Well, the GOP continues it's run of electoral success. I really believed we'd grab the Senate and make a tiny gain in the House much more confidently than I beleived Kerry would win. Alas, we seem to be deep in a Republican period that is built on an angry, rabid base and a frightened, untrusting middle. The countract on America continues.
We need to build. Setting aside the fact that this race was, at the top, a virtual tie, was this year to us what '64 was to the GOP and conservatism? The analogy would be more complete if we had nominated Kucinich and he'd gone down in a landslide, but it still works.
I suspect that in some ways we can learn from the rise of the right in the late '60s and '70s. One could say Clinton was Eisenhower, a likeable centrist who coopted the opposition's policies and worked to slow the tide against his party, angering the more extreme (McCarthyites for Eisenhower, movement progressives like me for Clinton) elements of his base. We bottomed out in the past two election years ('02 & '04) and now we need to rebuild. The GOP model, with, of course, many variations as times change and because opposing ideologies are not perfect mirror images.
What the GOP did was clever. The top worked well with the bottom. Nixon ran in '68 not as a conservative crusader, but seeking the pragmatic middle while sounding rhetorical themes that encouraged and motivated the base.
Meanwhile, the real action was down in the trenches. Very right wing candidates ran successful stealth campaigns for a dozen years, taking school boards, planning commissions, county courthouses and city halls. They worked to quietly unite their pro-business economic libertarian wing with conservtive Christians over "law and order" issues and "morality" in schools. They stood firmly against what was the prevailing national mood in the '70s as they knew in their hearts that there were elements of liberalism that had gone over the top. Government was growing bloated and top heavy and our culture was getting too licentious and self-indulgent.
They had a huge setback with Watergate at the national level, the backlash sweeping in more very liberal Dems to the house than ever before. Still, at the local and state levels they grew. They saw the Dems not taking care of cultural conservatives in the south and moved to run more southern candidates (this is where Nixon's subtle messages from the top set the stage for local and state action).
With a strong second tier, AAA League as Kos would put it, the GOP was well positioned to make huge gains in the house, take the Senate and even elect a president who got a true mandate in his second term in the '80s. That was a rapid rise that seemed to come out of nowhere to those who had only watched what was going on at the surface level. The far right built a grass roots coalition and planted their little memes very effectively and waited for the right opportunity.
The GOP has been essentially dominant since 1980. Yeah, it was shared power for a while, but for the most part the GOP has called the shots, especially since '94.
I've said this in different ways for the last few days, but I'm gonna keep saying it. We need to build from the ground up. If we do that well and we actually win people over to our values one person at a time, not rushing for a short term goal, but essentially doing political evangelizing, winning hearts and minds and, yes souls, then the rest will take care of itself. Build a new kind of movement and let the leader rise. Yeah, we can have fun little fantasies of who the new top level leaders will be in '08 and later, but right now we need to change the very ground on which the '08 election battles will be fought.
Aother note. The right wing grass roots, Evangelical Christianity and multi-level marketing schemes all work similarly. They are all slow, patient attempts to win somebody over with a personal touch. We need to do this. We need to take it to our churches, our campuses, our baseball teams, our corner taverns, our professional associations and our neighborhood associations. We need to win hearts and minds. We need to make more liberals, more progressives and more leftists. One by one by one ... until we've won.
Then, when our leaders speak, what they say will sound like common sense.