Understanding the 2006 election
Having pondered the election six weeks now, if you still do not know its meaning, then I don’t, either. That the election was no victory for conservatism seems clear enough (voters who wanted more conservatism knew which party to vote; they voted the other). However, so few Democrats in competitive races actually ran as liberals that I think that it would be a mistake to interpret the election as a victory for liberalism as such. That the election repudiates the Republican administration’s Iraq policy is hard to deny (Democrats did run, and win, on this point), but on other issues the incoming Democrats are not easy to read. If you know how they will act after they take control of the 110th Congress January 3, then you know more than I do. To Congress, America has elected a big blue question mark.
The Democrats won indeed, but on what issues as a party? On the war? Surely. On fiscal responsibility? Yes, but we voters as a body are smarter than some congressmen like to think; we know the Democrats’ character. On fair trade? Not really. Some Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Heath Shuler ran strongly on the trade issue, which is good, but as a party the Democrats advocated few if any concrete trade policies during the campaign.
The foremost reasons the Democrats won in 2006 are probably that they are not Republicans and that they oppose President Bush. Fair enough. Sometimes, quite properly, this is how the two-party system works. You may have voted Republican as did I, but the sands of the Republican glass were bound to run out sooner or later; and in 2006, they ran out. The Democrats won and in an important larger respect, this is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, far too many of the new Democratic Congressional majority are ambivalent toward traditional American culture, toward the unifying effect of the English language, and toward the heartfelt, natural expectation of pre-1965 Americans that their own descendants rather than random foreigners inherit the land. This ambivalence is a bad thing.
Well, the Democrats have won. Now they shall bear the responsibility to legislate and the burden to answer for the legislation’s effects. We shall see what they do with these. The meaning of Election 2006 may not be clear today, but by 2008 it should grow clear enough. We will all look back then, wise in retrospect, and say how obvious it all was.
Between now and then, may the Democrats do better than we expect. A big blue question mark they may be, but we are counting on them now.
HJH
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 am
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The United States of America is a country of the western hemisphere, comprising fifty states and several territories. Forty-eight contiguous states lie in central North n America between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bounded on land by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south; Alaska is in the northwest of the continent with Canada to its east, and Hawaii is in the mid-Pacific. The United States is a federal constitutional republic with Washington, D.C. its capital.
At over 3. 7 million square miles (over 9.6 million km?) and with more than 300 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area and third largest by mpopulation. With a gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $13 trillion, h the U.S. has the largest national economy in the world. GDP per capita ranks the U.S. first among large economies.
American society is the product of large-scale immigration and is home to a complex social structure as well as a wide array of household arrangements. The U.S. is one of the world’s most ethnically and socially diverse nations.
The nation was founded by thirteen colonies declaring their independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776. It adopted the current constitution (which has been amended several times subsequently) on September 17, 1787. The country greatly expanded in territory throughout the 19th century, acquiring further territory from the United Kingdom, as well as lands from France, Mexico, Spain, and Russia. With the collapse 9 of the Soviet Union in 1991, it became the world’s sole remaining superpower, and is a declared nuclear weapons state. The United States continues to exert dominant economic, political, cultural and military influence around the globe.