Perspective

Simply Perfect.  Really.

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John Cole: You Just Can’t Handle the Truth

It has now been about 36 hours since the most definitive victory for conservatism ever, yet according to my sources, Obama is still President, the Senate still has 60 Democrats, and the House gained a Democrat.
I guess you have to live in the beltway or work for a cable network to truly understand election results.

 digby: Put It On A Bumper Sticker

So Andrea Mitchell again spent the morning spinning the election on Tuesday as a terrible defeat for the Democrats that puts their entire agenda in jeopardy. She even went so far as to ask Jim Clyburn:

Let me ask you about the election, though, because Nancy Pelosi was talking about this as a victory. How can you with a straight face, I've known you for along time, how can you call the NY 23rd a victory compared to losing New Jersey and Virginia?

Andrea Mitchell is a Stepford reporter. Here's what Pelosi said:

"From my perspective, we won last night. We had one race that we were engaged in -- it was in northern New York. It was a race where a Republican has held a seat since the Civil War, and we won that seat. So from our standpoint, no. We had a candidate that was victorious who supports the health-care reform... So from our standpoint, we picked up votes last night, one in California [CA-10] and one in New York."

The last I heard, Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, not the Chair of the Democratic Governors Association. As Clyburn patiently pointed out, she got another vote for health care and a more liberal member in John Garamendi. And this is on top of another off-year seat she retained earlier with Scott Murphy's victory. All three of those seats could have theoretically gone to Republicans and they didn't. (Even the California seat was the one held by DLC darling Ellen Tauscher --- who was replaced by someone far more liberal.) So she's actually three for three in the off year elections, all of whom ran on health care reform. But I guess that's actually a losing record for Pelosi.

The fatuous gasbags have settled on the theme that the Democrats suffered a devastating setback to their agenda on Tuesday. This is despite the fact that as Clyburn pointed out, the only candidates who were actually running on the national agenda were those running for congress --- and the Democrats won. Nonetheless, the election has been decreed to be a precursor to a Democratic rout in 2010 and, more importantly, the reason for that will be because the Democrats have been far, far too liberal for the country. As usual.

I believe this is because they truly think these teabaggers represent a deep discontent with liberalism among all Real Americans. (They are, after all, white, middle aged folks dressed in red, white and blue, waving flags all around. Just like in Mayberry in 1955. ) They cannot shake the idea that these right wing nutballs represent the silent majority. Therefore, it simply isn't possible that the Democrats could be winning and losing on issues unrelated to these particular people's far out, radical ideology. They may think they're weird, but they have actually been persuaded that it's because of their liberal bias that they think that.

The idea that Jon Corzine could lose because he's presided over a great recession and springs from the gilded plutonomy that's widely believed to have precipitated it is unfathomable to them. It simply must be because Barack Obama is too liberal. It's impossible for them to believe that Virginia is a true swing state that has no real ideological center and so elects its leadership on the basis of individual issues and personal appeal. It has to be because the Democrats in congress have pushed the country too far to the left. It is the only plot line they know. (And they have been very successfully mau-maued by Roger Ailes and co. into second guessing themselves if they dream of deviating from that path.)
Mitchell went on to laugh and laugh with her colleague Savannah Guthrie over the absolutely ludicrous administration talking point that yesterday wasn't a total defeat for their agenda.

Guthrie: And every perception I have is that they really believe it! They think that these governors races are off year elections and yes, they lost independents and that has got to be troubling to them, but they say "by the time you get to these off year elections, these are folks that who come out are independents that lean Republican. The independents that lean Democrat by a large margin have become Democrats." So they have an answer for every argument you give and they're really not buying into the premise that they're in trouble here because of the Governor's races.
(laughing again) They really love to talk about NY 23 though, Andrea, because ...
Mitchell: NY 23!
Guthrie (still laughing): Yeah, NY 23 all the way.... because the Democrat won a seat long held by Republicans.
Mitchell: We should bumper sticker it. They probably already are...

This, in case you hadn't noticed, was on the allegedly liberal cable network's primary daytime news . Oddly enough (or not) it's not all that different from what's being said on Fox. Funny how that works.