I'm pleasantly surprised by Owens taking the NY 23. The undecideds decided it, and their doing so supports the idea that there is a sane middle in the American electorate, and the ones in upstate NY, even though they lean conservative, were not going to be manipulated by the Palins, Becks, and Armeys.
It's more significant that the Virginia race was won by a Republican who distanced himself from the Palin wing of his party than that a Dem lost.
I hope the message that finger-in-the-wind "moderates" take from this is that for now, at least, the teabaggers are mostly bark with hardly any bite.
Movement conservatives will not learn a thing from these failures; they'll continue to do what they do because they are irrationally driven and don't care about practical politics. But their future relevance depends on their usefulness for entrenched power, which will not foot the bill for a strategy that does not get results. If entrenched power pulls away from movement conservatives, they pull away the funding and the organizational coordination that has made these crazies important players in the political sphere for decades now. Without it, movement conservatism falls back to the irrelevant fringe where it belongs.
This strategy has worked for so long now, observers like me have become resigned to its always always working, but maybe we're seeing the beginning of the end here for movement conservatism. The craziness of August and the emergence of Beck is the reductio ad absurdum of the fundamental irrational logic that drives movement conservatism since Reagan. Movement conservatives who repudiate Bush as havaing betrayed the Reagan legacy don't see it, of course, but Cheney/Bush, Beck/Palin follows from Reagan as nausea follows from eating bad meat. Maybe, just maybe, the country, even with its low-information voters, is beginning the realize that the future health of the country simply does not lie with that lot.
This is probably too optimistic, but it's not impossible. We'll see how it plays out.
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