Confidence versus Recklessness

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E.J. Dionne is happy. Democrats are taking the Virginia election, especially as a sign of a rebound. Dionne, like other Liberals, thinks that one win over a bad campaign means the good times are returning. Howard Fineman of Newsweek thinks that Democrats can win if they “run as a moderate or run on competence (or both), and surf to victory on voters’ disdain for President Bush and his party’s corrosive ad tactics.”

Hey guys, Kaine took 52% of the vote, in a campaign he was easily winning for the last 2 months. While there are lessons to be learned here, one of the biggest should be to not read tea leaves into earthquakes. Calling Harry Reid’s tantrum on the Senate floor “an outside, grassroots game” is just idiotic. Pretending that anyone not already contributing to the DNC has any interest in a persecution of Karl Rove or Vice-President is no way to convince the American public that you have matured from the rants that convinced even the DLC that Howard Dean could not win the White House.

Fred Barnes has the gist of it, in his Daily Standard article “Sound and Fury” (as in signifying nothing); Barnes points out that “both had Democratic governors coming into yesterday's election. Both will continue to. Thus, there was no change, no earthquake, no reordering of the political universe. Ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.”

Good advice.