Aftermath

And so in what has become a post-election ritual, we sit and wait and wonder. If you are like me (God help you) your mouse grows accustomed to clicking the refresh button on multiple websites. All eyes are on Virginia (Montana just went into the confirmed column, apparently) as both sides line up the lawyers and the advocates and the talking heads. Let the games begin, gentlemen start your engines, let's get ready to rumble and all that.

So how big a night was it for the Democrats? From a literalist standpoint, until all of the votes are counted we still do not know. The Democrats won the House overwhelmingly, whatever the final results read, in a landslide transformation that certainly rivals anything in the post-New Deal era in terms of significance. As is the nature with Senate races, in which only a third of the hundred seats are up for election in any given cycle, any Democratic gains were destined to be more moderate. The conventional wisdom going in was that the Democrats might make it close but would have to run a table of tight races to take over the upper chamber. There was a lot of talk about a Republican Firewall consisting of Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, and Montana, but it appears that the wall broke. Democrats took Missouri, seem to have won Montana, and lost Tennessee (thanks largely to good old fashioned race baiting -- you stay classy, Southern Republicans; Harold Ford still gave one of the great concession speeches of our era and he will be back). It looks as if when the dust clears the Democrats will take Virginia. If that occurs, we will be looking at a bare Democratic majority once the two Independent winners, Joe Lieberman (anyone want to place odds how long it will be before he is back solidly in the Democratic fold?) and iconoclast and (pseudo?)Socialist Bernie Sanders are included in the Democratic caucus. But it will be a majority nonetheless, with all of the perquisites -- committee chairmanships, the power to investigate and subpoena, control of the judicial nominee steering process, etc. -- that entails.

Some might say that for a supposed sea change, the Democrats only took a razor-thin lead in the Senate, but that is to misunderstand the very nature of Senate elections. With only 33 seats up for grabs, the Democrats needed massive a shift to come close, and they got it -- they held every one of their seats (the majority that were contested) and may have grabbed six GOP seats. Arguing that the Democratic majority is slim and thus meaningless might allow GOP advocates to sleep a little easier. It will not mar the reality of what has taken place.

One of the most interesting tectonic shifts to have culminated yesterday came in New Hampshire where not only did the incumbent Republican House members discover they would have a lot of time and fewer DC commutes on their hands, but for the first time in more than a century the New Hampshire House and Senate went to the Democrats, and the Governorship is in the party's hands. My home state, always believed to be more conservative than it is, certainly by Bush-era definitions of conservatism, has both shown its iconoclastic nature, indicates the depth to which the Republican Party has sunk in the northeast, and suddenly has made itself very relevant for the Democratic primaries for 2008, the race for which kicked off, oh, last night at about midnight. (It also is worth noting that Massachusetts made history as well by electing the state's first black governor and only the nation's second, and by an overwhelming margin of 20 points.) On the whole, in fact, a hidden but equally important story that emerges from yesterday's news is the fact that Democrats are ascendant at the state level in the majority of the country.

Given the overwhelming success of the Democrats nationwide (with the South an increasingly isolated outlier for the most part) I think a word of praise for Howard Dean's 50-state strategy is in order. Maligned early in the year for wasting money on states that some strategists believed were lost causes, Dean stuck to his guns, took a national approach, and lo and behold, a slim victory in traditional GOP stronghold Montana might help catapult the Democrats to majority status in the legislative branch. For a lot of people Dean's screaming rictus will forever be frozen in amber but the reality is that for all of the skepticism about Dean (and I have been as up-front about that skepticism as anyone) any fair assessment of the election will have to give Howard Dean a great deal of credit, something that would have seemed laughable just two years ago.

Meanwhile, how can we not take pleasure in the fact that recount fever has suddenly struck the Republican Party? So now it's a good idea to make sure all of the votes are counted. Gotcha. I'm curious as to what, if anything, might have changed. My advice to Democrats? Remain consistent from 2000: It is important that we get the right result, that all votes be counted, that the most important thing is the integrity of the democratic system. Not only is this the right approach, but at that point the Democrats will have won the debate. It was only a matter of time before this happened. Why not rejoice in the rampant self-serving hypocrisy of the Republicans? It appears that Webb will go into any recount with a lead numbering in the thousands, a tally that will almost assuredly hold up unless there are serious irregularities, which we should want to have straightened out no matter what it does to the results. Democrats can confirm victory, watch Republicans trip all over themselves, and maybe learn a few things about the lengths to which they might go in an era of electronic voting. It could be a win-win situation.

I'll go into the historical analogues and the implications for Democrats at a later date, but there is one more rich anecdote that I think is telling. In the last week John Kerry was baselessly accused of disrespecting the troops even though his prepared remarks clearly indicate that he intended to make a (admittedly unfunny) joke at the expense of the president. The GOP and their chattering class minions of course ran with that patent falsehood knowing its falsity because there were points to be scored. Kerry did not demean the troops. So I hope that President Bush today receives the same amount of attention with the same level of opprobrium after uttering the following at his press conference this afternoon:

I thought when all was said and done that the people would understand the importance of taxes, and the importance of security.

So let me get this straight: Millions of Americans just don't get it because they exercised their will through the democratic process. We are all just too dumb, I guess. I look forward to the outrage from the same folks who worked themselves up into a lather over Kerry's misrepresented remarks.