GOP outlook: to avoid repeating history, Republicans had better make their own.

• Author: Rogers, Ed
• Position: U.S. Election Postmortem

There are three certain outcomes to every American election: a winner, a loser, and an exhaustive analysis of What It All Means. It is unequivocally clear that the November midterms were historic, and a victory as great for the Republican Party as they are a cause for celebration. Yet as the dust settles, the press has already started raising expectations about what President Bush should be able to accomplish in the two years leading up to the next election. Superficial and conventional wisdom leads with the assumption that the new GOP majority epitomizes the admonition of Jesus in Luke 12:48: "To whom much is given, much is also required." In reality, Republicans have been handed far less than carte blanche. Even the re-taking of the Senate has a built-in caveat. As former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has noted repeatedly, in the Senate, the majority does not rule. The 51-vote majority the GOP currently holds in that chamber is an advantage, not an edict: 51 falls far short of the 60 votes required to move any piece of legislation forward. Yet, punditry remains rife with the notion that President Bush has been handed a dictatorship along with his party's victory.

But having noted all that, the Democrats could have some difficult and depressing times ahead. Albert Einstein once pointed out that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. By that standard, the Democratic Party's first high-profile move since the election--the anointing of ultra-liberal San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader--is textbook, an act of madness destructive to the Democrats and highly entertaining to Republicans. Pelosi is symptomatic of the main reason the Democrats don't have a national party: the Democratic leadership is at ideological war with Middle America, especially the Southern middle class. The Democrats like to say that they lost because their base didn't turn out, but their base did turn out--and only their base. The middle class and the independent voter identified their options on the ballot, and didn't find much to identify with in the Democrats.

By contrast, as Democratic candidates across the country were begging high-profile leaders such as the Clintons and Al Gore to stay away, Republican candidates were lining up to roll out the red carpet for President Bush and his surrogates, and President Bush was indefatigable in his willingness to get on the stump...