Just as "New Labour" (which surely can't be "new" after ten-plus stultifying years and one really bad war programme) appears to be circling the drain--see Cherie Blair's unbelievably bitchy memoirs and getting beaten by a Boris (in Britain!)--it seems that the Republicans might finally have screwed the golden pooch, aka the land of cotton, Dixie, the Solid South.
Those who know me personally join my global readership in understanding that I've been an Obama guy since before he announced for POTUS--any black man (half-black, quarter-black, one-drop-of-blood black, doesn't matter) who can blast through Chicago's Northwest Side wards against several white opponents is worth keeping an eye on. He'll prevail over Hillary, who seems not to have gotten several dozen memos, and as to McCain... well, have you actually seen McCain speak formally? Can you imagine what several months of prolonged exposure to that will do to the electorate?
But the President thing is always much less important than its coverage always makes it seem; the real news is down Pennsylvania Avenue, in that big building with the dome. After blowing former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's seat in Illinois, the Republicans have now lost two Southern special elections, one in the Louisiana 6th and the other in the Mississippi 1st. For those who may not know, House districts have long been drawn with one goal in mind: incumbent protection. And it works (somewhere around 325 to 350, at a minimum, of the 435 Congressmen have no chance of losing every other November).
On top of that, about twenty years ago, just as Morning in America was heading toward the lunch hour and the always-welcome afternoon nap, the Republicans came up with the evil genius of majority-minority districts. The premise was simple: a smallish percentage of a given state's districts would be drawn so as to be packed with dead-cert Democratic voters, often minorities, which meant that the rest of that state's districts would be more Republican-leaning. And how did the Grand Old Partiers wrap up this Pyrrhic present? By emphasizing that the House of Representatives would see a marked increase in the number of minority members, which--sho' 'nuff--it did (and does). The Democratic big brains of the day were between the Scylla and Charybdis of losing power and racial insensitivity, so they put up minimal and flaccid resistance, and ended up losing AND being racially insensitive. This was the kind of thing that was either a cause or an effect (or both) of the Democratic Leadership Council's rise to prominence, which brought us Bubba and now Hillary, whom Barack will.... sorry, I digress. I guess I`ve got an official mancrush.
Anyway, these goofy districts can look like this:
What looks like it might be a TVA-created waterway is actually Mel Watt's district, designed more or less to pack in as many black North Carolinians as possible. The pictured district is actually an improvement--the original version went all the way to the Virginia border and was for several dozen miles no wider than an Interstate. You replicate this kind of bullshit nationwide, and you've got yourself a recipe to win the House, which operates on a strict 50%-plus-one rule, gives a rat's ass about seniority, and originates all money bills. The Commander-in-Chief can finger-wag and bully-pulpit until he's blue in the face (or wherever Clinton got blue), and the Senate can collegially do nothing for weeks on end in order of tenure, but the House... baby, that's golden.
All of this is, of course, predicated on not going out of your way to poke your base in the, um, base. In the case of the Republicans, there is widespread disenchantment among the baby-loving evangelicals, who cannot forgive the Harriet Miers Supreme Court business, even though it was almost certainly a stalking horse. There is real hesitation in that crowd about direct involvement with electoral politics, and the travails of Republican legislators Mark Foley (too pagey), David Vitter (too whorey), and Vito Fossella (two families!) hardly helped. The "fiscal conservatives" are exasperated as well--Bush43 (or "Smirky" as a friend of mine dubbed him) spends money even more intemperately than Reagan did, the dollar is flat on its greenback, oil costs a fortune, the number of homeless people is rivaled only by the number of peopleless homes, etc. I am not aware that the gun crowd has any real beefs in recent years; I mean, Cheney even shot somebody, which a veep hadn't done in over 200 years! The strong-on-defense sector, meanwhile, is torn: nothing makes them happier than slapping a "Support Our Troops" sticker on their SUVs, but a decent number really object to the Iraqi adventure and every mother-lovin' one of them is deeply pissed about the way veterans are treated, from the Walter Reed nightmares to the dithering over the New G.I. Bill.
It is not especially likely that legions of these folks will rush to vote for the nearest Democrat, though both Heath Shuler and Don Cazayoux got themselves elected from highly-conservative Southern districts. What is so likely as to be inevitable is that many of them won't donate, organize, volunteer, register voters, etc. What is so likely as to be inevitable is that the NRCC will be obliged to spend good money to protect "safe" districts that have become "competitive." What is so likely as to be inevitable is that nobody in either party or the media has any empirically-supported idea what having a black Presidential candidate will do for turnout, especially in the South, and on both sides of the racial divide.
Right now, there are 236 Democrats and 199 Republicans in the House, a decent 54-46% lead for the donkeys. With all of the factors noted above, a pickup of 25 seats in 2008 is not at all unlikely, with about half of those coming in the South. That won't come close to a veto override, but it does reach the magic 60% threshold. Why magic, you ask? Stay tuned...
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