What you deserve

Joel Kotkin on the most recent election:

If they are losing the middle and working classes, and even some millennials, what are the Democrats left with? They did best in states like California and New York, where there is a high concentration of progressive post-graduates and non-whites, and where many of the sectors benefiting most from the recovery have thrived, notably tech, financial services, and high-end real estate.

Yet these areas of strength could also prove a problem for the Democrats. A party increasingly dominated by progressives in New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Seattle may embrace the liberal social and environmental agenda that captivates party’s loyalists but is less appealing to the middle class. Unless the Democrats develop a compelling economic policy that promises better things for the majority, they may find their core constituencies too narrow to prevent the Republicans from enjoying an unexpected, albeit largely undeserved, resurgence.

Emphasis mine. Did the Republicans "deserve" to win last week? That's an excellent question and one that Republicans ought to consider.

Democrats won, decisively, in 2006. They flipped the Congress and set the stage for the arrival of Barack Obama's presidency. Did the Democrats "deserve" to win then? I certainly didn't think so, but the Republicans deserved to lose. I think this is what Kotkin is getting at.

The Democrats have a major problem in that they have no bench. Meanwhile, the Republicans have no lack of potential candidates for president in 2016, arrayed in a crazy quilt manner. Think of the potential options:

• Rand Paul, libertarianish senator and mild-mannered provocateur
• Ted Cruz, Ivy League-credentialed Tea Partier, not so mild-mannered
• Mike Huckabee, disgruntled fundamentalist
• Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, dueling plutocrats
• Scott "Governors Are Better" Walker
• Marco Rubio, because, well, we're not really sure why

That's hardly a definitive list of candidates, either. How do you sort that out?

Well, I think the way you sort out the candidates is by governing, which requires Republicans in Congress to figure out a way to "deserve" the tepid confidence now bestowed upon them. The issues that come up in 2015 will shape the presidential battlefield and will, in many ways, tend to dictate which Republican becomes the standard bearer in 2016. 

When we eventually look back on the presidency of Barack Obama, we are going to realize how consequential it was. For all his petulance, corruption, bad faith and operational ineptitude, he managed to change America more than perhaps any president since FDR. Republicans will have to figure out how to deserve power in a different context than the one they encountered in 1994. Obama and his works were rebuked last week, but they weren't necessarily rejected.