Sean Oxendine's blog

In the last couple weeks we've seen no shortage of sentiment implying that the GOP is in something akin to death throes, provided that it doesn't come to resemble something other than the modern GOP.  This post has been building in me for a while, but the latest piece by Ron Brownstein, titled The Bush GOP's Fatal Contraction, kind of set me off.

Look, I'm not going to say that nothing bad happened to Republicans on November 4.  I don't need to repeat the litany of losses we suffered that day.  If you've forgotten, read Brownstein's piece.  I've seen those numbers myself.

But I don't think its fair to say that "Bush leaves behind a party that looks less like a coalition than a clubhouse."  It is a pretty d*mn big clubhouse.  In the past few years, under a Republican President's watch, we've had two wars go badly, one of which a very large chunk of the country believes was unnecessary and founded on lies, a recession begin, instances of severe corruption, sex scandals, graft, massive deficit spending, and a city go under water, the financial system collapse, and a Republican President argue for a $700 billion bailout.  All that was missing was plagues of locusts, and I'd have signed up for Hal Lindsay's newsletter.  The Democrats nominated not just a political candidate, but a pop culture phenomenon, who raised three quarters of a billion dollars over the course of his campaign, who ran (at least in Virginia) on a platform of ending a foreign adventure, tax cuts for 95% of the American people, a health care plan in the middle of the free market and government-run plan, and good old fashioned mom and apple pie.

The result?  The Democrat got about 53% of the vote, about the same as the first President Bush got against Dukakis, and if 5% higher than Kerry performed.  Lest you think that this can all be chalked up to the racism of those darned West Virginians, Obama only ran about eight-tenths of a point behind Congressional Democrats.

In other words, about 9 in 20 voters voted for Republicans, versus 11 in 20 Democrats.  In similar circumstances like 1952 and 1920, the verdict against the in-party has been much more dramatic.  This is a bad result, but it is not a "chuck the social/fiscal/defense conservatives over the edge" bad result. 

Brownstein continues that "[t]he consistent thread linking the 2006 and 2008 elections was the narrowing of the playing field for Republicans even as Democrats extended their reach into places once considered reliably "red."  Pardon my colloquialisms, but "well duh."  The Republican party consistently failed to perform and to produce good results over the past four years, and when it did (in Iraq), it was too late for the 2006 elections, and just in time for the business cycle to swing negative.  When the Republican party was performing well, from about 2001-2003, it looked like reliably blue areas of the country like the upper midwest and the Pacific Northwest were trending their direction, while nothing was going right for Democrats.  When you have power and you govern well, the country swings your way.  When you have power and you don't the country does the opposite.  Very quickly, it turns out.

The results of this election should not have surprised anyone, and if they did it should have only surprised them by how well the Republicans performed given the circumstances.   When you have a President with 25% approval ratings, you don't make advances into blue states, you struggle to hold on to purple states, and you lose some ground in red states.  That's not partisanship talking, that's common sense. 

And Brownstein overlooks the most important fact of all when he writes: 

But to win the GOP nomination, McCain embraced Bush's core economic and foreign policies and then selected, in Sarah Palin, a running mate who waged the culture war with a zeal that made Bush and Karl Rove look squeamish. Both decisions weakened McCain's position with centrist voters; then the financial collapse deepened the hole.

The very important fact that he overlooks is that even with Sarah Palin and McCain's supposed embrace of Bush's economic and foreign policies, McCain was leading Obama before the financial collapse took place (and this was well outside the time of the regular convention bounce).  Obama was reduced to making snarky comments about lipstick on pigs and old dead fish and running commercials about how McCain couldn't send e-mails.   He was getting ready to drop Keating 5 ads.  In other words, up until September 15, this was a very winnable race for Republicans.  It wasn't just at the Presidential level either -- between the RNC and the financial collapse, every generic congressional ballot poll had the Democrats' lead in single digits; we also had the first poll showing Republicans leading in the generic ballot since 2004.  We were headed toward a three or four Senate seat loss, rather than the seven or eight one we're looking at today.  Given the overall condition of the country even pre-AIG/Lehman Brothers, that is astounding.

