Looking at next year's election from that point of view, I would be very concerned that the Donkeys have peaked way early. All the conventional wisdom favors the Democrats, and that is not necessarily a good thing more than a year out. Besides, the Democrats keep losing on the issues that they seem most to care about.
Michael Barone, at RealClearPolitics points out that Bush is showing a remarkable degree of control over the agenda for a lame duck President. It wasn't too long ago that the majority leaders in both houses of Congress were planning to impose a withdrawal date for American forces in Iraq. That project has utterly collapsed.
That leaves the left wing of the party angry at its leaders and the party split on the war, much as it was in 2002, when about half of congressional Democrats voted to authorize military action.
The Democrats here suffered from a lack of imagination. They could not imagine that the United States military could perform more effectively in 2007 than it did in 2005 and 2006.
George W. Bush seems to have had a similar lack of imagination until the November 2006 elections woke him up. But he chose a new commander and a new strategy, and things have changed. Democratic leaders have acted on the assumption that the status quo of November 2006 would persist indefinitely.
You can look at Bush's "surge" as a strategic innovation that may be showing dramatic results, or as a political strategy to design to maintain control of the agenda despite Democratic control of Congress. Either way, the Bush Administration is running circles around the Democrats. Lack of imagination is indeed the Democrat's problem, but it is far deeper than Barone indicates. The Democrats are very good at complaining about Bush's military policy and his national security policy, but they have no imagination for drafting a policy of their own.
Barone also mentions the Democrat's retreat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and on the resolution condemning the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. Of course, a string of defeats on the floors of Congress does not necessarily indicate electoral weakness for the party of Clinton, Reid, and Pelosi. But then there is this:
Last week, Democrat Niki Tsongas won a special election with only 51 percent of the vote, in a Massachusetts district where John Kerry won 57 percent in 2004 and would have run much better in 2006.
Now if you are a nervous Democrat, that looks suspiciously like the canary in the coal mine. It would be wishful thinking on a Republicans part to count this one piece of data as an indication of Republican strength. But it is rather hard to explain otherwise.
I would add to this list the election of Bobby Jindal to the State House in Louisiana. Louisiana was one of the last one party states in the South, and so it had a run-off election system. Jindal won 54%, so he goes straight to the Governor's seat. His three strongest Democratic rivals got a mere 45% in total. Piyushnabu "Bobby" Jindal will be the nation's first Indian-American governor. He would be the nation's first Hindu governor, except that he converted to Catholicism when he was a teenager. Son of immigrants from Punjab, he was born in Baton Rouge. The sky's the limit. Rumors of the death of the Republican party are perhaps premature.
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