Realignment

There's a new sentiment in the air, if the people who ask questions at my speaking events are any guide. I love these events, even though I am probably better at staying home and writing. I argue with people more than encouraging them, I'm afraid. Not most people. Just certain types of questioners.

It used to be 9-11 theorists. Then it was doomsayers wallowing in their post-Obama hope overdose. Now it's people who are afraid of majority rule and want to avoid it. At a recent book-tour stop there were three examples. First, one gentleman wanted to impose testing and allow only the smartest 10 percent of Americans to vote. The basis for this was his claim that "most people just don't have the sense that god gave a cat."

Second, a professor told me that if we didn't impose checks on majority rule the teabaggers would take over the United States just as the Nazis did Germany.

By David Swanson

I'm not a big fan of post-partisan America, a notion that seems to amount to running the government through two political parties but taking care that one of them not perform in any significant way better than the other one. But I am a fan of the idea, which nobody ever seems to consider, of actually disempowering parties.

That idea has a precedent in the first dozen years or so of our republic whose Constitution never planned for party rule, although nonpartisanship would obviously have to look very different today. I suspect we could imagine ways of making party-free government work if we tried. At the moment, however, Americans' political thinking is so party-saturated, that any talk of opposing parties is met with the question "Which one?" or with the statement "Yeah, I'm for a third party too!"

By Dave Lindorff

Maybe symbolism is just symbolism, but the optimist in me says that
Barack Obama's invitation to former Communist and life-long political
activist Pete Seeger (along with Bruce Springstein and 89-year-old
Pete's full-throated grandson Tao) to sing Woody Guthrie's anthem This Land is Your Land,
and the fact that the once blacklisted folk legend chose to do not just
the feel-good, approved-for-public-school-music-class-use verses, but all
the verses, including Woody's long-censored "commie" verses, and that
Obama was right there singing those verses along with the rest of the
million people on the Mall, has to mean something.

While most coverage of the Chambliss-Martin runoff has focused on the fact that Democrats will not get a filibuster-proof majority, there's a deeper story here. On Election Day, Saxby Chambliss beat Jim Martin by only 3%. Just four weeks later, Chambliss won the runoff by 15%. What the heck happened to Georgia voters?

Obviously Obama wasn't on the ballot, and many Democrats who turned out on Election Day for Obama were not highly motivated to vote again for Martin, a decent but uncharismatic candidate.

By David Swanson

The debate among progressive activists and commentators in recent weeks has tended to range from the leave-Obama-alone-and-he'll-fix-everything position to the stage-a-protest-at-Obama's-house-for-the-next-month position, including numerous stances in between those extremes. What all these positions share is acceptance of the incredible shift of power from Congress to the White House that we have seen in just the last eight years. It is in these concluding moments of the Bush-Cheney era that Congress's coffin is being constructed just outside our window, and I'm afraid that the peace and justice movement is picking flowers to bring to the funeral.

The CNN/Opinion Research poll has incredible numbers:

59 percent of those questioned said Democratic control of both the executive and legislative branches will be good for the country, compared with 38 percent saying such one-party control will be bad...

So the Republican mantra that America is a center-right country that doesn't want Obama's agenda to succeed is one more Big Lie.

The poll also indicates that the public has a positive view of the Democratic Party, with 62 percent saying they have a favorable opinion and 31 percent an unfavorable opinion of the party. For the Republicans, a majority, 54 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of the GOP while 38 percent hold a positive view.

Barack Obama took Howard Dean's pioneering concept of an Internet-powered campaign and raised it to unbelievable levels, resulting in the landslide election of America's first black President.

Today we learned Obama built an email list of 10 million progressive activists. (Ari Melber says 11 million, representing an incredible 16% of his voters.) So what's next for Obama's online machine, a.k.a. MyBO? David Carr is spot-on:

Here's a graph by Andrew Gelman (h/t Paul Krugman) that brilliantly refutes all the nonsense that America is a "center-right nation."

As you can see, House Democrats received over 50% of the two-party vote in every election since 1946 except 1994. And even in the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, Republicans only got 52% of the two-party vote.

Jerome Karabel offers six excellent reasons why Obama's victory looks like a realignment:

Harris & VandeHei did a good job of describing the massive shift in power from conservatives to Obama, which is nothing short of a revolution.

The rout of the Republican Party, and the accompanying gains by Democrats in Congress, mean that Barack Obama will assume office with vastly more influence in the nation’s capital than most of his recent predecessors have wielded.

The only exceptions suggest the magnitude of the moment. Power flowed in unprecedented ways to George W. Bush in the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It flowed likewise to Lyndon B. Johnson after his landslide in 1964.