Ross Douthat on the Wendy Davis debacle for Texas Democrats:
It should be said, and many people are saying it, that Davis and her team ran a poorer-than-expected campaign overall, and that the allegedly-brilliant team running the Democrats’ new Texas ground game were not in fact so brilliant. But the more important issue, surely, is that the Democrats decided that it made sense to run, well, Wendy Davis as their “change-the-map” candidate in Texas. Nunn and Carter in Georgia were nominations that fit reasonably well with the facts on the ground, and while they obviously disappointed Nunn did at least outperform the last two Democratic Senate nominees in her state. Davis, on the other hand, actually underperformed the Democratic nominee’s totals in the last two head-to-head races against Rick Perry … which is, again, pretty much exactly what you’d expect when you nominate a figure who owed her prominence to a filibuster on late-term abortion to contest a statewide rate in Texas. . . .
Read the whole thing, but you could summarize the basic error of Democrats in Texas and elsewhere this cycle in one word: Hubris.
Republicans did much the same thing in 2005-2006 after Bush’s re-election convinced the Stupid Party that America had reached some kind of GOP utopia, “The Permanent Republican Majority.”
There were people (Hugh Hewitt comes instantly to mind) who actually believed that nonsense, who failed to realize how the betrayal of trust epitomized by John McCain’s “shamnesty” proposals in 2006 and 2007 were alienating grassroots conservatives.
Clearly, Republican leaders believed they could compromise on economic issues and split the difference on social issues. The devastating losses in the 2006 mid-terms and the crushing victory of Barack Obama did nothing to knock any sense into Karl Rove’s GOP Strategery Brain Trust. However, in 2010, conservatives finally told the GOP leadership to go to hell and the grassroots had their own damned revolution. (Fuck you, Charlie Crist. Rot in hell, Arlen Specter.)
The GOP Strategery Brain Trust managed to reassert itself after 2011, as John Boehner and other backstabbing crapweasels managed to fritter away whatever influence had been gained by the historic 2010 Republican landslide. Naturally, then, Mitt Romney got the 2012 GOP nomination and, naturally, lost to Barack Obama. So here we are at last, in 2014, when Mitch McConnell and his cronies have finally recaptured the GOP majority they fumbled away in 2005-2006.
What happened to Democrats in 2014, then, was a sort of natural consequence of political momentum in America’s two-party system. When a party re-elects their president to his second term, the winners always believe they have a complete mandate for their agenda, no matter how narrow the margin of their victory. Republican victories in the elections of 1980, 1984 and 1988 were all by margins that could be called legitimate mandates, larger than the margins of either of Obama’s victories in 2008 or 2012. Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as Speaker of the House lasted only four years, and Harry “The Alleged Pederast” Reid kept the Senate Majority Leader’s gavel for eight years.
Clearly, the Democrats who thought Wendy Davis could be elected governor of Texas were insane for believing it, but the incoming floodtide of Mexicans will sooner or later turn Texas into a Democrat state, and Democrats will turn Texas into an impoverished and corrupt ruin, as they are already doing in California. Unless the new Republican majority in Congress is absolutely dedicated to a no-more-bullshit border security policy — no amnesty now, no amnesty ever — their majority will prove short-lived, and Mitch McConnell will have the honor of being the Last Republican Senate Majority Leader, presiding over the end of the American republic.
Unless the idiots atop the GOP power ziggurat in Washington wake up, by 2030, the Republican Party will be a withered shadow of its former self, exiled to permanent minority status and political irrelevance. That is to say, if there still is a Republican Party in 2030. It’s not too hard to envision a scenario wherein Democrats win the White House in 2016, take back the Senate in 2018, re-elect Hillary Clinton and recapture the House in 2020, The consequences of such a scenario could lead to either (a) the final collapse of the Republican Party or (b) Texans voting to secede from the Union.
Honestly, I think Texas should have seceded last year, although next year or the year after that would be OK, too. But they need to do it soon, or eventually there won’t be anything left of Texas worth fighting to save, nor anything anywhere else in America, either. Democrats will preside over the Death of America, because the leaders of the Republican Party are all worthless, unprincipled, selfish cowards who care more for the prestige of their own offices than they do for the people who elected them. Any other questions?
America is hopelessly doomed. Nothing but a miracle can save us. But there is no reason we can’t laugh while it’s still legal to laugh.