If McCain had pulled it off, and Obama had received only 49% of the vote and Democrats had made minimal gains in Congress or worse, the conclusion would be either (1) that Americans are racist or (2) that Democrats just can't win the Presidency.  Sorry, but the difference between a permanent Republican majority and a pup tent Republican party isn't 4% of the vote.

Anyway, the point of all of this is to go back to something very, very important that Patrick wrote about a week ago, and which conservatives should ponder carefully before they start excommunicating any branch of the party or otherwise seriously altering their message.  He writes:

American elections are by and large not referendums on ideologies. They are contests of personality, optics, and performance in office. This goes the same for when they win or we win -- whether it's 1980, 1994, or 2006/2008. The Democrats did not have to change their ideology to win; they needed to change the charisma level of their standardbearer and needed an economic crisis and a prolonged unpopular war.

Because ideology doesn't matter in elections, and so much of politics depends on ephemeral characteristics like personality and who was in when the economy cycled south, the parties paradoxically have relatively wide latitude to govern ideologically without fear of public backlash once they get in. This is why cries of "socialism" were so ineffective during the campaign, and likewise why Bush got most of what he wanted in his early Presidency, even before 9/11. If Barack Obama is able to adopt far-left policies and make it look like he's making the trains run on time, the country will enter a new liberal era not by virtue of public opinion, but by acquiesence to what appears to be competent governance. In 1993-94, the Clintons tried to move the country to the left and looked incompetent in the process. It was the latter more than the former that opened a door for conservatives in 1994.

This is spot on.  Republicans didn't lose because they were too conservative, or not conservative enough, or didn't ban abortion, or wanted to ban gay marriage.  They lost because they were given the reigns of power, and they didn't perform.  If you look at the big party changes across recent American elections:  2006/08, 1994, 1982, 1980, 1974, 1966, 1958, they share a common thread:  The in-party screwed up.  It doesn't have much to do with what the out-party was doing.  If the Democrats screw up, all of those glowing internal exit poll numbers about Hispanics and youth and turnout and what-not will turn as depressing for them as they did in 2002 and 2004, when we were crowing about how Republicans had won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties.

That's the worst thing about this election for Republicans -- our fate is not really in our hands.  But in the meantime, we shouldn't act like the results from November 4 are a 1964/1984 "will we ever govern again" result, because they weren't.  What we're doing on this site is important, and the party does need to examine how it interacts with its online communities, how it presents its message, and how it attacks the incoming administration.  But that's ultimately for what happens when we are handed the reins of power.  At what point in time we're handed the reins depends as much on the results the incoming Administration is perceived as supplying as it does anything we do in the background, but in the meantime, we've got a pretty darned good bedrock to build upon.

Governor's races are odd birds.  Of all the races I follow -- House, Senate, Presidential, even state legislative -- they tend to be the least partisan.  The reasons are similar to the reasons that Presidential races often seem so issues-less, especially when compared to the legislative races:  People don't look at their chief executive and see a bundle of issues; they see a leader.  This is more pronounced at the local and state level, where they just see someone who fixes potholes and makes sure their kid gets funding for afterschool football.

On top of this, these races are going to be very much subject to the performance of the economy over the next few years.  In 2002, Democrats and Republicans alike suffered as chief executives were forced to make cuts in state budgets during the 2000-2001 semi-recession.  Given the full-blown recession/semi-depression we are likely headed towards, there could be a similar effect.  Sarah Palin is still very popular in Alaska, but after she cuts education to keep the budget in balance, will she still be?

So anyway, theses are very preliminary.  Right now if I had to guess, I'd say Republicans would net one or two Governor's mansions, bringing them to 23 or 24 seats.  I've bolded the ones that I think seem especially primed to change hands. 

