This morning when I saw the Times' front-page tease for Nate Silver's latest political cryptology -- "Don't Call It a Comeback?" -- I assumed that Silver was referencing the GOP's rather excellent chances, at least in the House, of achieving the status quo ante; that is, that what seems like 2010's roaring Republican comeback is actually just the rubble's resettling, to pre-2006 days.
Instead, Silver's point (although I've no doubt he agrees with the above) was that at this late stage of any campaign season, "rumors of a candidate’s demise -- or comeback -- may be greatly exaggerated, given how little time there remains to make up even fairly small polling deficits."
Point taken. The other, anticipated point, however, awaited only my next click: Politico's main and serendipitous headline, "The new political map: Welcome to 2004." There, in somewhat more formal language, Jonathan Martin and Alex Isenstadt improved on my rubble:
Based on the state of the political map two weeks out from the election, the famed red vs. blue model that followed the 2004 presidential race appears to be returning to shape.... Even if Democrats are able to prevent a total wipeout, it’s likely that this year’s election will mark a return to the familiar political universe that characterized the decade before 2006 when the GOP controlled swaths of politically conservative and moderate parts of the country.
In other words, Democrats' exploratory outposts of 2006 and 2008 simply could not hold, and what they're now experiencing isn't so much an invasion as a revanchist maneuver. As long as Democrats had George W. Bush in office to singularly demonstrate the horrors of contemporary GOP management, they were safe in unsafe districts at almost any speed. But to voters in center-right districts, the Bush era and its attendent atrocities against sound governance are as good as ancient history.
This is well known. What is commonly forgotten or haughtily dismissed by Democrats' rather narrow progressivist base, however, is that progressive Congressional Democrats are hardly ever caught in the electoral crossfire; they represent relatively safe progressive districts -- which, naturally, is why they got themselves elected in the first place -- where Republican candidates possess little chance of success. When the party, then, as the governing majority, moves to the left, it is incumbent Democratic moderates from swing districts who pay for any backlash.
What has always astounded me, though, is that movement progressives always celebrate incumbent progressive victories in purifying, weeding-out elections as proof that the progressive message holds the key to overall victory. This, it scarcely needs to be added, is a precise and destructive misreading of virtually every ideological signal that swing-district voters are emitting.
Now, some progressive readers are bound to conclude from this that mine is an argument against progressive goals, which would be but another misreading. It is, rather, merely a notation of uncomfortable political truths and realities -- the very ones our progressive president, in the formulation of policymaking, has had to contend with -- which movement progressives have an insufferable habit of ignoring.