A Bit of Perspective

Great column by my nearly-almost-employer Arianna Huffington. You remember Arianna, surely? She's the nearly-almost-Republican candidate for First Lady of California who saw the light and ran for Governer as a progressive. Doesn't ring a bell? She's the foreign chick who used to pretend to flirt with the increasingly troll-like Bill Maher on "Politically Incorrect." Yeah, her.

Anyway, today's column picks apart the idea that Democrats are somehow doomed to permanent minority status. She points out (quite astutely, with quotes!) how despondant Republicans were after losing the 1992 election. And just look at them now...ruling the country with an iron fist like they've been running the show for decades. Check out this telling remark, for example, from my good buddy, The Right Reverend John Ashcroft:

“The Republican Party needs to shake itself loose from top-down management, undergo a grassroots renewal and adopt a vigorous, positive agenda that flows from the priorities, views and values of citizens who involve themselves in that process. . . . Our party needs to frame its priorities more in terms of what we’re for rather than what we are against.”

That's exactly the kind of demoralized argument I'm reading on lefty websites every day. It's also not at all what the Republicans did, unless you consider shipping Arabs to Cuba by night and then torturing them in secret for several years a "vigorous, positive agenda." But that's not the point.

The point is, there's no need for hand-wringing and despair. We missed the election by about 3.5 million people, which is a whole fuckload, for sure. But it is not an insurmountable number. There's a ton of people in this country. A ton. Even in places that don't seem to have a lot of people, like Iowa City, which houses several tens of thousands of people while appearing about as cosmopolitan as Ice Station Zebra.