Given the large number of open seats and undeclared candidates, I'm even less certain about these than the Senate ratings (which is pretty darned uncertain).  This is especially true of open races that I've labelled uncompetitive, since really no one can call an open Governor's race uncompetitive this early.  But just watch me.  Because I'm dangerous like that.

More below the fold.

In light of Patrick’s earlier post on the importance of Senate recruiting, I thought it would be good to give a preliminary outlook of where things stand in the Senate. I’ve divided the Senate seats for 2010 up into three categories for each party: Seats that will be competitive no matter what, seats that could be competitive with the right national environment and/or recruiting effort, and seats that would require a major shift in the national environment to become competitive. 

At first glance, the outlook is pretty grim for Republicans. Of the two competitive Senate seats for the Democrats, both probably at least slightly lean their way to start. For the Republicans, probably three of the four Senate seats for Republicans are at best 50-50. With the right combination of recruiting, retirements and national environment, this could easily get really bad, really quickly. Considering that at the beginning of this cycle only the open Colorado seat and maybe Oregon or Minnesota would be placed in the definitely competitive category, we see how important a role the environment and recruiting can play (indeed, without stellar recruiting by the DSCC of candidates who didn't intially want to run, AK, NH, NM, and VA might have had different outcomes). Similarly, in 2004, Senators Chafee, Allen, and DeWine, and potentially Talent, would have at best been in the “potentially competitive” category. 

But it’s a double edged sword, and shows why you should ALWAYS recruit your best candidate to run. If Tim Roemer had run against Dick Lugar in 2006 – someone considered as unassailable at recruiting time as, well, Mike DeWine – he probably would have had at least a 50-50 chance at becoming a Senator. We just don’t know how the national environment will look two years from now, and that will greatly impact who is seen as vulnerable. The situation swung wildly from Democrats to Republicans to Democrats from 1992 to 1994 to 1996, and swung pretty decisively from 2004 to 2006. It isn’t impossible to imagine Bayh or Mikulski or even Obama’s replacement being vulnerable in 2008, provided we have the right recruits in place and are running in a favorable environment. 

It’s also worth noting that the famed midterm election tendency, which finds that the President’s party always loses seats in the midterm election, simply doesn’t hold as well in the Senate. While there are only three exceptions since the Civil War in the House, there are a number of exceptions in the Senate since direct election of Senators commenced in the early 1900s, including 1962, 1970, 1982, 1998, and 2002. Therefore, we probably shouldn’t expect the “midterm tendency” to bail Republicans out.

So with that said, the ratings are below the fold.

There's a new blog around, Red Albany, dedicated to covering the race for the New York Statehouse.  Judging from the content so far, it looks to be very well done. 

More, please.

The supposed big story of the Congressional races is that Republicans lost their last Congressional seat in New England with the defeat of Chris Shays.  The implications of this are supposedly ominous, as Reid Wilson declares:

But Shays' defeat shows that even someone prepared for a tough race who has spent years building his reputation within the district can go down to defeat. Republicans are going to have to re-establish a foothold in the New England before they can seriously challenge for the Speaker's gavel.

The answer to this is "hogwash."  New England holds a special place in history as the traditional seat of power in the nation.  When the Northern Republican party was in its prime, New England was the place to be, politically, economically, and culturally speaking.  But it is a crumbling ediface of its former self, with the accompanying decline of economic, cultural, and especially political influence. 

In the 1950s, New England had twenty eight Congressional districts.  In the Republican party's greatest time of historical dominance in the early 20th century, it had around thirty-three seats.  Today, New England has twenty-two states seats.  It will lose another after this census, meaning that it will have only five more seats than Massachusetts alone had at mid-century, and will barely have half as many seats as, say, Texas.  Indeed, Texas alone presently supplies about as many Republicans to Congress as all of New England supplies Democrats.

