The similarities between the political condition of the Democratic Party in 2010 and the Republican Party’s condition in 2006 are growing. One sign of the similarity is the tendency toward hopeful delusion on the part of many Democrats and liberals, which parallels the hopeful delusions of Republicans and conservatives in the run-up to November 2006.
Two senior congressional Democrats, Reps. Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters, in hot water with the House Ethics Committee, just as Republicans had to suffer from the cascading effects of the bribery scandal involving San Diego Rep. Duke Cunningham and a sex scandal involving Sen. Larry Craig (with one involving Rep. Mark Foley to follow in September).
Congress was wildly unpopular in 2006, and both houses were in Republican control. The 2006 number in Gallup was 14 percent. Today, with both houses in Democratic hands, the number is marginally better, around 20 percent.
Ah, but Democrats have Barack Obama, don’t they? He received the largest number of votes ever cast, and people still like him. Well, George W. Bush received the largest number of votes ever cast in 2004. Gallup yesterday had Obama with an approval rating of 41 percent; Bush’s approval rating in the Gallup poll released on August 22, 2006, was 42 percent.
More important, perhaps, is the fact that in 2006, Americans had grown impatient with Bush and Republicans in Washington — despite three years of solid economic growth, extraordinarily low unemployment, rising home values and the continuation of unprecedentedly low inflation and interest rates.
In 2010, of course, the unemployment rate has settled well above 9 percent, what little economic recovery we’ve seen slowed at an alarming rate in the second quarter and there’s not much hope for sunnier days soon.
Of course, there are the peculiar parallels between Bush’s incompetent handling of a disaster for which he wasn’t responsible — Katrina — and Obama’s troubles with the BP oil spill.
Yet in 2006, Republicans found it almost impossible to believe they were about to live through an event Bush memorably called a “thumpin’.”
Oh, they knew the results would be unfavorable, but then, they always are in a president’s sixth year. They knew that 60 percent of voters were saying the nation was on the “wrong track,” a deceptively simple polling question that’s usually the most accurate when it comes to indicating the degree of dissatisfaction and possibility for radical change in an election.
But surely, they thought, voters wouldn’t hold their own representatives accountable for the sins of other congressmen; surely an electorate that had gone GOP in the last three elections by increasing numbers wouldn’t reverse course so dramatically; surely voters would see that simply invoking “change” without defining the change was nothing more than snake oil.
I’m sensing some of the same feeling among Democrats and liberals these days. The turn in their electoral fortunes simply doesn’t make sense to them. Obama has passed major legislation, which they think is a plus; he took measures against the economic crisis, which they applaud, and they believe everybody ought to understand that a vote for the GOP is a vote for Bush.
Some of the optimism is happy talk designed to prevent an even greater drubbing at the polls by keeping Democratic voters from despair and paralysis. But some of it is genuine, and speaks to the bifurcated nature of politics these days. It has never been easier to live entirely within a single ideological and political precinct, owing to the communities of affinity that dominate the Internet.
It’s the way of all communities to rally around the news that makes them happy and to try to ignore the news that makes them upset. That’s why the extent of public disaffection with Republican excess came as a surprise to the right in 2006 and why the extent of public disaffection with Democratic statism will surely come as a surprise to many on the left in November. The surprise was due to the fact that the Internet allows people to filter out news that displeases them in a way we’ve never seen.
The exuberant noise made by these communities of affinity offers their members the illusion — the illusion that they know all they need to know. The right used blogs to blind itself to the truth in 2006. The Left is using Twitter and Facebook-status updates.
The result, it appears, may be the same.
JohnPodhoretz@gmail.com