decision and change their schedules. I see no excuse — this thing has been planned for months, these candidates have known about it for months. It’s just fundamentally wrong. Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That’s baloney.”

–Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, commenting on the leading GOP presidential candidates declining to appear at an upcoming minority forum, citing scheduling conflicts.

Bonus quote:

“What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? If we’re going to be competitive with people of color, we’ve got to ask them for their vote.”

–Former GOP VP candidate Jack Kemp.

Meet at the country club…well yea, isn’t that what Republicans typically do?

A new Gallup Organization report demonstrates that the Republican brand name has been severely damaged as a result of Iraq and scandals over the last six years.

For 2001 through 2005, the party identification balance in Gallup polling — before independents are asked which way they lean — remained within 2 points of each other.

In 2001, Democrats had an edge of eight-tenths of a percent; in 2002 the GOP was up by nine-tenths of a percent, then in 2003, Republicans were 1.9 points ahead.

That GOP lead shrank to six-tenths of a point in 2004, then Democrats pulled within the error margin, with just four-tenths of a point separating the parties.

But for 2006, Democrats pulled away, leading Republicans by 3.9 points, with 34.3 percent identifying themselves as Democrats, 30.4 percent as Republicans and 33.9 percent as independents.

This represents a swing of 5.8 points in just three years, from a GOP lead of 1.9 points to a deficit of 3.9 points.

Much more startling, though, was about the identification of “leaners”–people who categorize themselves as independents but who tend to “lean” or “identify with” one party or the other and who in fact often end up voting for that party.

In this category of leaners, Democrats had an advantage of 1.3 points in 2001. The parties were within the margin of error in 2002, when four-tenths of a point separated them and in 2003, when there was just a one-tenth of a point difference.

In 2004, Democrats had a 2.7 point advantage, and it grew to 4.4 points in 2005.

But in 2006, this category exploded to a 10.2-point advantage for Democrats: 50.4 percent for Democrats, 40.2 percent for Republicans. The remaining 9.4 percent did not lean toward either party.

This 10.2-point advantage is the biggest lead either party has had since Gallup began tracking the leaners in 1991.

It should come as no surprise that fewer and fewer people want to be associated in any way with the party that brought us the Iraq disaster and Mark Foley. Time will tell, but I wonder whether the mid 2000’s will end up being a turning point in American politics. Just like the early 80’s under Reagan brought an end to decades of liberal thinking and progressive government, 2006 may be the time that brought the brand of conservatism espoused by the GOP to an end as a viable governing philosophy. Or maybe not..it depends on how well Democrats handle their new majorities.

Sometimes the GOP itself says it best. My favorite Republican shill Bob Novak:

As they adjust to the 2006 election returns, Republicans recognize that this was no isolated bump in the road. The loss of about 320 state legislative seats across the country to the Democrats classifies last year’s election as a midrange electoral disaster.

The internal Republican debate concerns how much Iraq contributed to this outcome. The White House and Republican members of Congress who voted for intervention in Iraq contend that many issues led to their defeat: incompetent management of the Hurricane Katrina crisis, widespread cases of corruption and abandonment of spending restraint. But Republicans at the grass roots tell me that Iraq was the central problem and must be erased as an issue.

…
One nationally prominent Republican pollster reported confidentially on Capitol Hill after the president’s speech that if at the end of the year U.S. troops are still in Iraq and U.S. blood is still being spilled there, the GOP disaster in 2008 will eclipse 2006. Thus, many Republican members of Congress have tied their hopes to Bush’s pledge that Iraqi forces will take over local security by September.

But Republican opposition has intensified rather than diminished since the president’s speech. What was whispered privately is now declared publicly. At last week’s hearing, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s second-ranking Republican — Chuck Hagel — called Bush’s new strategy “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”

You can read his complete diatribe here.

The snipping sounds of the political scissors being applied to Bush’s testicles are getting louder. Wisely deciding to pick his battles more carefully in the wake of the Congressional trouncing the GOP received last month, Bush has decreed that his wireless surveillance program will now be submitted to the jurisdiction of the FISA court for review, instead of petulantly insisting he can order such illegal activities under the authority of the Constitution’s Article II.

The Neocon Right is pissed:

Is there no principle subject to negotiation? Is there no course subject to reversal? For the Bush administration to argue for years that this program, as operated, was critical to our national security and fell within the president’s Constitutional authority, to then turnaround and surrender presidential authority this way is disgraceful. The administration is repudiating all the arguments it has made in testimony, legal briefs, and public statements. This goes to the heart of the White House’s credibility. How can it cast away such a fundamental position of principle and law like this? –Mark Levin, National Review

Bush is submitting because he has no choice. He has no political capital left and cannot continue to oppose the American people on so many issues. It is clear to all (except to the National Review) that this warrantless surveillance program was illegal, it violated the 4th Amendment, and that submitting a warrantless wiretap for FISA emergency review did nothing to dimish the president’s powers to protect the country against terrorism. It was a fight he simply could not win.