Even adding New York to the definition of New England does little to alter the analysis; by adding New York to the New England states we end up with fifty-one seats.  That's less than California, and it will drop by another three after this census.  And between New York and New England, Republicans have dropped a grand total of eleven Congressional seats (six from New York, not New England).  Even taking over every Democratic seat in New England AND New York would barely get Republicans a majority in the House. 

This isn't to say that the Republican party shouldn't compete in New England -- it should, it can (as evidenced by continued successes in gubernatorial races, competitive House races in Vermont, Maine, and Massachsetts in the worst possible conditions imaginable in the last few cycles, and continuing party competitiveness overall in New Hampshire), and it will.  A House seat is a House seat.  Obviously the Senate picture is very different, since you're looking at 12% of the Senate drawn from those states. And to the extent that problems in New England are symptomatic of problems in other, growing portions of the country, like Fairfax County Virginia or Orange County North Carolina, that point (a different one than that being made above) is taken.

But the importance of New England to holding the Speakers' gavel is grossly overstated, and is an artifact of history, much like the belief that upstate New York or downstate Illinois is staunchly Republican.  The focus of the Republican party in the short-to-medium term should remain in the Rust Belt and the Mountain West; fixing the party's problems there will do a lot more for the party's future than re-establishing its bona fides in Rhode Island.

The gist of Jon's post here is that if you want to make a difference in the rightosphere, cut back on the punditry and rev up the activism.  I couldn't agree more.  As I've written before, it's embarrasing that we apparently had a close race with an outstanding candidate in NY-24, and he didn't show up on any race-watcher's radar screen.  If we don't have people on the ground looking for signs momentum from serious, articulate candidates, the people at the top will never know where to direct energy, attention, and eventually money.

For all the talk of the GOP's inability to win in New England, we've had several other races fly somewhat under the radar screen such as VT-AL last cycle, MA-05 special (this received some prominence), and ME-01, where GOP candidates kept their races in single digits at a time and place when the GOP President and brand have reached especially toxic levels (ME Bush Approval Rating: 23%).  In a normal GOP year, these races are close; in a good GOP year they are very winnable.

But the only way that we can possibly know about these races is either (1) count on the NRCC to tell us about them or (2) have activists on the ground communicating from the roots up where we have charismatic, articulate, intelligent candidates who can run effective campaigns with a sufficient amount of money.  I'll let you decide for yourselves which ones are the most important.

But if you really want to make a difference, follow a state legislative race.  I've long argued that there is a real upside to McCain losing, and that is this:  If he had won, with the economy in the shape it is in (and likely will be at least perceived as being in 2010), we would have had little chance of making gains in 2010, and could have faced another 2006-style blowout (interestingly, GOP losses in statehouses in 2008 were fairly modest). 

This in turn is important because most states will engage in their once-a-decade (usually) ritual of setting legislative districts.  Some states -- including important states such as Iowa and Arizona -- pass this off to independent commissions, but the vast majority of states do it the old fashioned way: Through partisan gerrymandering. 

One of the only reasons that the GOP was able to stay competitive in Congress for most of this decade was that for the first time in a long time, it was able to stay competitive with the Democrats in the gerrymandering department (no, the GOP did not have some nasty advantage here, as the Democrats had some pretty ugly gerrymanders of their own that didn't get much attention in MD, TN, AL, among others).  This can cut both ways, as a heavily gerrymandered state can become a disaster area for the gerrymandering party if the partisan winds shift even a little bit (see, e.g., Pennsylvania and Georgia).  But a modest gerrymander such as Ohio and Michigan can provide real bulwarks against even substantial partisan change.

Right now, we have little information about what goes on in state races.  Much will depend on what happens in open Governor's races in states like PA and AL, where an ailing Obama economy could shift things to the GOP (yes, the voters will turn on the party of change that quickly, see 1994 and 1982).  But the statehouses are a key component.  I've listed statehouses below where we're within seven in the state Senate or state House -- in other words, where flipping four seats would be enough to gain a majority:

AK-Senate, 10-10 Democrat (Reps hold House and Gov.)

