From Katrina, to Iraq, to Jack Abrahamof, we have seen the failure of conservative government.  The Bush administration has exposed the governing philosophy of conservatism for the sham it always was.  Conservatives don't believe government can or even should work.  They say this quite openly.  

Therefore, they have a vested interest in government not working.  If government did work, it would undermine everything they say they believe in.  When government is in the hands of people who don't want government to work, you can expect that government to be riddled with scandal and incompetence, considered suitable only for distributing government contracts--taxpayers' money--to its own financial backers.

It's too bad that a great man and a swell fellow like Tom Daschle got beat, especially by a pious nitwit like John Thune.  (I understand that Daschle and his wife bought some property in Washington, D.C. which apparently was a sign that they no longer had "South Dakota values.")  

The other thing we need to do is confront the red states.  We have to change some minds.  Self-identified conservatives out-number self-identified liberals by a little better than 3-2.  As long as that continues, we are going to start every election behind.  I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think it's time to reclaim the word "liberal."  

There are lots of us, and what's more, we have the Bible on our side.  Jesus said fifty times more on the subject of wealth than he ever said about sex.  He talked about the poor all the time, but said not a word about homosexuality.  His language toward the religiously pious was blistering--"brood of snakes," "hypocrites," "white-washed tombs"--but he always had a word of hope and welcome for those on the social and economic fringe.  

For the United States Senate, the GOP elected a person with signs of late dementia (Kentucky), a guy who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud (Oklahoma), a guy who made back-door deals with David Duke (Louisiana), and a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired (South Carolina).  

And people say there's something wrong with us?  We're not the ones who foisted this menagerie of nincompoops on the rest of the country.  The Republicans did.  I'd say they have more problems than we do.

In this book, justly called "the must read of the year," Thomas Franks asks why Kansas keeps voting Republican even though it is not in its economic interest to do so.  He looks at economic decline all across the plains states and asks why these folks keep voting for people whose policies accelerate that very decline.

The religious right did turn out and it was, of course, solidly Republican.  This has been the case ever since Reagan, though perhaps some people are just now noticing.  While conservative evangelical voting patterns weren't any different than in the past, their level of activity probably went up a notch or two, though several other slices of the electorate did so as well--young people, for example, who turned out well, despite initial reports, yet whose over-all share of the vote was only slightly higher than in 2000.  (They went strong for Kerry, 55-45.)

Forget what you've heard about religious conservatives and rural voters swinging the election to Bush.  They didn't.  In fact, the percentage of people choosing "moral values" as the reason for their vote actually declined from both 2000 and 1996.  Moreover, Bush's percentage of the rural vote also declined slightly this time.  

There appears to be three "tilts" that gave Bush his 3% edge.  There was a slight--a very slight--tilt to Bush based on his leadership during a time of war.  It takes quite a bit to unseat a president when the bullets are flying, particularly when Bush was able to promote his leadership as being about something large and important, i.e. the promotion of freedom.  (Personally, I think the bin Laden video probably gave Bush a bump of a percentage point or two.  It shifted the attention from Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster of the past 50 years, to terrorism, supposedly Bush's long suit.)