realignment
You know that series of beer commercials that uses real footage from post-game press conferences of former pro football coaches and (sometimes) cleverly makes it seem as if the coach is talking about the beer?
The ad in that series that seems to have most people talking these days is the one that uses the interview below, where Jim Mora says in a very high and nasal tone "Playoffs, don't talk about playoffs." I hear that phrase...and tone...so often that it's almost starting to sound like one of the one-liners from the late 60s/early TV show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Think Arte Johnson saying "Very Interesting."
Stan has it right -- after much inspirational talk about change, delivering change in this town won't come easily. I worked in Congress' inner sanctum in 1981 when President Reagan brought big change on the heels of Jimmy Carter. Reagan cut taxes, but he didn't balance the budget as promised. He swayed the Supreme Court, but he lost the Senate in the 1986 election. His Vice President, George W. Bush, succeeded him, but reversed many of his policies.
Even with a landslide win, Barack Obama will face daunting challenges from the economy, the war, health care, energy, immigration, and etc. He seems intent on facing those challenges squarely, which will cost political capital. He will find that his worst enemies on Capitol Hill are not Republicans, but conservative Democrats who refuse to take his lead. Bill Clinton barely got out of the starting gate before losing control of the House in the 1994 election. Mr. Obama is studying that very carefully in hope of keeping Democratic majorities longer than two years. Keeping them six or eight years will be a feat.
Andrew opened an interesting and important subject yesterday that I suspect will be one of the big topics in the mainstream media tomorrow: is the 2008 election a "realignment"?
The answer is that it could be, but we won't really know for several years.
I did my senior thesis on realigning elections. It has been a long time since my last year in college, but one of the things that has stayed with me since I did that research (and typed the paper on erasable bond using an IMB Selectric) is that you can't instantly label an election as a realignment. It may have the potential of being a relatively permanent change in some voters' preferences, but one election is not a trend.
