'Wow...GOP is now DOA'....

by David Grand
November 22, 2006

That's how Jay Leno viewed the 2006 elections, as did many  jubilant Democrats who are still reveling (to use Bush's term) over their "thumping" of Republicans nationwide.  However, it's far too early for the funeral dirge to be sung or for the flag flown over the Capitol Building to be lowered to half mast.

As they say, what goes around comes around. And no one knows that better than the Democratic party, who suffered an even worst shellacking in the 1994 midterm election, with Republicans gaining control of Congress for the first time since 1946. But as they were able to stage a comeback after 12 years of wandering in the wilderness, so, too, will the woebegone GOP--in, say, about 20 years or so.

And, as Washington Post writer Jonathan Weisman warned congressional  Democrats, " they should regard that Republican takeover as an object lesson in what to emulate and what to avoid; that is, emulating the legislative energy of the Newt Gingrich era while avoiding, at all costs, the overreaching, arrogance, and rancorous partisanship that left them virtually powerless and spawning a period of political corruption and influence-peddling."

Conservative columnist George Will attributed the GOP's downfall to "its sinking beneath the weight of Iraq, the lesson of which is patent: Wars of choice should be won swiftly rather than lost protractedly." And "that the war, like the $223 million bridge to nowhere in Alaska, pungently proclaims how Republicans earned their rebuke, guilty as they were of abandoning conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embracing anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building pursued incompetently.")

He complimented Democrats for "accepting much of the country's rightward movement over the last quarter-century, by dropping  the subject of gun control and welcoming candidates opposed to parts or all of the abortion rights agenda."

Not surprisingly, Carroll County wasn't caught up in the tsunami that engulfed most of the country, and kept it record intact of not putting a Democrat in any office since 1990.  Dennis Beard did, however, come close to breaking the Republican stranglehold on the Board of Commissioners, by finishing right behind Republican Michael Zimmer (the poster boy for the notorious Carroll County Republican Club).

And  his strong showing had the positive effect of re-energizing Democrats and brightening the prospects of their candidates doing even better next time.

As regards any changes there'll be in the direction the war takes under the democratically-controlled Congress, I have to agree with the analogy drawn by Rep. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and war critic, when asked that question:  

When Leo Durocher was managing the New York Giants, he had a second baseman Eddie Stanky, who one day while taking infield practice, dropped everything hit to him...so Durocher grabbed a glove and ran out and told Stanky, "I'm going to show you how to play this position." And when they hit one to him, he dropped it, too. He then turned to Stanky and said: "You've screwed up second base so bad that now nobody can play it." And the same is true, Obey said, of the Iraq war, which  "we've screwed up so bad that nobody can play it and all of our options are bad ones."