Democrats brace for the fall they created themselves

Knoxville's MetroPulse, the area's standard liberal "free alternative weekly" bemoans what its staff sees as a developing 2010 political trend-toward Republicans-in a staff blog post from Frank Carlson:

It's beginning to feel a lot like 2006, when Republicans lost majorities in the House and Senate. Although we still don't have numbers like that, the momentum does feel like it's shifting towards the GOP.

Meantime, back in the real A'murka, Republican Stephen Fincher has collected $620,000 in three months of campaigning for retiring Democratic Rep. John Tanner's 8th district seat. Yesterday I mentioned  Farmer Fincher had earned $300,000 in his first quarter to State Sen. Roy Herron's $675,000.  

You know it could be bad in 2010 for Democrats and liberals when some of the most dedicated liberals in this part of the country are warning within their press organs for their people to prepare for the coming political apocalypse. Furthermore, when Democrats become scared that a gospel-singing farmer might defeat an old political veteran like State Sen. Roy Herron for an open congressional seat, the Tennessee Democratic Party appears to be in far worse shape than previously expounded on in these pages.

For all of the talk among dedicated Democrats about politics running in cycles, what we are seeing develop in Tennessee and around the country is beyond the mere cyclical comeback of Republicans. If current political trends continue, Democrats will have squandered their majority status in less than four years' time. The sad part for Democrats (and pleasing part for Republicans) is that every bit of it could have been prevented.

In 2008, national Democrats, particularly those within the party's liberal activist wing, were warned by many within their own party that beneath Barack Obama's talk of "hope" and "change" was an agenda which, while very pleasing to many people on the Left, would not make the average American voter very happy (it should be noted that in many jurisdictions, Obama did well by relying on the votes of people who generally don't vote and won't be voting in this year's primary or General Election), and that the voting populace might be inclined to voice their dissatisfaction with the President at the voting booth in 2010, and that not only Congressional Democrats, but State and local Democrats might suffer. Hillary Clinton famously warned of the unrealism of Obama and his crowd during the 2008 presidential primaries, and the hard Left chose to ignore that warning.

Then in Tennessee in 2009, after Democrats had lost the majority in both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly for the first time ever (depending on which historian you ask), the solution of the hard Left in Tennessee was to choose an Obamacrat, Chip Forrester, as their party chairman. That choice has worked out very well-for Republicans, who have won special election upon special election since Forrester took over the Democrats and look poised to expand their House majority and perhaps their Senate majority as well.

America is, at its political core, a center-right nation. Bill Clinton understood that, which is why he ran on a centrist platform and abandoned the most left-wing portions of his original agenda when it became clear that voters simply were not going to put up with it. The leaders of the national Democratic Party, and increasingly the leadership in Tennessee, are living in a fantasy world that says voters embrace the Obama agenda when the numbers tell us otherwise.

If the Tennessee Democratic leadership continue on their current path-along with the party's national leaders, we can expect Republican majorities for a very long time indeed.