South City Mouth

Three days out from VA-Day (Victory in America), here's a grab bag of random thoughts:

With Missouri's minimum wage raise amendment passing by a 79-to-21-percent margin, it's clear that Americans have their minds on social justice. No longer are people willing to wait around as we have for 25 years, hoping that voodoo economics might finally trickle down to the rest of us. Not only that, but clearly it's OK these days to show concern for the poor. I remember a time not so long ago that most Americans thought of the poor as a bunch of lazy freeloaders, not worthy of a moment's concern. Now, most Americans seem to agree that something's very wrong when a quarter of all children in the world's richest nation lives in poverty.

I continue to listen to talk radio as Republicans search their post-election souls as we Democrats have often found ourselves doing over the years. Their consensus on why they lost so badly on Tuesday? They just weren't conservative enough. Republicans apparently agree that they need to move even farther to the right. House Majority (not for long) Whip and Missourian Roy Blunt said so yesterday in his address to the Heritage Foundation, an outfit that no doubt thinks moving even farther right is a splendid idea. I too applaud Republicans' ongong quest for ideological purity. Indeed, I hope they succeed mightily. Of course, they'll continue to lose even worse with each subsequent election, but they'll have that ideological fire in their bellies to keep them warm during their winter of discontent.

So what's up with President Bush's sudden about face on Iraq? Until Wednesday morning, it was stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. How quickly things change. And by the way, in the wake of his recent insistence that Rumsfeld was here to stay, can I now safely call Bush a liar?

Have you seen this year's electoral victory maps? They look awfully blue, even in that flyover area where all the real Americans supposedly live, where nobody would ever vote Democrat. Republicans made a big deal about their broad swaths of red in 2000 and 2004. Remember those electoral map T-shirts proclaiming "Bush's America: My America." Republicans are oddly silent about America's 2006 color scheme.

Obviously, Tuesday's results are not a mandate for liberal extremism. Look at most of the Democrats who won and how moderate and centrist they appear. Likewise, look at all the moderate Republicans who lost, leaving the GOP even more ideological and radical. For all Republicans' snide laughing at Democrats' sometimes-foolish efforts at reaching out for the center all these years, at least the Democrats were trying. Republicans meanwhile pandered exclusively to the far Right, thumbing their noses at the other 70 percent of us Americans. Their strategy reaped obvious results on Tuesday.

The dam has broken and there's no turning back. I suspect the future holds combative two-party rule, but I'll take that over what we've seen the past six years. In the meantime, the days are over in which words like Democrat and liberal are hurled like insults. For many years, the Democrats faced an uphill battle at regaining trust that had deservedly been lost years earlier. Democrats have had a burden of proof on themselves for some years now, while Republicans were more likely seen as the more Christian, more morally upright and responsible, more American. I'd say the GOP, due to their own arrogance and moral corruption, has blown that sweet deal for itself. Now, it's seen as OK to vote Democrat, and that burden of proof at least seems to be history.