If at First You Don’t Succeed, Blame Somebody Else

NYT Opinionator

Are there any bright spots for Republicans in last night’s results? Chris Bowers of MyDD.com notes that the Republicans did not pick up a single House seat, Senate seat or governorship that was held by the Democrats on Monday. “That breaks every record for futility,” Bowers writes. “No one can ever do worse than they did this year.” At The American Spectator blog, David Hogberg manfully tries to look on the sunny side of defeat anyway. “Well, let’s emphasize the positive, what little of it there is,” Hogberg writes. “Governor Tim Pawlenty defied the polls and hung on in Minnesota. On ballot initiatives, all of the bans on same-sex marriage passed, as did the ban on affirmative action in Michigan — despite it being outspent by something like 10-to-1. And that’s about it.”

It’s hard to make lemonade when you don’t even have lemons to work with. So most conservative opinion-slingers prefer to engage in post-election finger-pointing. Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says it’s all John McCain’s fault: “Handed a large majority, the G.O.P. frittered it away. The chief fritterer was Senator McCain and his Gang of 14 and Kennedy-McCain immigration bill,” Hewitt writes. He also offers President Bush some of the worst political advice of the season: “Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available.”

Ryan Sager, on the other hand, says “the immigration issue is an utter political loser.” (Matthew Continetti concurs.) Sager writes on his personal blog:

I don’t see any major race (or any minor one, for that matter) where immigration saved an otherwise doomed Republican. Santorum banged that drum hard and lost. Graf banged that drum and only that drum and couldn’t get any traction with it — even in a border state.

I happen to support a Wall Street Journal style policy of open borders. But as a political matter it’s also clear: Restrictionism is bad politics. Republicans need to keep winning the West, and the West is increasingly Hispanic. We can’t turn the whole region into California.

At The Weekly Standard (get back to Midterm Madness, kiddo!), Continetti blames an excessive reliance on the Southern Strategy:

The lesson of 2006 is that the South is not enough space to build a national governing majority. You have to branch out to other parts of the country, such as the Interior West, Pacific Coast, Northeast Corridor, Midwest, and elsewhere. Instead Democrats are surging in those places, and Republicans are increasingly confined to (high-growth) areas in the Sun Belt.

Continetti concludes, “So the geographical sphere of Democratic power has expanded, while the sphere of Republican power has contracted. That’s clearly bad news for the G.O.P. — in 2006 and beyond.”

A “weirdly happy” David Brooks blames the Republican members of Congress: “[T]here would be something wrong for the country if the Republicans got to act this way in the House and then keep their majority,” he writes at Midterm Madness, TimesSelect’s group campaign blog. “That would be a sign we’d become a one-party state.”

Some contributors to National Review’s The Corner appear too dispirited to partake in the ritual orgy of recriminations (usually a Democratic ritual, but it has bipartisan appeal) just yet. Instead, gallows humor is the order of the day. National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez predicts President Bush will re-nominate Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Jonah Goldberg uncorks a Simpsons reference: “I for one welcome our new Democratic overlords.” And John Podhoretz blames Diebold voting machines for stealing the election for the Democrats.