The flip side to this argument is that there was a national wave of revulsion against conservative policies, especially in Iraq, and strong support across the board for many liberal policies, such as raising the minimum wage. I am not aware of any Democrat elected last week who does not at least oppose the Bush administration's conduct of the war, even if they don't necessarily support an immediate pullout favored by liberals. Nor do I know of any Democrat who will vote against a modest increase in the minimum wage.
In short, even the most conservative of the Democratic Party's freshman class are well within its mainstream on the issues that matter today. Therefore, liberals argue, it was not conservatism that got them elected, but their support for popular liberal policies that Republicans had steadfastly opposed.
On the Republican side, they still seem shell-shocked by the results and have no clue about why they lost or what to do about it. One reason for this, I believe, is that many were genuinely surprised by the depth of their defeat, even though it had been forecast by the polls for months.
This was because there is now a fully developed alternative media where conservatives can get all their news and never hear an unfriendly voice. For months, this media -- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, conservative Websites -- have taken the line that Republicans not only should win, not only could win but in fact would win. Over and over again, we heard about Karl Rove's secret polls showing a certain Republican victory, and Fred Barnes told us night after night on Fox News that the mainstream media's polls were wrong.
In fact, the polls were dead-on accurate. And they told anyone who read them that blind recitation of the daily White House talking points was a one-way ticket to oblivion. Yet time and again, all I heard on conservative talk radio or read on conservative blogs was that the economy is the best it ever was, that the war in Iraq is being won, that anyone who says otherwise is a liar and so on.
The one thing I know with certainty about sports and elections is that you have to be a realist to win. Living in a dream world is an absolute guarantee of defeat. I believe that if Republicans had been forced to confront reality earlier, they might have been able to turn things around. Their friends in the conservative media did them no favors by feeding them a false sense of optimism.