CO-Senate, 20-14 Democrat (Dems hold large House majority and Gov.)

IN-House, 52-47 Democrat (Reps hold Senate and Gov.)

LA-Senate, 22-15 Democrat (Reps hold Gov.)

LA-House, 52-50 Democrat (Reps hold Gov.)

ME-Senate, 20-15 Democrat

MS-Senate, 27-25 Democrat (Reps hold Gov.)

MT-House, 50-50 Democrat (Reps hold Senate)

NV-Senate, 12-9 Democrat (Reps hold Gov., shaky)

NH-Senate, 14-10 Democrat

NJ-Senate, 23-17 Democrat

NY-Senate, 32-29 Democrat

OH-House, 53-46 Democrat (Reps hold Senate)

OR-Senate, 18-12 Democrat

PA-House, 104-99 Democrat (Reps hold Senate)

VA-Senate, 21-19 Democrat (Reps hold House)

WI-Senate, 18-15 Democrat

WI-House, 52-46 Democrat

Obviously some of these are critical.  Being shut out in Colorado would allow Democrats to improve upon the partisan gerrymander they succeeded in getting a judge to approve in the 2000 cycle, further entrenching their majorities (indeed, given that they did this in the 2000 cycle while holding onto only one chamber doesn't give me a lot of hope here).   Controlling redistricting in states like OH, LA and PA, which are slated to lose seats, can help ensure that the seats given up are Democratic seats, and not Republican seats.  Taking control of the Indiana House would allow Republicans to undo the Democrats' redistricting plan from the 2000 cycle which led to their 5-4 majority.  And making certain that we have a seat at the table in NV can help ensure that the new district is at the very least a "fair fight" district, much like NV-03 is now.

But we can't help unless we know what is going on at the local level.  You're our only connection, and we need your help if 2010 is going to be a success.

I found this link from James Pethokoukis' (very excellent) blog, with some interesting questions.  My own brief answers are (1) probably, (2) look how Bush's presidency turned out (3) see 1982 midterm elections, (4) I don't think so.  He knows Republicans benefitted mightily from Bush not having a successor, (5) yes, but I don't think they will have an all-white-male ticket again, and (6) 2012.  What do you all think?

1. Was this really the shattering of a glass ceiling?  If George H.W. Bush had won in 1992 and the field were wide open and the economy were in the toilet in 1996, would Obama and the campaign that he ran in 2008 have also won in 1996?  I think so.  What do you think?
2. Why do Democrats still have to answer Republican questions, even when they win the election?  George W. Bush loses the popular vote and governs like he won a mandate.  Obama wins convincingly and he is somehow supposed to take it slow?  Not if he really does want to solidify a realignment.
3. What happens if these new voters from 2008 are unemployed in 2010 or 2012?  I'm guessing they will want change again.  Obama has such a tough road ahead of him.
4. If the Obama administration is going well in 2012, would Obama drop Biden as a running mate to set up a chosen successor for 2016?
5. Will the Democrats ever nominate a white male for the top spot again?
6. When will the Republicans nominate someone for the top spot who is much younger than his Democratic opponent?

As we work on developing our RightRoots, one thing to decide is what aspects of the NetRoots' model are worth adapting, and which are worth jettisoning.  Personally I am skeptical of the 50-state strategy, especially at the Presidential level, and believe that if the stock market hadn't collapsed in September we would be hearing all manner of recriminations about Obama's spending in North Dakota and Montana right now.

But one thing the Netroots have been absolutely 100% spot-on about is the need to put someone on the ballot in all 435 districts.  This isn't to say that it is important to send money to these candidates or strongly support them, but it is to say that Congressmen shouldn't be given a pass, because you can't beat something with nothing.  If there's no one on the ballot, if the incumbent pulls a DeLay, or a Foley, or a Sherwod, or a . . . well, you get the idea, you don't win.

