But a “surge?” C’mon now. Whatever they are, they’re decidedly not a dramatic change or a strong forward rush.

MW: Good to see ya’ out. I like the way you talk

Nope. A moderate Republican has at least some identifiably Republican policy positions. Perhaps you should name any two of Scozzafaza’s before you start suggesting that I’m the one who should check their facts. The fact is that in all her public policy positions, she was a liberal. Not a moderate, a liberal. (And that she was a “liberal Republican” is irrelevant.) Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se.

She* is anti-gun control, and wants to extend the Bush tax cuts. That’s two. She was opposed to health reform. Three.

Granted in the context of the GOP she’d be left-wing. But the GOP hasn’t managed 51% of the popular vote since 1988. And in 1988 young people were strongly opposed to socialism.

*I won’t even try to spell her name. My poor anglo brain can handle names up to three syllables, but her name has four. Also double-consonants, and ambiguous vowel sounds.

Given the fiscal train wreck that is the Obama administration, fiscal issues should take priority in that equation. Hopefully the social conservatives will now understand that they need to take the back seat in 2010. In the car – a necessary navigator – but from the back seat. If the fiscal conservatives are driving, the independents are on board.

EDITED: Wanted to get this in – The ultimate irony will be if Bill Owens casts the deciding in what is promising to be a very close vote in the House today. If that happens, perhaps conservatives will have their “Nader moment” and finally understand the consequences of not unifying behind a single conservative candidate.

I’d be happy if everyone got elected on their worth not their party affiliation, so I don’t see a problem here.

I haven’t seen the exit polling, but I’ll bet Democrat Bill Owens won by grabbing a large share of the independent, moderate voters who were ticked off at having a side-show of far-right Republicans come into their district. NY-23 may revert to Republican hands in 2010 if the GOP puts up a fiscal conservative, small government candidate that doesn’t stress social issues.

Hoffman was not running as a Republican, even though national Republicans came into the district to campaign for him. He had a number of other problems that showed him as far to the right as the committee-picked Republican candidate was far left, and I think he scared the electorate. I heard (but haven’t verified) that he appeared on Glen Beck’s show a few days before the election and called Beck his “mentor”. And he didn’t live in the district. He was a third party candidate that would have never won a primary in the district.

The lesson of the campaign is that while President Obama is still very popular, he doesn’t have “coat tails”. People like him, but they aren’t buying his soap. He campaigned pretty vigorously in NJ, but couldn’t help Corzine recover his reputation. The independents who decide our elections still like Obama, but they evaluate each race based on “the man” and not the party.

Blue Dog Democrats have to be worried about this. Even if the leader of their party comes to campaign for them, an immensely popular president who draws huge crowds, they know that doesn’t translate into votes for them on election day. That probably means that Cap and Trade is done for, and Health Insurance Reform is going to be difficult in its current (?) form.

Who’s fault is that? Dede’s, a moderate or liberal Republican who has served as such for years in the NYS Assembly for the offense of being a moderate or a liberal GOPer? For a lot of reasons, I strongly suspect that left to a head-to-head turn-out contest in a special, Dede would have won handlly over Owens.

Or the fault of the Hoffman-Palin-Beck-Hannity-Thompson-Pawlenty-Conservative Party axis which asserted that Dede was just a bridge too far? Well, they blew up that bridge; the NY GOP is not polluted by Dede’s deviationism, and Hoffman (who not incidentally struck me as a really bad candidate and maybe even a bit dim-witted) has a shot at running against Owens next year. Meanwhile, Pelosi has another vote to pass bills — not just healthcare — that everyone agrees will be really hard to pass. Good job, guys.

And they want to take this act on the road — to knock Kirk and Simmons and Christ and others up side the head!

How about this – I am ready to double down on a second bottle of 15 year old Laphroiag against the libation of your choice. I’ll even give you a better proposition than I got from Reynolds (which is a locked and loaded wager) – I say the Dems lose ground in both the House and Senate in 2010.

What do you think I am, a sucker? OF COURSE the Repubs are going to gain ground. But the gains will be minimal at best.

Also, look at the polls…Congressional Republicans have a lower overall approval rating. That’s very different than 1994.

