Here’s some solace for Rocky
Mountain Republicans suffering the post-election glooms: It could
have been worse.
You could be New England Republicans,
the few, the forlorn, the forgotten, in a six-state region with
more than 14 million people, soon to have exactly one Republican
member of the House of Representatives.
Or you could be
in the Midwest, where a surge of populism, war-weariness and
general disgruntlement swept away two incumbent Republican senators
and a slew of House members.
But no, you’re in the
Interior West, where the great Democratic wave that rose off the
coast of New Hampshire, swelled across Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Kentucky, and Missouri, and even inundated Kansas, began to
diminish. It got you wet, but didn’t flood you.
Otherwise, those perennial Democratic targets, Congresswomen
Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado and Heather Wilson in New Mexico,
would have lost. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona might have been defeated.
Barbara Cubin could have beaten in Wyoming, and, a Democrat might
even have taken Idaho’s reliably Republican 1st Congressional
District from an ultra-conservative Republican.
At this
writing, none of this has happened. Kyl and Musgrave are safely
re-elected, and Bill Sali will represent Idaho’s first district
even if a fellow-Republican once described him as “an absolute
idiot.” Of the 16 senators from the eight states in Mountain Time,
11 will be Republicans when the 110th Congress convenes in January,
as will 14 of the 28 members of the House.
But that will
be one less senator and three fewer representatives than in the
109th. The House losses were in Colorado (1) and Arizona (2). That
one-less senator is in Montana, about to be the only Mountain State
with no Republican senator. Bill Ritter’s victory over Bob Beauprez
in Colorado means that only three of the eight states will have
Republican governors. Yes, from the perspective of Mountain State
Republicans, it could be worse. But it could surely be better.
The Interior West has not turned Democratic. But it has
turned competitive. Only a few years ago, Republicans had reason to
hope and Democrats to fear that the region had become irrevocably
red, a solid Republican West, a modern counterpart to the solid
Democratic South of a few decades ago, where winning the primary
was “tantamount” (a word never used in any other context) to
victory in November. This was always something of a delusion. It
was not that long ago that Bill Clinton carried five mountain
states. Still, for the last half of the 1990s and the first part of
this decade, Republicans were regionally ascendant as the Democrats
grew both weaker and meeker.
No longer, and one reason is
that the West is part of America. The Iraq war is no more popular
in Denver than in Detroit, and corrupt congressmen are held in no
higher regard in Bozeman than in Boston. But there have also been
changes within the region. New arrivals — refugees from
Mexico, California, and the Midwest — brought new attitudes.
And at least a few of the longtime residents question the
neo-anarchism that perverts the traditional libertarian attitude of
“you can’t tell me what to do on my own time in my own place,’ to
“You can’t tell me what to do, no matter what I destroy.”
In which context, one Republican loss outside the region should be
noted. In California’s Central Valley, Richard Pombo, chairman of
the house Resources Committee and arguably the most extreme of the
neo-anarchists, was soundly whipped. Like a lot of other Republican
losers, Pombo had dealings with now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. Like a lot of the newly-elected Democrats, Jerry McNerney
might have trouble holding the seat against an untainted Republican
next time.
But McNerney also assailed Pombo for trying to
weaken the Endangered Species Act and for supporting more oil
drilling off the California coast. Like voters elsewhere in the
West, those in central California may not love government
regulations, But they are having second thoughts about scuttling
them altogether.
And one more thing: For days, those who
dominate what passes for journalism on television have been braying
that most of the new Democratic congressmen are conservatives who
will war with their more liberal leadership.
Nonsense. On
two or three social issues, notably abortion and gun control, some
of these Democrats differ with party dogma. On taxes and trade,
health care and education, foreign policy and environmental policy,
they are in the Democratic mainstream. In the 110th Congress,
Social Security will not be privatized, the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge will not be drilled, and the minimum wage might
well be raised — all with plenty of support from freshmen
Democrats, including those from the Rockies.
There is,
this week, only so much solace available for Mountain State
Republicans.
Jon Margolis is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He covers politics in the West from the
vantage point of Vermont.
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