That said, I'm not terribly upset that we didn't have a candidate on the ballot in districts like AL-07 or for that matter in most of the 41 districts the GOP didn't contest (see table below).  But what is unforgiveable is that there were fifteen districts with PVI's of D+10 or less where the GOP didn't put up a candidate.  There were eleven districts with PVI's of D+5 or less where the GOP didn't put up a candidate.

What makes this worse is that many of these districts were in states like Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia, where the Democratic ticket performed horribly this year.  If there was ever a place where an upset of a sleeping Democratic incumbent could occur, these were the places.  Places where Republicans performed reasonably well in 2006 (under the circumstances) (note to self:  your off-the-top-of-your-head memory of margins of victory is not nearly as good as you think) like WV-01 were left empty.

Tom Cole had a tough task recruiting this year because a smart challenger would look at the playing field, look at history, and conclude that 2010 was a much better year to run.  But as we move toward 2010 there are no excuses, and we should make sure someone is on the ballot in all of these races.

Chart  below the fold.

Much has been written already about whether 2008 is a re-aligning election. I suppose that this is a small fraction of what will be written in the coming months. I laid my thoughts out here, here, here, here and here about whether 2008 would be re-aligning, and my answer is still a cautious “no.” I’ll have more to say later on the subject, but without getting too “Karl Popper” on you, I find most of the arguments for emerging re-alignments to be the worst kind of historicist junk. Just as an example, while it is true that the youth vote voted overwhelmingly Democratic, this forgets that eight years ago it was split. There’s nothing to say that four years from now it won’t be split again, especially if Obama has a rough time of things (indeed, a large part of why that generation is heavily Democratic for now is that twenty-somethings’ political memory consists of a competent Democratic President and an incompetent Republican President).

There are certainly arguments to the contrary (for one thing, the left dominates many of the information avenues to these voters, which will probably take more than one or two cycles to remedy), but we have no way of sorting them out with anything other than mere guesswork. In short, I find these arguments about as convincing as I found arguments in 2004 that we were encountering a permanent Republican majority (“We won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties!!!!”). A re-alignment may be brewing, but we really won’t be able to know until we are well into it.

For now, I’d like to take a close look at how Obama built his map. We note at the beginning his solid, but not overwhelming, majority in the electoral college, which presently looks to be about 364 to 174. Again, this is a solid win, but it is not LBJ 1964. This is fairly remarkable, considering that you have to go back to 1952 or possibly even 1920 to find an open race where the climate was similarly inhospitable to the incumbent party. Both of those resulted in double-digit popular vote wins for the out-party running into the 400s in the Electoral College.

Michael Barone links to a map of how counties voted, courtesy of the Washington Post here. There’s also a cool 3-D map you can click on, though it takes an awfully long time to load. But this isn’t particularly illuminating, as all it shows is the binary choice of Obama/McCain. But the difference between a county or state going 50-49 Obama and 50-49 McCain isn’t as interesting to me as the difference between a county or state going 10-90 McCain as opposed to 10-90 Obama. We need maps that show gradations of red, purple, and blue. A map like this is more useful.

But rather than take the absolute results, what I would like to do is look at the Partisan Voting Index (with a doff of the hat to Charlie Cook for the term) for the states. What this does is take the states and compare them against the candidates’ national average. In other words, if a candidate wins nationally with 55 percent of the two-party vote, and wins a state with 55 percent of the two-party vote, the PVI is zero. This basically allows us to look at what states fall on the right and the left side of the political spectrum as it manifests in a particular election. More importantly, by taking the states and reducing them to the same baseline (e.g. R/D+0), it also allows us to compare elections with very different national results, to see how much the underlying map has changed.

With the amount of spending, advertising, registering, and organizing that occurred in this election, targeted as it was at certain states, we should expect to see significant distortions in the maps. This is especially true if a re-alignment is taking place, as re-alignments are almost always accompanied by substantial regions of the dominant parties electoral coalition breaking off. A classic example here are the 1928 and 1932 elections. Given the substantial upheaval in the electoral college, it should be unsurprising that in 1932, only four states were within a 2 points of their PVI in 1928.

