Last Call

Ezra Klein discovers that the death of the Democratic Party in the South and the rise of Contract With America II is just a tad premature.

But I asked the crack poll team at The Washington Post to send me favorability numbers for the Democratic and Republican parties in 1994 and now. My hunch was that Democrats are looking a bit like they were in 1994, but that Republicans are looking way, way worse. That their attacks on Democrats have worked, but that they've dragged themselves down as well. I wasn't prepared, however, for these numbers:

That comes from the CBS/NYT poll, which shows Democrats outperforming their January 1994 selves, while Republicans are wildly underperforming their '90s predecessors. The numbers, however, were surprising enough that I wanted to check them again. So this comes from The Washington Post's poll.

Politics is generally viewed as a zero-sum game: When one party gains, the other loses. But Republicans have pursued a strategy turning politics into a negative-sum game: Both parties lose. They have effectively harmed the Democrats' agenda but done so at great cost to their own favorability numbers.

In other words, yes the Democrats are hurting in the South. But the Republicans are hurting far more. People are just goddamn fed up with these preening jackasses, and the majority of Americans just want to get the country back on its feet so they can have a clean shot at improving it. The Republicans do not have an alternative. They don't have any real viable plans, because the Republican plans over the last 30 years have resulted directly in a huge meltdown of our economy. They don't have anything other than "Obama is a Socialist/Fascist/Kenyan Usurper/America-hating Hippie/Sekrit Mooslim Terr'ist/HE'S BLACK HIDE THE WOMENFOLK!" No way to improve unemployment. No way to solve health care. No way to fix global warming. No way to do anything other than to hate Obama.

That's it.

Even folks in the South aren't buying it anymore. Obama Derangement Syndrome is not a solution to America's problems. Not everything Obama is doing is a viable solution either, but he's made headway on at least laying the foundation, and he's making progress on a lot of things. I give him a hard time but can you imagine where we'd be right now under Old Man McCain and Moose Lady? Jesus.

America is so sick of these idiots. 2010 is going to be a damn hard lesson for one of the two parties.