I love California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t care if he’s a Republican. Yes it’s true his record on some liberal issues is less than stellar, such as on gay rights/marriage, though he’s still better on those than most Republicans. But on the issue of the environment, which I consider to be the single most important issue of our time, there is no politician of either party that even comes close to Arnold’s stewardship.

Defying Bush and many Republicans, he has embraced the global warming crisis and has used California’s clout as the world’s sixth largest economy to impose tough restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. The rest of the country benefits from this–if carmakers, for example, are forced to build more fuel-efficient vehicles for California they are better off doing it for the whole country rather than keeping different sets of standards by state. This becomes even more true as more and more states follow California’s brave lead on this issue.

He has vowed to restore California’s emission levels to 1990 levels by the year 2020, and bypassed Bush entirely by meeting with Tony Blair recently to get California to participate in the same carbon “cap and trade” program being used in Europe.

He is determined to inject the global warming debate into the 2008 presidential election, even though he’s not eligible to run himself because he wasn’t born in America:

“There is a whole new movement because of the change of people sent to Washington [referring to Democrats]. “We want to put the spotlight on this issue in America. It has to become a debate in the presidential election. It has to become an issue.”

He is being so influential in Republican circles on the issue that GOP contenders for president are calling him to consult about the issue.

He is also wise enough to see how leadership on the environment can serve to repair America’s image in the world that has been so badly tattered by Iraq:

“The war has dragged us down. There’s no reason to get political, that’s just the way it is. But you can balance it by being a great leader in the environment. The more America shows leadership in that area, the more we will be loved for that as much as they love us for our hamburgers and for our jeans and for our movies and for our music.”

I hope he is successful in what he’s seeking to do–and if I were a Californian he’d be the first Republican I ever voted for. It just goes to show that good common-sense politics can span both parties–even if it’s unfortunately rare.

Besides, the tech geek and transhumanist in me is a huge fan of his “Terminator” movies.

Given that the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report were not to his liking, Bush has now sought out the counsel of academics and retired generals who have predictably advised him not to draw down troops from Iraq and to not reach out to Iraq’s neighbors. They also advised him to increase the military’s budget without explaining where the extra money would come from.

The advice given was long on the unrealistic ideals of creating a stable democracy and “defeating extremism”, while short on in depth research into the nitty gritty consequences of keeping our troops in harm’s way.

This is vintage Bush–seeking to discard any and all evidence/advice except any that bolsters his personal views. Does that sound familiar? It should–the discarding of intelligence showing no WMD’s in Iraq was what led to the confrontation in the first place. He just never learns..and his ignorance comes at the expense of the American people, the taxes they pay, and the loss of their prestige around the world.

The people spoke forcefully in November that they want a change in Iraq and they want it now. Bush refusal to listen is at his and his party’s peril, making them look exactly as deluded and out of touch as they actually are.

As Republicans retreat like beaten curs in the face of their implosion last night, to lick their wounds and fret about a future under Nancy Pelosi, they would do well to reflect on what brought them to such a sorry juncture.

The Party of Lincoln was supposed to be one of limited government, fiscal prudence and a balanced budget, a belief in the power of the markets, transparent governance, and a strong and sensible foreign policy. These principles were embodied in the Republicans’ Contract with America that helped usher them into power for twelve years. Notably absent from the Contract was any mention of divisive social issues like abortion or gay rights.

Shortly after their ascension to power, and increasingly so after Bush II came into office, Republicans threw the Contract away and most of their core principles along with it, adopting instead a scorched-earth policy based on delusions of having secured a permanent majority:

• Instead of focusing on dollars and cents, they resorted to socially divisive issues like gay marriage and Terry Schiavo to rally their base while leaving the rest of America cold.
• Their “win at all costs” mentality caused them to impeach a popular sitting president over a sexual indiscretion, severely poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and nearly eliminating the possibility of bipartisanship on any issues ever since.
• After 9/11, they squandered not just the goodwill of the world in the aftermath of the attack but also the nation’s prestige and ability to lead or pressure other nations through their pig-headed and misguided determination to invade Iraq without a plan or a clear set of goals.
• They became a rubber-stamp for a President with total disregard for basic constitutional rights.
• They engaged in fear-mongering tactics to win elections, raising the specter of terrorists on every street corner just waiting to pounce on Americans should Democrats ever come to power.
• Instead of nurturing the federal surplus handed to them after the Clinton years, they wasted it all and turned the surplus into humongous deficits, spending like drunken sailors while Bush failed to use his veto pen on anything except a stem cell research bill.
• They insisted on greatly worsening the federal budget by handing out tax cuts to those who needed them the least.
• They threw transparency in government out the window, letting their votes be bought by lobbyists and operations such as the “K Street Project.”

