POSTMORTEMS….I’m a little blogged out at the moment, but there are a couple of good post-election comments over at Showdown ’06. First, Zack Roth talks about Rahm Emanuel and the blogosphere:
Beyond the rightness or wrongness of Emanuel’s strategy, the larger point is that there’s no need to set up the netroots and the Democratic establishment in opposition to each other. Many of the most successful Democratic candidates ? Tester and Webb, for example ? had strong backing both from the blogosphere and the party apparatus. And with a victory this big, surely there’s enough credit to go around.
This is something we should all stitch on our foreheads. Yesterday’s results were a tribute to Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and a tribute to Emanuel’s fundraising ability and general energy level. I note that Dean said nice things about Emanuel last night, and I hope Emanuel returns the favor. Bickering is bad enough when you lose, but it’s even worse when you win.
Elsewhere, Christina Larson documents the pain of the Club for Growth’s Pat Toomey. It seems the Club took a poll before the election and they didn’t like the results:
Two-thirds agreed with the notion that the GOP used to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government but was not today. By an 11-point margin, likely voters expressed greater confidence in Democrats to handle select fiscal matters responsibly. ?We have lost our brand,? Toomey bemoaned.
Get real, guys. The Club for Growth and its ilk have never cared a tenth as much about lower spending as they have about lower taxes. They know perfectly well that if a Republican administration actually cut spending to match its tax cuts it would get voted out of office for the next century.
And they’ve never cared. They just want low taxes (the easy part of fiscal responsibility) without the spending cuts (the part that gets you voted out of office). It’s similar to the GOP’s Iraq strategy: they want the glory of winning a war, but without the pain of making the hard choices it would take to actually do so.
At the moment, the Republican Party is the Party of Magic. That’s the brand they need to fix.
