GO AHEAD, CALL THEM CONSERVATIVE DEMS. WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Unlike Tom Schaller, I have to admit, I wasn�t bothered at all by the spin that the Democrats won because they embraced a lot of candidates with conservative views and backgrounds. Now Tom�s a political scientist, so he has to be concerned with empirical truth and all that stuff (didn�t Karl Rove get rid of that?), and as a matter of truth, he and the legendary political researcher Dennis Yedwab are of course right: the bulk of the Democratic majority came from Northeast, Midwest and Mountain seats where the winners were not conservative.

So the spin that the Democrats won because they moved in a more conservative direction is inaccurate. But so what? Consider the alternative spin, which is that Democrats are a bunch of extreme liberals, who will be as far out of touch as the Republicans and who will be destroyed in 2008? I�d rather have a party that�s fairly liberal but has a reputation or image as moderate than one that�s really moderate and over-cautious but has a reputation for being extremely liberal, which was the situation through much of the 19990s. The more sophisticated version of the spin, of course, is that the Democratic leadership is a bunch of liberal freaks, and the newly elected Heath Shulers et al won�t get along with them. But that�s not a real issue unless they actually don�t get along, and the Democratic Party has handled much wider disparities of opinion in the past.




We now return you to the regular reality-based programming.

--Mark Schmitt

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