Let me repeat that…Dems added to their majority in the House last night. In California the seat was already Democratic, but in New York the Dems gained one. – jg

ummm… There was no actual Republican still running in NY-23.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…the only people that voters like less than Congressional Dems are Congressional Repubs… So I ask again…what Republican resurgence? – JG

You cannot be serious. This is wishful thinking on an epic scale.

How about this – I am ready to double down on a second bottle of 15 year old Laphroiag against the libation of your choice. I’ll even give you a better proposition than I got from Reynolds (which is a locked and loaded wager) – I say the Dems lose ground in both the House and Senate in 2010.

Where did liberals get what they wanted, aside from two House races in California?

To name two off the top of my head: Maine voted to permit the use of medical marijuana, and Washington voted to grant gay and lesbian couples all the state-granted benefits given to heterosexual couples. There are others–local bond measures, mayoral candidates and such–which I’m sure you can find if you care to. This election really doesn’t signal a major shift for or against either party.

Simon, people are demanding equal rights.

They have that now. What they are demanding is creation of a new right: the right to marry a person of the same sex. Whether that idea is good, bad, or indifferent, it is inescapably new. It’s almost a mirror image of the old saw—Anatole France’s coinage, I think—that the law, in its majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges. You could argue that the rich are less likely to run afoul of that proscription than the poor, but you could not seriously deny that such a law affords poor and rich equal rights.

Fact: the conservative base would deny gays all special rights and have fought against them in the past.

Interesting. First you say they’re just “demanding equal rights.” Two paragraphs later, you concede that it is a “[f]act” that the dispute is over the granting or denying of special rights. The latter is correct.

As far as your claim that Scozzafava was a liberal who turned into a Republican…check your facts. She has been a Republican all of her life, and got the endorsement of Gingrich, King and the NRA. But was she a moderate Republican? Yep.

Nope. A moderate Republican has at least some identifiably Republican policy positions. Perhaps you should name any two of Scozzafaza’s before you start suggesting that I’m the one who should check their facts. The fact is that in all her public policy positions, she was a liberal. Not a moderate, a liberal. (And that she was a “liberal Republican” is irrelevant.) Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se.

Prior to all this hysteria, gays had the exact same rights as straights vis-à-vis marriage: they could marry a consenting member of the opposite sex. They may have lacked any desire to use that right, but they still had it, just as your Miranda rights exist independently of any occasion to use them.

Simon, people are demanding equal rights. They’re not saying they had the rights and then they were taken away. Also, the idea that somebody could have exercised rights as a gay person if they lied and acted straight is, to put it bluntly, absolutely nonsensical. Come on man, this is weird even for you. They could marry somebody they don’t want to marry to get the rights that married people have? Good lord.

As far as your claim that I’m saying that my points amount to a claim that there’s an abridgement of current laws…come on. That’s not what I said, that’s not what I meant and I’m done with these logic traps.

Fact: the conservative base would deny gays all special rights and have fought against them in the past.

Fact: the conservative base fought to keep sodomy outlawed, therefore trying to keep sex between gay men criminalized.

Fact: the conservative base pushed to create an amendment to our Constitution that would codify discrimination based on sexual orientation into one of our founding documents.

You can say I’m conflating things all you want, but I started this discussion talking about the right wingers being anti-gay and ALL of these things fall under that umbrella.

However, and back to my original point, all I’m saying is that NY-23 shows what happens when those forces get into the mix…Republicans lose a possible swing district.

As far as your claim that Scozzafava was a liberal who turned into a Republican…check your facts. She has been a Republican all of her life, and got the endorsement of Gingrich, King and the NRA. But was she a moderate Republican? Yep. And your party needs more of those if you hope to make a dent in the east. That’s how the Dems were able to make gains in the South and Midwest and it’s the only way Republicans will not become a regional party.

1) A New Jersey House member elected on Obama’s coat tails announced that he’ll vote no on the health care bill

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/11/06/a-nj-democrat-says-no-to-health-bill/?mod=rss_WSJBlog

2) Steny Hoyer says he still doesn’t have the votes to pass the bill tomorrow and it may “slip” into Sunday or even next week.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29236.html

(Bet Hoyer wished he had that NJ vote.)

Then, there’s the Texas Democrat who chose today to announce’s changing parties.

http://www.texastribune.org/stories/2009/nov/06/hopsons-choice/

(OK, he might have changed anyway, but he’s a conservative member who obviously thinks he’s no longer going to win as a Democrat.)

