Mark Twain Was A Republican

And like Twain, and Paul McCartney almost a century later, and no matter how savagely eager the Democrats, and not a few conservatives, are to bury rather than praise them, the reports of the congressional GOP's death have been greatly exaggerated:

Last [Tuesday] night Democratic candidate Francine Busby failed to reach the 50% + 1 mark in her quest to take the seat formerly held by Republican Duke Cunningham. She finished in the low- to mid-40's....

The election will go to a June runoff, but this seems to me to have been the Democrats' only real chance at this seat. GOP candidates pulled in a majority of the vote - and it is hard to imagine that not happening in June.

The Democrats had everything going for them in this election. They had a corrupt felon-incumbent, they had low turnout, they had a well-financed challenger, and they had a divided Republican field. They had a district that has, in the last ten years, skewed Republican less and less. And they only managed to get about 8% more of the vote when they needed 14% more. In 2004, Busby pulled in 36%. This time around she won 43.9%.

This is roughly equal to how both Kerry and Gore did in the district in the last six years - and roughly what you would expect a Republican-leaning district to do with an open seat election: stay Republican by a slightly smaller margin than when the incumbent is running.

There is no other way to understand this but as a loss for the Democrats.

No other rational way, actually. As I wrote a few days ago, Donks think they're going to win back the House and Senate because they want to so badly, and they can't help conflating the two concepts. Fratricidal right-wingers, by contrast, want to blow up the governing coalition the movement spent three decades painstakingly constructing out of an aggrieved sense of puritanical indignation, rather like the wife who catches her husband cheating on her and immediately shrieks for a divorce without giving any thought to what will become of their children.

I freely acknowledge that in many fundamental ways the Republican majority has lost its way. That isn't in any serious dispute. But the answer isn't to throw out the proverbial baby with the poopy bathwater, and especially not in a time in which, utterly unlike 1992 (the last time the Right self-destructed, with inevitably fiery consequences nine years later), the fate of millions of American lives depend upon keeping power with the party that takes national security seriously.

My contention has been and remains that the latter will ultimately trump the former, and GOP voters will turn out in sufficient numbers to keep the Congress in Pachyderm hands, quite literally, because they want to live and stay that way. And the results of the special election in California's 50th District bear that out.

[Kudos to the RCP guys for coming back in off the ledge and returning to the sensible perspective....]