In light of the November massacre of 2006, here’s what I wrote back in August about rooting for the Dems:

For me, a vote for Democrats this fall (and possibly in 2008) would be, more than anything else, a vote for a check on the policies of the Bush Administration. The last six years have shown us what this administration will choose to do when virtually unconstrained by Congress. “Preventitive” war, highly questionable detainee policies, domestic spying of dubious constitutional provenance, and a more statist and authoritarian policy generally have been the result.

Some Republicans have been spinning this election as a victory for our enemies, the Islamists and associated tyrants, but that begs the question regarding whether the policies of the Bush administration have been objectively effective at countering the threat from Islamist terrorism. It’s debatable, to say the very least, that the war in Iraq has been a net gain for the USA on that score. Republicans have been eager to treat the Iraq war as an essential part of the “war on terror,” but that has, at best, been a self-fulfilling prophecy as American troops find themselves bogged down fighting jihadist insurgents in a country that formerly posed no significant threat to us.

I thought the war was both unjustified and unwise from the get-go, and nothing that’s happened since has persuaded me to change my mind. So, if this election is taken as a rebuke to the war by the powers that be that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned. What that will translate to in concrete terms is unclear, and there’s good reason to think that, at least as far as Iraq is concerned, the answer is “not much.” But a Democratic congress stands a much better chance of checking presidential warmaking ambitions elsewhere. Plus, chastened Senate Republicans who see which way the wind’s blowing might take this opportunity to press the White House for a change of course (I’m lookin’ at you, Sen. Hagel). I’m not a Democrat and still have plenty of differences with the Donkey party, but I’m thankful for a little Madisonian sand in the gears, so to speak.

One expects that there will be some intense soul-searching on the part of the GOP leading up to the 2008 presidential election. The increasingly fractious conservative movement looks set to rupture completely with libertarians, neocons, evangelicals, paleocons, and so on bursting the seams of fusionism once and for all. In a recent Newsweek article former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson sees the younger generation of evangelicals moving away from the quasi-libertarian views of some of the older generation with their embrace of activist government, making a continued alliance with economic conservatives look more and more tenuous. Meanwhile, neoconservatives are turning on the President and his botched war policy, not entirely unlike what happened to the President’s father in ’92 when various prominent neocons started flirting with the Clinton-Gore campaign. Whatever emerges from all this, it seems unlikely to look much like the conservatism that existed from Goldwater to Reagan. And it’s hard to point to a prospective GOP presidential candidate who could rally these various factions to his candidacy (McCain? Romney? Guliani?).

Not that the Democrats, despite their impressive victory, are necessarily going to have an easier time of it. There are enduring tensions between the socially liberal and “centrist” leadership and some of the more socially conservative populist candidates elected yesterday (the kind of people Russell Fox would approve of). The tepid Democratic agenda papers over these differences more than it commits them to much of anything concrete (They believe in “a strong national defense that is both tough and smart” – great!). The Dems’ internal strife is presumably going to come out into the open when they select their candidate for 2008 (Interventionist or anti-interventionist? Socially liberal or moderate? Economically centrist or populist?). And a voter rebuke of the Republicans doesn’t necessarily translate into strong support for any particular Democratic platform. Interesting times.

By the way, locally, the voters of Massachusetts let me down by sending question one down to defeat thanks to a coordinated scare campaign orchestrated by the liquor stores. Stupid democracy! Oh, and the Democratic candidate for governor, Deval Patrick, glided to victory over his Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healy, making Patrick the Bay State’s first African-American governor.