Below are the relative maps for 2004 and 2008. Pure purple means that the state’s PVI is between -2 and 2; slightly bluer means a Dem PVI of 3-4; each gradation means another two points until you hit the darkest blue or red, which means a PVI of 10+.

I will let readers draw their own conclusions, but to me the maps look largely identical. Despite a billion dollars spent between the two candidates in carefully targeting states, each candidate ended up, relatively speaking, within 2.5 points of where their counterparts ended up four years earlier, in thirty-one states.

These include several critical swing states where heavy advertising, organizing, and registering of voters should have moved them more than the national average. In the end NM, NV, VA, and CO moved about as little as did states that were ignored by the campaigns such as VT, IL, CA, and ID. What states moved?

Kid has hand-foot-mouth disease (not a serious illness, but pretty annoying to a 15-month-old), so my longer analysis is going to have to wait a day or two.  I'll have plenty to say, but for the moment, believe it or not, Republicans appear to have dodged a bullet.  More later

For now, congratulations to President-elect Obama.  While I probably agree with about 3% of what you're going to try to do (more on that later), we'll have plenty of time for discussing that over the next four years.  For now, all Americans should enjoy the historic nature of this moment.  It should be a major step forward in race relations (whether the powerful entrenched interests who have a major stake in racial grievance mongering allow that to happen is another thing altogether).  From the time we're young, every child is taught that in America, anyone can grow up to be President.  Not all believe it.  But we've had plenty of proof over the past years that the Presidency is not limited to people born with silver spoons in their mouth, and now we have proof that it is not limited to people with a caucasian phenotype.  In that sense, it is a good day for all of America, and that is change even I can believe in.

Whether it is a good day overall for America in the long run depends on which Barack Obama shows up for the inauguration.  We saw two Obama's over the course of this campaign.  We were introduced to primary candidate Obama in the first half of the year.  This Barack Obama won on promises of hundreds of billions in new spending, a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, unconditional meetings with dictators, revision and/or abandonment of free trade agreements, swift passage of the Freedom of Choice Act, and a repudiation of the Reagan/Clinton/Bush approach to governing the economy.

Then there is the Obama who won the general election.  Based on what I saw through his advertisements in Virginia, this candidate won on promises to protect the right to keep and bear arms, a massive middle class tax cut, a health care plan somewhere in  the middle of a free-market appraoch and government-run health care, a net spending cut and continuous acknowledgement that government doesn't have all the answers to our problems.  This Barack Obama essentially ran as Bill Clinton's third term.

I firmly believe from past associations, voting records, and the various unscripted comments made over the course of the campaign that "primary candidate Obama" is the "real" Obama.  If that President Obama shows up, the economy, already sapped by the financial crisis and the cyclical close of a lengthy expansion, will not improve, the country will remain divided, and his party will have a rough election in 2010.  For all the talk of the desire for a new approach, exit polling shows the country to be barely more liberal than it has been since 1972.  If "Presidential candidate" Obama shows up to govern in spite of his instincts (much as Bill Clinton did for his second term), there could be a solidified political re-alignment in American politics.  We'll see what happens, but I hope for the good of the country that "Presidential candidate" Obama is who shows up. 

I guess I should also note that there has been "running from behind/coming under fire" Obama.  This is the Obama of "lipstick on a pig/old dead fish/you're likeable enough."  We only saw glimpses of this Obama, because there were so few moments where he didn't look to be on a course of winning his campaign.  But with Democrats firmly in control of the executive and legislative branches, at some point in the next year, Obama is going to be in bad political shape.  If "coming under fire" Obama looks anything like it did during the campaign, it will get very ugly.

In the meantime, I went over to Obama's tax calculator and was pleased to see that I am entitled to a $1,500 tax reduction.  I'll keep my fingers crossed.