I know there are plenty of folks proclaiming a political realignment, that America is no longer a center-right nation; but I don’t believe it, for three reasons. One, I believe there’s little evidence that this election was a repudiation of conservative principles, given that the Republican Party isn’t particularly identified with conservative principles at the moment and was running a nominee who himself isn’t seen as all that conservative. (IMHO, John McCain is a lot more conservative than he’s given credit for, but he’s certainly more to the center than a true conservative standard-bearer would be.) Rather, this was the culmination of a popular repudiation of the Republican Party of the last eight years; if, from the ashes of 2006 and 2008, a new GOP arises, true to its conservative roots, led by Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, after a period in which they are clearly not responsible for anything the federal government does, I think we’ll see a very different response from the national electorate. The root here isn’t popular disgust with conservatism, but rather popular disgust with D.C.—and the Democrats now have that all to themselves.Two, even given that, Barack Obama could only pull 52% of the vote; running to succeed the least-popular outgoing incumbent since Harry Truman, he only pulled 4 million more votes than John Kerry did four years ago, and one million more than George W. Bush did. A shift, yes, and certainly one which produced a major change in the Electoral College—but not really all that impressive a shift, given the electorate’s weariness of the Bush-era GOP. This victory gives the Democrats the opportunity to create a political realignment, either honestly or crookedly, but it does not in and of itself represent one.And three, the results of major ballot measures around the country don’t bear out the image of a country suddenly gone liberal. What they suggest, rather, is a country that’s shifted a little to the left because of disaffection with the theoretically conservative party, but by and large still thinks about the way it’s always thought.
