The Winners

by digby

Chris Cilizza explodes five myths of the election and what do you know? It’s all good for Republicans! This was actually a defeat for progressives, blacks and young people voting Democratic doesn’t mean much, McCain didn’t mess up — Republicans couldn’t have won anyway, Palin was a big plus and this is only a slight setback for Republicans.

There has been a lot already written about the pernicious meme that Obama didn’t win a mandate, and it may have had some effect. It’s fading a little bit. But the nature of the mandate is still being defined, and if Cilizza is indicative of beltway thinking, the fact that Democrats won seats from Republicans means that the country has rejected liberalism:

At first glance, the numbers do look encouraging for proponents of a new New Deal era in government: Obama claimed at least 364 electoral votes and more than 52.5 percent of the overall popular vote, while Democrats now control at least 57 seats in the Senate and 255 in the House.But look more closely, and you see a heavy influx of moderate to conservative members in the incoming freshman Democratic class, particularly in the House. Of the 24 Republican-held districts that Democrats won in 2008, Kerry carried just three in 2004. Democratic victories on Nov. 4 included Alabama’s 2nd district (where Kerry took 33 percent of the vote) and Idaho’s at-large seat (where Kerry won just 30 percent). In fact, according to tabulations by National Journal’s Richard E. Cohen, 81 House Democrats in the 111th Congress will represent districts that Bush carried in 2004.The fact that roughly a third of the Democratic House majority sits in seats with Republican underpinnings (at least at the presidential level) is almost certain to keep a liberal dream agenda from moving through Congress. The first rule of politics is survival, and if these new arrivals to Washington want to stick around, they are likely to build centrist voting records between now and 2010.

You see, when a Democrat wins a Republican seat it means his or her constituents really prefer Republicans.

Update: Here is a very welcome op-ed by Tod Lindberg, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and an informal foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign refuting the “center-right” meme in the Washington Post. Maybe a conservative saying it means it will have some salience inside the beltway.

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