Center-Right Nation Update

Trendrr & Center for America’s Future

Wow, Dave Sirota is, like, psychic:

When I wrote my first column about the "center-right nation" and subsequently launched the "Center-Right Nation Watch" series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I… was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that "if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever."

(…)

As the graph shows, the use of the exact term "center-right nation" spiked immediately after election day (point "0" is the day my column published, point "1" is election day).

As Sirota admits, not every appearance of the term is necessarily an endorsement.  Even so, what it does reflect is that the media are actively debating whether America is a center-right nation… after two consecutive elections where the Republicans got their asses handed to them.  That’s a pretty remarkable (and depressing) demonstration of the right’s ability to influence our national discourse.

And the purpose of all that squawking and concern trolling?  To create a new reality that obscures the one we actually live in.  Following Tom Schaller and former Washington Times Editor Tod Lindberg, Ron Brownstein is the latest to give us a peek at what that reality actually looks like.

Brownstein dismantles the center-right meme by comparing Democratic inroads in Republican territory to Republican inroads in Democratic territory.  The results aren’t even close: Obama won 9 historically red states; McCain didn’t win any historically blue states.  Democrats occupy 22 out of 58 dead-red Senate seats (38%); Republicans hold 4 out of 36 true-blue ones (11%).  Democrats won 83 of the 255 congressional districts that went for Bush in 2004 (33%); Republicans won 5 of the 180 that went for Kerry (3%).

As Brownstein says:

All of these trends expose the same dynamic: Democrats are effectively courting voters with diverse views, but the Republican capacity to appeal to voters beyond their party’s core coalition has collapsed.

There just is no debate to have.  The Republicans are a hard-right party in a center-left country, which leaves them with two options: They can move left (not happening), or they can have their media friends bray about how America is a center-right nation until Obama and the Democrats move right to join them.  I have a sinking feeling that that might actually work…

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