Kos has frontlined Tom Edsall's fantasy of a permanant Red State Realignment; as a NYT subscriber, I'm being twice weekly showered with Edsall's drivel , via his current gig as guest columnist, following the (unlamented) departure of John Tierney. Edsall's one note samba is that the Democratic sweep of Congress was chancy ...
...their grip on power precarious, their mis-steps (such as l'affaire Hoyer) already destructive of intramural comity -- all of which mean that Rethuglicans, with their well oiled machine ( Legionaires of the Order of the Greased Palm) could easily come sliding back into the Congressional Driver's Seat.
What is missing in his analysis is the possibility America's disastrous flirtation with the Reagan Revolution is at last ending, and that a new alignment is dawning. What I would argue is that the entire Conservative Project in this country, post WWII, is an also ran, a wannabee, and that maybe, just maybe, that fact is starting to percolate into the National Consciousness.
The Democrats created the New Deal, they led us to victory WW II, they built a National Paradigm of Competence, Social Justice, and Patriotism. Then enter the Buckleyite whiners, with their litany that the New Deal was a Mistake and should be called off. Clamoring for the steering wheel, essential wannabees. Well, plutocracy has its own levers of power, and even the Democrats (despite their post-Watergate boost) were looking sick in the protracted aftermath of Vietnam, and eventually, the Rethugs were able to install a master salesman in the personage of R. Reagan. The degree to which his presidency was dominated by salesmanship is brilliantly detailed by Frances Fitzgerald; and I would argue that Reagan's luck was that he never encountered the need to actually perform any action of great consequence. He rode the Magic Carpet of Marketing to apotheosis, and was buried with obsequies that would have made blush the corpse of a Roman emperor in his casket.
But to give RR his due, he made it cool to be a Rethuglican again; and one motiviation for the river of obloquy visited upon Clinton's head was the Rethuglican realization that Clinton had the brains and charisma to thrust RR into the twilight, and re-establish the (relative) perceived coolness of being a Democrat. Now Clinton did plenty of bad things (think NAFTA), but also plenty of good (think deficit, think containment of the N. Korean nuclear program); but what stands out about the man is that he was, and remains, profoundly interested in the details of policy and governance, that his agenda was in that sense positive. Now think back to the Buckleyite mantra of "repeal the New Deal" and the essential negativism of the whole Conservative project starts to emerge.
Now enter George Jr. and his happy band, the Svengalis of Incompetence. The negativism of the Rethuglican Project now starts the assume the dimensions of (pardon me for this) an elephant in the room. You can't hide it, you can't sell the contrary, you can't (when you control all three branches) blame it on the other party. Was it the deficit, the donut hole, Katrina, Iraq -- that finally tipped the American voting population that the chains of government were not engaged to the sprockets, and that no matter how hard W might seem (at least occasionally) to pedal, the wheels were not turning?
What I suspect is that the fall of the House of W is also the fall of the House of Reagan. We will have a huge clean up bill, for sure; but I would argue that, however belatedly, the worm has turned.