Even after their defeat in the American mid-term elections, the Republicans can't stop spinning. Which is only to be expected, I suppose.
But you'd think that our own media outlets on this side of the Atlantic would do better than to regurgitate Republican propaganda as if it were hard fact.
On RTE, for example, the myth that the Democrats won the elections by running conservative candidates has been repeated on a number of occasions.
Not so.
This story in the LA Times gives the lie to this particular piece of nonsense.
"...of the 27 Democratic candidates for the House who won outright Tuesday, only five can truly be called social conservatives. Far more are pro-choice, against the Iraq war and quite liberal."
The Democrats won because America moved away from right-wing extremism back to the political centre, because America woke up to the fact that the White House was occupied by a spoiled frat-boy who had no notion of how to lead, and because America has finally moved on from the nightmare of 9/11 and can no longer be panicked into supporting the notion that every conflict has to be settled by brute force.
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The reason people have been saying the Democrats won by running "conservative" candidates is that they ran a few conservative candidates in a small handful of highly publicized elections, against far more conservative Republicans- for example, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, who ran in a highly public race against solid social conservative Rick Santorum. This has given the (misleading) impression that the democrats ran conservatives as a general strategy. It was not a general strategy, it was merely one they used in particular cases.
We'll have to wait for the pollsters to dissect the election results, but I suspect part of the reason for the stunning Democratic victory was widespread apathy among highly conservative voters, who sat through years of a firmly GOP-controlled House, Senate, AND Presidency, only to realize that absolutely none of their objectives had been achieved. There was widespread talk among conservative and evangelical voters about "punishing" the Republican party for its "desertion" of conservative principles. Most old-fasioned, dedicated Republican conservatives have never been very comfortable with the neoconservatives anyway.
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