The press still doesn't get it. Even without the presidential election, we are about to have one of the most transformative elections in our lifetimes. If experts like Charlie Cook, or the Republican Party itself, are right, the Republicans are about to lose another 20 to 34 seats in the House and at least seven seats in the Senate.
That is gigantic. It will take decades -- maybe even generations -- for the Republicans to recover from that. Political tsunamis like this don't come along very often -- and we are about to have two, back to back. In 2006, the total tally between the House and the Senate was an astounding 36-0 seat change in favor of the Democrats.
This is an enormous story and yet hardly a peep has been heard from the press about this. In fact, quite to the contrary Newsweek just wrote a cover story on how this is still fundamentally a center-right country. On which planet? Could you have imagined the press declaring after the 1994 Republican "revolution" that it meant nothing because this was still a fundamentally liberal country?
The problem is the Washington bubble. Inside the Washington bubble, the Republicans are always right, the Democrats are always cowed. Every issue is framed from the conservative perspective and liberals are some fringe group outside of the "mainstream of America." Wake up press, mainstream Americans are about tell you for the second election in a row that they are definitely not conservative.
You see, every member of the traditional press that just read that last sentence will rebel. "Come on, how can you say the country is not conservative? That's outrageous." Watch, I'll outrage you even more -- the United States of America is a liberal country.
Compared to some Western European countries, we could be a little more liberal. But compared to the rest of the world, it's not even close. We are one of the bastions of liberalism. In fact, the United States has almost always led the world in being progressive. We created the United Nations, we rebuilt our enemies through the Marshall Plan, we pushed for human rights throughout the world, we established the idea of freedom of speech and of the press, and the list goes on and on. We are a liberal country and proud.
Now, these last two elections will show that a short-term flirtation with the conservative movement was a gigantic failure. We gave the country over to our conservatives for the last eight years -- and we hated what they did with it.
That's because Americans are not fundamentally conservative. They believe that when there is a disaster like Katrina, we should help one another and it is the government's job to be there for its citizens. They believe it is the government's job to regulate the markets (which simply means to establish some fair rules by which everyone has to play) so that the free markets are not left unfettered. They believe that first strike wars in foreign lands turn out to be a bad idea. They don't like torture. They believe in a minimum wage. And they fundamentally believe in a social safety net, as established in programs like Social Security.
Since the national press has been brainwashed by the conservatives for several decades now, it will take them some time to adjust to this. But adjust they must, because the Democrats will have control over Congress for along time to come if any of these projections are accurate. I know it's really hard to get it through their heads, but James Dobson does not represent us, Nancy Pelosi does. How long and how forcefully can the American people say that before the press acknowledges it?