Many of the ideas of the Revolution itself were really good. What failed was Republicans’ ability to execute on them because of their self-entitled sense of having obtained permanent hegemony and the concomitant feeling that they no longer needed to be brought to account for their actions. It became sufficient for them to keep rallying their base, keep pushing wedge issues on the public, keep painting their Democratic opponents as weak on terrorism and wanting to coddle terrorists.

The Republican Revolution came to power because of an idea. It ended when the only idea left was how to keep power. As Democrats return to enjoy their own time in the sun, they would do well not to forget that lesson.

It’s one thing to lob bombs from the safety of minority status, it is quite another to lead. With Democrats sweeping the Republicans out of the House for the first time in 12 years, and probably picking up the Senate pending recounts in Montana and Virginia, what they just accomplished was the easy part. Now comes the hard part of leading the country out of the sorry morass in which it finds itself.

Let’s neither under- nor over-estimate the magnitude and meaning of Democratic victory last night.

The leader of the “under-estimate” crowd is the idiotic and disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who with a straight face told MSNBC last night that a Democratic victory in the House would make them nothing more than a “lame-duck majority;” whatever that means, it is infinitely better than being a minority which is what hopefully faces his party for the foreseeable future. I have also seen lots of bloggers, liberal ones especially, downplay the meaning of the election as having been limited to just a few corrupt officials, say it’s a “small step forward,” it wasn’t a landslide, and so on.

From whence comes this pessimism? Have we been out of power so long we are still too afraid to relish being in the majority, fearing that we might wake up any minute and find out it was just a dream?

When the Republicans ushered in their so-called Republican Revolution in 1994 with guns blazing, by what margin did they hold the House? The GOP led Democrats by 230 to 204, a margin that shrank in the intervening years and one that was won mostly by victories in the conservative South. How about now? Democrats picked up at least 27 seats last night without losing a single one (unheard of in modern memory even in 1994), many of them in the Northeast but also in all other areas of the country. That put the count at around 228 Democratic, 195 GOP, and 12 still undecided as of this morning. Pretty close to 1994 in reverse, huh? With that 230 to 204 margin the GOP, for better or for mostly worse, imposed a long period of Republican hegemony in Washington that didn’t end until last night. If that number was good enough for them, it’s good enough for Democrats.

On the other hand, let’s not over-state the case either. Democrats won more for being the anti-Bush than for the strength of their own vision, and nobody is claiming a revolution. I don’t see that as a bad thing. An old saw in politics is that when your enemy is self-destructing, you stand back and let it happen. Republicans were doing such a good job of imploding, and voters seemed so eager for a change, that there was no reason for Democrats to stick their necks out by proposing plans and visions that would subject them to hostile fire. Keeping mum on a specific agenda was therefore good politics.

Now the election is over, the Elephant is dead, and it’s time for Democrats to grapple with the reins of power. I do not envy them the huge mess they have been left with to fix: Iraq. North Korea. Iran. Global warming and accelerating environmental degradation. Corruption. An economy teetering on the edge of a nasty recession or worse caused by a flattening housing market, loss of confidence in the dollar, and massive federal debt and trade deficits. Oil addiction to hostile countries. Stagnant wages. Soaring healthcare costs. The imminent retirement of the baby boomers and the accompanying burdens on federal entitlement programs.

The problems are monumental, and the nation is looking to Democrats to start providing some answers. If they succeed, they will likely forge an enduring majority. If they do not, they will either return to minority status or exchange power every so often with Republicans. In a way the deck is stacked against them, since many of the problems that were created by Republicans will see their full fallout and consequences under Democrats’ watch, and they therefore stand to be unfairly punished in the future. But that’s the nature of politics, and Democrats will either cope or not.

As they struggle for answers, the more liberal leadership should not forget that they were brought to power on the backs of moderates and conservatives who wrested districts away from Republicans. The center-left forms the backbone of the new Democratic resurgence. These people, the Blue Dog Democrats and others like them, will have to answer to their constituencies again in the not-too-distant future, and you can bet these folks will push hard for the kind of centrist agenda that the DLC and Rahm Emmanuel espouse. This alignment towards the center is also good for the party because our gain of moderates (truly the heart of America) is Republicans’ losses of same, making them more than ever a minority party of extremists on the Right.

Democrats are off to a good start, promising in their first 100 hours to do things like raise the minimum wage and force pharmaceutical companies to compete and lower prices for the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They will not have much time to celebrate and measure the drapes before being called to account for their vision on how to fix the mess in Iraq.

They better be ready.