Election returns

"Spin" can be a funny thing. What people say and what they do often are misaligned. The mouth may say "I'm not afraid" of that large, ferocious dog chained in a neighbor's front yard, but the feet nevertheless tend to use a path at least one foot beyond that chain's length.

Good sense, after all, often outweighs good spin.

We'll see if that applies to the post-election weeks and months ahead. On a number of fronts.

That liberals dismiss the ideological swings of 20-plus points from last fall's presidential election in Tuesday's Virginia and New Jersey governor races isn't all that surprising.

And I hold out little hope (OK, none at all) that Democrat Party leaders will reverse course on the reprehensible direction they're taking this country.

But there are a lot of Democrats in both houses of Congress who face elections next year and know they aren't as "bullet-proof" as Nancy Pelosi is in her ultra-liberal San Francisco district.

I assume a good number of those "blue-dog" Democrats would like to keep their jobs and, at the very least, are calculating the length of that large, ferocious dog's chain.

Good sense would dictate doing so.

Similar calculations should be going on across the aisle, though. At least at the highest levels of the GOP.

Just as Ronald Reagan "took back" the Republican Party for conservatives almost 30 years ago, those who hold his tenants, as well as The Constitution, sacred are moving in that direction again.

Yes, liberals spin this as right-wing extremism and charge that there's no room for moderate thought in the Republican Party.

Well, first of all, look at the pictures and video of this summer's tea parties and then the 9/12 march on Washington.

Extremists? More like a mix of veterans, retirees, young parents, everyday middle class folks who had never been part of any kind of political activism but were simply fed up with Washington's unprecedented power grab and gross mismanagement.

And moderate thought? Since when is supporting and voting for liberal idealism "moderate"?

It strikes me that in this decade, particularly, we hear all about how conservatives need to "move more to the center" and be more "big-tent" inclusive and so forth, yet I haven't heard once how Democrats should do anything similar.

My position is that Republicans have, and that precisely has been their problem.

Tuesday's other election that brought national attention, the House race in New York's very moderate 23rd District, bears that out.

The GOP saw fit to push a liberal "Republican" in Dede Scozzafava. The backlash from conservatives, already fed up with RINOs such Arlen Specter (before he jumped parties), Olympia Snowe, et al, resulted in the rapid ascent of a little-known conservative, Doug Hoffman, as a third-party candidate.

While Hoffman's support skyrocketed in the weeks leading up to the election, Scozzafava's dropped lower than whale dung, and she dropped out of the race (and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, by the way).

Regardless of Owens' four-point win, a message was sent to the GOP hierarchy.

Question is, are they also now measuring chains?

Their future, like that of those "blue-dog" Democrats, almost certainly depends on it.