Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
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Mark Schmitt (and Matt Yglesias) have been debating what one-party Democratic control might look like. Yglesias concedes that we're not going to have a completely Democratic House and Senate in 2007, and probably not in 2009, so to some extent this is an intellectual exercise. But at the same time, Schmitt notes that the Republican coalition may in fact be reduced to a "rump" containing almost no pro-choice or pro-environment legislators, and very few pro-labor ones. This makes for a very interesting policy conundrum; organizations like the Sierra Club will find it very hard to advance bipartisan coalitions on many issues.
It's worth pointing out that the bipartisan give-and-take present in the Senate in the 1990s was almost certainly the exception, and not the rule. Surely, the senate has been a bipartisan organization since the New Deal, when populist Republicans from the breadbasket allied with Democrats, and in the Civil Rights Era, when the Rockefeller Republicans teamed up with all the non-segregationist Democrats, or in the 1980s, when moderate Democrats compromised with a Republican majority. But in the era of Republican rule from 1983 1893 to the Depression, interrupted only by Woodrow Wilson (with an assist from Teddy Roosevelt), bipartisan cooperation was quite rare, as it was in the immediate post-reconstruction era. Note this model of partisanship from Keith Poole et al., from their book Polarized America.
It's no "Chronic-WHAT-les of Narnia", but this video (28+ mb) is both traumatizing and hilarious at the same time.
Drinking Liberally, this Thursday and Every Thursday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th ave E.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 05:54 25 April 2006
