The Democratic party's problems, crystallized in the last-ditch scramble to save Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in a special election Tuesday, can be traced to a simple mistake: Many in the party misread voters' desire to switch parties in recent years as an ideological shift to the left.
In fact, there is little sign that Americans' ideological tendencies changed much at all, even as voters gave control of Congress to Democrats in 2006 and handed President Barack Obama and the rest of his party a massive victory in 2008. Ideologically, the country remained throughout this period what it was at the outset: a center to center-right nation.
Throughout this period of Democratic rise, America was instead a centrist nation that simply had become fed up with Republican rule, largely because of concerns about the GOP's competence and its tone deafness. Voters' response was to shift parties more than ideologies.
In retrospect, the problem for Democrats was that some in the party—particularly in the liberal wing that is dominant in the House of Representatives—seemed to read this shift away from Republicans as a shift to the left. That became apparent first in the early-2009 construct of an economic stimulus package, written initially in the House. It went heavy on the kinds of public-spending programs liberals favor, and light on the tax cuts and small-business incentives that even more moderate Democrats like.
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