Kaus on Conventional Wisdom

Kaus reports on what he thinks will be the new shift in conventional wisdom: the Democrats will do better in the Senate than the House.

I think that the majority party in America remains the Republican Party, by which I mean that a plurality of voters with party affiliations are Republicans, and a healthy chunk of those without formal affiliation would vote Republican if it weren't for the President. The question in the election will be how people who think of themselves as conservatives register opposition to the President (and maybe to the war).

As for the conventional wisdom, its dynamic (perfectly practiced by Kaus himself) is to disagree with last week's headlines, so it will continue to pulse and morph regardless of reality. We won't have a clear idea of reality for another few weeks.

UPDATE: On presidential elections, I enjoyed the dialog between Kaus and Alterman on bloggingheadstv.

I'm having this weird split political personality feeling today (Friday morning) because on the one hand, the Kaus-type conservative Democrats make sense to me, both as a strategy for winning elections and as the one hope for fiscal sanity. At the same time, last night's Senate vote was my Roe v. Wade. I'm apoplectic about it. It's just not democracy, and I kept hoping somebody would show some kind of screaming liberal political backbone. I wanted Byrd to pull a crazy parliamentary stunt, Kennedy to go nuts, Obama to knock off the flowery phrasery and do something.

To put it another way, Patrick Henry didn't say "Give me liberty or, failing that, I'll settle for a sealed-off gated community and an elaborate intelligence apparatus so that at least I'll be able to catch the latest episode of Dangerous Housewives without worrying about any pesky islamofascists."

The problem with blogging is that you look around to find something worth saying, and often it comes down to politics, which is precisely the topic that I find most depressing, and can lead to much bluster. I love this country.