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I have been relatively silent after the 2006 Elections, watching the coverage from a distance while trying to maintain the illusion that I am still a graduate student. There seems to be at least four streams of thought regarding what happened on Election Day 2006: 1. Democrats Won - there is a entire school of thought, mostly coming from Democratic activists, that the Democrats out-organized the Republicans and beat them at their own game. In this stream of thought, the dynamics were good for the Democrats but 2006 would not have been such a huge success without a well-organized 50-state strategy. 2. Republicans Lost - this view, most popular among Republican activists, is that the body count from the war and the ethical scandals of key GOP leaders were too great a force. Those who hold this view contend that if it were not for their organizing efforts, they would have lost the 50+ seats that Democratic alien from a distant planet strategist James Carville predicted (handily, his prediction came after the election). 3. Conservatives Won - there is a third opinion that 2006 was a victory for conservatives. This idea is promoted by those who contend that George Bush is actually a big government liberal using conservative lingo to shill for big business cronies. Thus, Republicans and independents who voted against the GOP were voting against the growth in debt, as well as voting against the Iraq invasion on the basis that is was a significant breach of traditional conservative foreign policy. Not surprisingly, this is a viewed held by people like Rush Limbaugh and others who have much to gain financially from protecting the conservative brand. 4. Libertarians Won - There is another stream of thought that contends libertarians won on Election Day. People who hold this view claim that laissez faire voters were incensed by the Terry Schiavo incident, the SCOTUS decision on eminent domain and the Patriot Act, and that is was the ever-increasing reach of government that voters reacted against. Can I choose all of the above? Or some of the above, depending on the race? I have managed or consulted on over 30 political campaigns in my life (all Republican, by the way, for those of you who think I am some raging liberal). Each campaign has its own character, based on the dynamics of the time, the dynamics of the candidate and their opponent, and the dynamics of the district. Even hugely national years, like 2006 and 1994 before it, are still comprised of thousands of local races, from US Senate and Governor, all the way down to the property value administrator. We live in a time when there is a large and influential class of people whose sole job is to tell us what just happened. Our interest in having life explained to us is behind the 24-hour news cycle, as well as the growth in the blogosphere. But I wonder if this phenomenon, this need for answers, is healthy. This seems especially true given that most of the people we get answers from we do not know. They are distant bloggers, or faces on a television screen. Not people we live in community with, not people whose absence from our lives would matter. This may just be the grousings of a cranky former politico. But how many of us, before the last election, got together with our neighbors and hashed through the choices? How many of us went to a candidate forum, or even know a candidate? I fear that our keyboards are becoming a proxy for real enagement in people's lives. I am not saying that the virtual is not "real," or some other silly Luddite notion. I am instead contending that we are largely uninvested in people's lives and spend too much time asking people we do not know to explain our own lives.
Original content by: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Willzhead/~3/50082526/and_the_answer_.html.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.