The health bill probably will still pass the House — but my bet as of now is that it will just barely squeak by as Pelosi and Hoyer and Obama promise the kitchen sink to woo a few more Blue Dogs. But a narrow vote (with zero Republicans) will tilt things toward the Senate where opposition is more solid and much less subject to pressure and blandishments.

Do we really imagine that everything would be the same if Deeds and Corzine had won?

However, you’ll note I said “stop moderate Repubs from running” which is exactly what happened in NY-23. Go read the blogs.

That is not what happened in NY23. Your assumption is that Scozzafaza was a moderate republican. She was not. She was a liberal who obtained the GOP nomination in a back room deal.

The fact that Scofazza was pro-gay rights was a big factor in the blogosphere and a key reason Palin came in and threw her weight around…which ended up turning a Republican seat into a Democratic seat. So the proof is in the electoral pudding.

Case in point, numerous mainstream Republican politicians bemoaned the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and tried to get a vote to put the definition of marriage in the constitution! I don’t know how you get much more anti-gay than trying to criminalize their sexuality and deny their rights FOREVER.

This is a very problematic statement. First, you conflate the sodomy laws with a change of the definition of marriage, although those are distinct issues. They don’t become any less distinct just because some people think they’re both important issues. Second, you phrase the marriage issue as if it involves the denial of a preexisting right, and that just isn’t so. The federal marriage amendment was misguided, but it didn’t deny anyone “their rights”: it prevented the creation of a new right, one not only unheard of but unthinkable until only a few years ago. Prior to all this hysteria, gays had the exact same rights as straights vis-à-vis marriage: they could marry a consenting member of the opposite sex. They may have lacked any desire to use that right, but they still had it, just as your Miranda rights exist independently of any occasion to use them. You may not ever exercise your second amendment rights, but you still have them. What the marriage movement wants is the creation of an entirely new, unprecedented right: the right to marry someone of the same sex. To say no to that is not to deny or curtail an existing right, it is to decline to grant a new right.

And maybe we should grant that right. I take no position on that point. It is faulty analysis, however, to deny that it is the creation vel non of a new right we are talking about, rather than abridgement of an existing one.

Even if the lesson is learned, primary challenges to viable candidates will probably continue, and that is unfortunate (the attempt in California to derail the nomination of Fiorina, who can beat Boxer, in favor of DeVore, who cannot, is an particularly counterproductive example). Nevertheless, while primary challenges will continue, I think that the idea of abandoning the GOP for third party vehicles is now discredited, and that the establishment will think twice about which candidates to back. All this promotes party unity, which is very much to the good.

And that lesson has no meaningful cost for an obvious (if sometimes overlooked) reason: in the House, to paraphrase one of my heroes, the late, great Speaker Thomas B. Reed, the majority is there to govern, and the minority is there to watch. The House is institutionally structured to be a singularly submissive spouse to a united majority party, a story that you see replayed throughout its history in Robert Remini’s book on the subject. Given the dynamics and mechanics of the House of Representatives generally, and the party composition of this House specifically, one more (or less) Republican vote in the 111th U.S. House makes no difference at all to anything at all.

Far more importantly, this outcome — yes, even accounting for a genuine Dem pickup in NY-23 where the right wing basically gave a seat to the Dems — puts an end to all that triumphalist talk about Obama’s election heralding a new realignment, the end of the GOP except as a permanent minority party of angry southern white men, the reshaping of the electoral map, coloring Virginia and other southern and western “red” states “blue,” due to vast demographic changes, blah, blah and blah.

It puts an end to talk of an immediate and total realignment. That talk was premature at best.

The 2010 electorate, tho, will almost certainly favor the GOP more than the 2008 electorate for the soimple reason that young people and minorities tend to skip mid-term elections.

But by 2012 the coalition that earned Reagan the White House twice loses to the coalition that Reagan stomped twice. Which means the GOP is going to have to grow it’s tent, or it will die as a national party.

And I have to agree with Justin on his main point. Gubenatorial elections are good for a party to win, but have almost no national implications. For example nobody would notice if the GOP forgot to run congressional candidates in CT, VT, or RI, but all three have GOP Governors.