Political recovery

Kirsten Powers:

...

Not that long ago, Democrats were licking their wounds following a second defeat by a man they viewed as having the intellectual capacity of a mop.

In 2004, the specter of Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" loomed. George W. Bush didn't just win another election; he gained ground among Hispanics and even the most loyal of Democratic voters, African-Americans.

Explanations for Democratic losses abounded. Liberals predictably argued for a move to the left, moderates for a move to the middle. There was much talk of "fighting back" and "standing up for Democratic principles," although nobody was sure what "Democratic principles" really meant anymore.

Rob Stein, an attorney and former Clinton administration official, wowed Democratic insiders with a PowerPoint presentation detailing the funding, management and overall infrastructure the conservative movement had built over the last three decades. In 2005, wealthy Democratic donors founded the Democracy Alliance to fund organizations to fight this behemoth. Dem activists busied themselves trying to create a carbon copy of this infrastructure of think tanks, sophisticated voter lists, media watchdog groups and talk radio outlets.

Many Democrats had begun fretting even earlier. The Center for American Progress, launched by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta in 2003, became a sort of liberal Heritage Foundation. Air America radio, meant to challenge the dominance of conservative talk radio, began programming in 2004. Media Matters came on the scene as the left's answer to conservative media monitoring. Another progressive think tank, Third Way, appeared in January 2005.

Many people began to refer to this infrastructure as "the (Hillary) Clinton shadow government." Run mostly by former Clinton administration staff or people supported by the Clintons (the former first couple raised money for Media Matters), many assumed that these groups would pave the way for a Hillary Clinton administration.

For them, Barack Obama was a young, impressive freshman senator from Illinois who gave a rousing 2004 convention speech - a guy with a bright future way down the road.

Little did they know.

Four years later, the "permanent Republican majority" is a distant memory and there is talk of America becoming a center-left country.

The reason for this is two-fold: the failure of GOP governance in the last eight years and the emergence of a powerful leader in the person of Obama.

...

I think there is another reasons for the failure. The Democrats were very effective in a dishonest way of projecting failure on the part of Republicans. The failure of Democrats in Louisiana was projected upward to the Bush administration. Democrats were eager to project failure in Iraq because of the difficulties of the war there.

What this tells us as conservatives is that it will be important to demonstrate Democrat failure. It will be more difficult for Republicans because the media will still be carrying Obama's brief and will be hostile to Republican claims of failure. But they can only hide and excuse it for so long. At some point it will be too obvious to ignore. The fact is that liberalism does not work. It destroys more than it lifts.

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