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November 10, 2006

Aftermath: Leaders, losers, numbers

AP
Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, left, meets with Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid of Nevada on Capitol Hill in Washington yesterday.

Profiles:
Pride of Baltimore: Nancy Pelosi Learned Her Politics At the Elbow of Her Father the Mayor (WaPo)
How Pelosi parlayed Democrats to power. San Francisco Chronicle.

Harry Reid, an Infighter With a Sharp Jab
Dancing his way to power, Reid begins in jig time Las Vegas Sun

Podcast: Helen Thomas: Change in Iraq if Dems get some backbone (mp3 audio, 7:20)

Tool: Missouri blogger Shelley Powers plans to monitor her Congresspeople's votes, pointing to useful tool worth bookmarking: RSS feeds of their voting records. (Presumably this will be available for the next Congress as well.) Here's what Lincoln's Chafee's page looks like.

She adds,

With this election, we're going to start seeing a global pushback on all of the so-called morality issues. It's going to take time, and a lot of work, but I think we're seeing fatigue with the morality play we keep putting on with each election. People have more to worry about in their lives than whether Fred and Ray can get married, Sally have an abortion, and Joe get stem cell treatment for his Alzheimer's. We saw this in Missouri, in Arizona, and South Dakota. I look for what happened in these states to gradually become more widespread. To me, this makes us all winners this election.

Net gain: What the Democrats' win means for tech. Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache at CNet. "On a wealth of topics--Net neutrality, digital copyright, merger approval, data retention, Internet censorship--a Capitol Hill controlled by Democrats should yield a shift in priorities on technology-related legislation."

Flush: Online Gamblers Worked To Defeat Sponsor Of Anti-Gambling Legislation: InformationWeek reports,

Representative Jim Leach, R-Iowa, the sponsor of the anti-gaming legislation, was defeated in this week's election....

"A lot of poker fans were lobbying against Leach," said former New Jersey gaming regulator Frank Catania. "Poker players have been organizing. They could eventually be a (lobbying) group like the Sierra Club."

Conservatives free at last? Blogger Jon Swift exults (No Holding Back),

The liberal media seems to think conservatives should be unhappy with the election results but that just shows how out of touch they are. When Republicans had both houses of Congress it was actually quite a burden. With great power comes a great sense of responsibility. Many conservatives have felt that we had to restrain ourselves in order to not risk alienating voters. But now the gloves can come off and for the first time in 12 years we don't have to hold back any longer. We can tell you what we really think and we are ecstatic about our newfound freedom. Around America you can almost hear conservatives singing, "Oh Happy Day!"...

Rove's movement: The Great Revulsion. Paul Krugman is also let loose from Times (Pay to Read) Select this week:

...we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.

Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don’t accept the legitimacy of opposition...

...Two years ago, people were talking about permanent right-wing dominance of American politics. But since then the American people have gotten a clearer sense of what rule by movement conservatives means. They’ve seen the movement take us into an unnecessary war, and botch every aspect of that war. They’ve seen a great American city left to drown; they’ve seen corruption reach deep into our political process; they’ve seen the hypocrisy of those who lecture us on morality.

And they just said no.

Bottom line: Political Animal Kevin Drum crunched the exit polls:

...I was only able to find a grand total of seven groups that broke for the Dems by substantially more than the overall gain of 5 points. Here they are:

Group	Gain
No high school	+15%
Those rating the economy "good"	+15%
Latinos	+14%
Jews	+11%
No religion	+9%
Income $200K+	+9%
Independents	+8%

...In the long run, I suppose the higher totals among Latinos and independents are the big news. Beyond that, there's not much. Keep this in mind when you start reading anecdotal analyses of "what happened." Most of it doesn't hold water. Based on the exit poll data, it was just a broad-based wave of disgust against Republican rule.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:44 AM | Permalink