Republican supporter Chris Caldwell is very concerned that Republicans are in big trouble because voters will be moved by the latest Democratic attacks, even though they're mostly based on inuendo, hypocrisy, guilt-by-association, and accusations that some well-known Republicans participated in "unscrupulous" business practices ten years ago that almost everyone back then, including most Democrats, thought were a good idea.

Democratic supporter Josh Green, on the other hand, is scared that the Democrats are going to blow their chances of making huge gains in November because voters will be turned off by their attacks, which are mostly based on inuendo, hypocrisy, guilt-by-association, and accusations that some well-known Republicans participated in "unscrupulous" business practices ten years ago that almost everyone back then, including most Democrats, thought were a good idea.

Me? After Bush won, and long before 9/11, I predicted...

...that he would be a popular President who would keep his promises and bring new voters into the GOP fold. He was showing all of that to be true up to 9/10, and not near as much changed on 9/11 as some people think. The war has made Bush somewhat more popular among some who doubted his leadership abilities, true. But he already had approval ratings of about 57%, and was more popular than Bill Clinton had been at the same time in his Presidency, long before Islamofascist assholes took their war on freedom to the American mainland.

I also predicted back before 9/11 that, in 2002, Democrats would make moderate gains in the House, but probably wouldn't take it back, or if they did it would be by a very slim margin. I also predicted that they'd pick up 3-4 seats in the Senate. I still think that. I didn't say that they'd also pick up a few governorships and state legislatures in 2002, but I think they will.

I also think Democrats will be crowing loudest after November 2002 about picking up the governorship of Texas, and Phil Gramm's Senate seat. They will spend two years gloating about how this proves that "even Texas no longer likes Bush" and desperately hoping this will cause independent voters everywhere to decide Bush is a gibbering moron who's destroying the country.

On the other hand, I think Republican Bill Simon will probably surprise everyone and beat Davis in California.

Meanwhile, Bush will go down some and up some in the polls, but will by and large remain quite popular, and will probably cruise to re-election in 2004 with Reagan-like numbers. His party will also likely undo most Democratic gains that year. Democrats will then claim once again that it's because the "right-wing extremists" who "don't really represent" the views of most Americans scared and deceived the voters, or that "only the war" makes Republicans so popular. If they do so (and they probably will) they'll prove once again that they're nowhere near as smart as they think they are.

Here's a certain unpleasant truth for most hard-core partisans to swallow: neither party has a lock on most American voters--not women, not men, not the poor, not the middle class, and certainly not "the rich." That's especially hard for certain old-school Democrats, who seem to think it's still 1964 and that they have a natural right to own 2/3rds of the country's elected offices, and that Republicans have "fooled" people into voting for them with "wedge issues" and "emotion" instead of ideas--having failed to notice that Republican ideas have dominated American political discourse for more than a decade now.

It's almost as hard for certain Republicans to admit that their gains over the last generation aren't a rising tide that will continue forever. Good thing too; Republicans would probably do just as much damage if they became as fat, arrogant, and convinced of their own moral superiority as Democrats did. It took us 30 years to recover from Lyndon Johnson's massive domestic policy mistakes--the War On Poverty hurt America a lot more than the War in Vietnam--and I'd rather not go through a similar Republican-style onslaught, thank you. Neither, I think, would most voters.

The truth is that the country is closely divided on most of the big issues of the day. So many races are bitterly contested because of this disagreement over ideas. The only difference being that most of the new ideas have been coming from Republicans. That's what helped them come back from their days in the wilderness in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1980, 1994, and 2000 especially, we saw that Republicans had learned the power of new ideas. In 2000, Bush ran a surprisingly positive campaign, based almost entirely on ideas and optimism. Gore ran a campaign that was mostly negative and emotion-based--most of those emotions being fear, racial animosity, and envy. It's no wonder he blew the staggering lead that the wild successes of the Clinton era should have given him.

That Gore lost to a candidate who seemed a little immature, a little shallow, a little timorous to countless voters was a loud wake-up call to Democratic loyalists. Sadly, they seem not to have heard it. Instead they've indulged their desperate desire to rewrite history and tell each other their candidate's loss wasn't his fault, or theirs, and wasn't real. But maybe it's not sad; if they're that fucking stupid, they deserve what they get.

In the future, Democrats would do better to find some new, responsible ideas and get behind them instead of continuing to act like whiny little bitches whose natural right to power has been taken away by cheating Republicans. I'm not sure the Lilly White Millionaire Boy's Club that runs the Democratic National Committee today quite gets that, though. (By the way, do Democrats have any idea how moronic they look taking cheap shots at Bush for being a wealthy scion who's had an easy life? Given who Al Gore Jr. is, who Terry McAauliffe is, and what the average Democratic Senator and House member today is worth?)

In the last three congressional elections, on a nationwide level, very slightly more people voted for Republican candidates than Democratic candidates. But Democrats picked up seats in the House and Senate anyway. That should make them happy, but should also tell them they can't expect to keep gaining forever.

You'd also think it would make some of them stop whining about the fact that their candidate got 3/4ths of 1% more total votes in the 2000 Presidential election (basically by exploiting racial fear and animosity and playing up to elitists in the wealthiest areas of the country, by the way, and losing most of Middle America and most of the poorest regions of the country in the process). It would do them more good, I think, to finally just acknowledge that Presidential elections have been designed from day one to be more than a raw popularity contest, that the rules haven't changed in 200 years, and that every single post-election recount in Florida, even by very liberal rules, came to the same conclusion: Bush won by any legal standard that has ever been used in the United States. Their continued whining about it, and alleging that there was fraud, only makes Democratic partisans look even more pathetic. I contend it hurts their chances in 2002 and 2004 far more than it helps. It also wastes energy that they could be using to find a positive, responsible, idea-based agenda.

All their desperate sniffing for scandals and slimy inuendo will probably hurt Republicans. But it will hurt Democrats more. After the Iran/Contra witch hunts, and a Whitewater investigation that cost almost as much and went on almost as long, I suspect the country's losing patience.

Here's a clue, my Democratic pals: Preaching to the choir is not how you win elections. If you stop acting like you "truly" represent "the real people" and start engaging on ideas and coming up with some genuinely creative proposals, you and the country will likely benefit. When you've lost, it hasn't been because Republicans "tricked" an easily-distracted electorate, or because they cheated. When you lost, it was mostly because you haven't had a new idea since Clinton won in 1992, and your old ideas aren't selling all that well to anyone but you and your friends who only vote Democratic anyway.

No matter what happens, Democrats can no longer dominate the country like they once did. That's because, when Democrats worked with Republicans to pass civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, segregationist Southerners lost their love-affair with Democrats, and stopped passing the "Yellow Dog Democrat" mentality on to their children. Now it's a generation later, and the segregationists are mostly dead. The South has became about 1/3rd Democratic, 1/3rd Republican, and 1/3rd Independent, just like the rest of the nation. The country's better off because of it, but it also means no party will ever have a true lock on national politics for very long.

The party that dominates the ideas over the next generation is the one that's got the best shot at holding most of the power, and right now that mostly looks like Republicans. Democrats may balance that if they start getting some new ideas of their own again, or taking some away from the Republicans. But no matter what, neither party's going to have complete dominance any time soon.

This does, sadly, mean that politics will be somewhat more divisive, and politicians will be somewhat more cowardly over certain issues. But ideas will move forward, and that's what really matters.

I'd like to see Democrats start embracing new ideas again. My only question is: are they capable of it?