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The following from the New York Times is about as concise as it gets on why it is so hard to combat spending:

But selling spending reductions may not be as easy as selling tax cuts, which first ignited the conservative grass roots. “It is the problem of concentrated benefits and diffused costs,” Mr. [Morton] Blackwell said. “For the people who want a spending program, it is the most important thing in their lives. They want and need that spending. They will work day and night to get that spending. But the cost is so diffuse it is hard to find people who have similar opposition to it.”

He is not the only one. Rod Martin writes:

For most of my life, a small minority of us Republicans (notably Newt Gingrich and Morton Blackwell, plus acolytes such as me) agitated, cajoled and worked for the day when our party would take seriously the “ground war”…

We argued this point year after year, to no avail, until the closeness of the 2000 election and the rise of Karl Rove forced the issue. And having then won our debate, our party won too: an historic mid-term in 2002 and a seemingly impossible sweep in 2004.

Which is where it all went awry.

Like kids with a new toy, our Republican leadership became mesmerized with their turnout program. It wasn’t just a playhouse: it could be a fort, it could be a spaceship, it could be a secret hideout for the cowboys fighting their toy Indians.

It could, in fact, be absolutely anything.

Anything except a message.

And that’s how the majority was lost.

In other words, having ignored the necessity of hardware previously, the GOP went nuts in the other direction and thought hardware (or technology) could solve it all. But relying on technology while pushing power-hungry, unattractive candidates and no message but “we’re less evil” has been demonstrated to be a losing recipe. More from Martin:

A turnout effort cannot be better than the message motivating the turnout. This is Rule Number One.

For most of two years — and on certain things longer than that — Republican Congressional leaders settled for a message of “those Democrats are worse than we are” and “look at our new toy.” They pointed out that Democrats had no ideas and that you can’t beat something with nothing. It never occurred to them that Democrats might beat nothing with nothing.

Superior turnout machine (or hardware, technology or whatever one cares to call it) is still vital, but the sine qua non are good candidates and sound issues (people and ideas). The next challenge I see for people involved in hardware/technology/machine is this: how do they design and implement a political mobilization system that will encourage and recruit upstanding, moral and philosophically-principled candidates who will not be corrupted by power? And how will they fashion a system that will feed a continual renewal of such people into the system rather than relying on incumbency, which inevitably erodes principles?

When the GOP figures that one out, and only then, will it be able to forge that fabled permanent conservative governing majority.

Local governments across the region are considering cutting spending or raising taxes in the coming year because of a decline in revenue growth caused by the housing downturn…

The difficulty in Northern Virginia is that after six years of double-digit increases in home values, officials are predicting little or no growth for the coming year. Tax revenue could creep slightly upward, but the increases are nowhere near the whopping totals of recent years, officials said.

Local governments in Virginia by law cannot run budget deficits, so to balance their budgets for the fiscal year that begins July 1, officials must make up millions of dollars in shortfalls by cutting spending or raising taxes.

The answer then is rather obvious — cut spending. Unfortunately, politicians running the governments usually pull out the “for the children” mantra. Having spent like drunken sailors on a shore leave during the boom years, now the school walls will crumble, the poor children will go hungry, books will be burnt to keep libraries warm unless the tax payers fork over more money. We all heard the sob stories.

Arlington officials want to cover the shortfall without raising the property tax rate, according to Mark Schwartz, the county’s director of management and finance. “We will not present a budget that says: ‘Here’s a gap. Let’s increase taxes to fill it,’ ” Schwartz said. [Snip]

Vice Mayor (of Alexandria) Andrew H. Macdonald (D) said of bridging the shortfall, “we can do that either by finding some more efficient way in making cuts or find a new source of revenue by slightly raising the tax rate. . . . My view is that we may have to change the tax rate slightly.” [Bold face mine.]

Loudoun where I live is no exception to this false choice of more-taxes-or-schools-will-fall-apart:

In Loudoun, officials are warning of spending cuts — likely in schools — or an increase in the tax rate in a rapidly growing county of 260,000 people awash in spending for such public projects as schools, firehouses and roads. Loudoun led the region this year in the growth of property assessments at 28 percent, but housing assessments are forecast to plummet to negative figures during the 2008 budget year, officials said.

“The situation has deteriorated a little bit and is expected to deteriorate further,” said Loudoun budget manager Ari Sky. [Bold faces mine.]

We can’t cry over spilled milk now, but the next time our local government managers propose new spending during fat years, remember the lean years and the inevitable and disingenuous cries of “But without more taxes, the kids will go uneducated!”

The numbers looked a lot less rosy to the other architect of the campaign—RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. It was Mehlman who built the much-vaunted turnout machine. But he feared that many inside the party were relying too much on technology, like voter databases, and had lost sight of the bigger picture: that voters were turning against them. “We’ve built a great new car, but the gasoline for the car isn’t us; it’s the candidates and the issues,” Mehlman told NEWSWEEK. There was no bigger issue than the war, which Rove had pushed as a winning theme for the GOP. As he flew back to D.C. on a private jet two days before the elections, Mehlman scribbled his predictions on a card—not to be revealed until after the elections. His numbers were much closer than Rove’s: the GOP would lose 23 in the House (5 short of the final tally), 5 in the Senate (1 shy) and 6 governors (spot on). Last week Mehlman announced he would step down and pursue opportunities in the private sector. [Boldfaces mine.]

The late John Boyd, an Air Force pilot, the leader of the Pentagon “reformers,” and perhaps the greatest American military theorist, said, “People first, ideas second, hardware third.” He also criticized the Pentagon for having its priorities reversed (“hardware first, ideas second, people last”). That’s what came to my mind when I read this passage.

BTW, my prediction was 20-25 House seats lost, 4-5 Senate seats lost. Looks like mine wasn’t too far away from Mehlman’s. And I am not nearly as expensive as Mr. Mehlman!

More on “People First, Ideas Second, Hardware Third” applied to politics in Part 2.

This year, Webb beat Allen by 116,000 votes and 17 points in the region. About half of that margin came from Fairfax County, the state’s biggest place and an important symbol of the change in the state’s politics.

“Fairfax used to be the bellwether for the state,” Brodnitz said. “Now it’s considered a critical piece of the Democratic map.”

And should the exurbs around Fairfax go decisively for the Democrats in future elections (Webb carried Loudoun 50-49 and Prince William 51-48), the GOP will become less and less competitive. Now is the time for rainbow conservatism and stem the Democratic tide in the exurbs that are growing in money and votes.

“I do not wish to cause more litigation that would not alter the results,” Allen said, adding that he saw “no good purpose being served by continuously and needlessly expending money and causing any more personal animosity.”

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer demanded yesterday that Republicans show decency by conceding gracefully without resorting to legal battles and recount after recount in razor-thin races. Even setting aside the 2000 Florida recount mess (where Gore retracted his concession), does Christine Gregoire ring a bell?

I remember that election. I lived in Seattle, Washington, where the Democrats, after losing two counts, engaged in a selective manual recount in Democrat-dominated King County only and “won” the third recount.

There is a word for Schumer’s demand — hypocrisy. Welcome to the Democrat-contolled Congress.

Clearly, the election was not a victory for leftism in the United States. That leaves two explanations for the result, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One theory holds that the GOP went too polar to the right and conceded the center (h/t RCP):

“The story line really is that the Democrats are winning the middle,” said Democratic pollster Al Quinlan.

Veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff said: “Iraq is front and center of this election, and people voted for change. The GOP base held — was motivated and voted — but the margins among independents and moderates [for Democrats] was too much to overcome.”

The other theory is that Republicans were not conservative enough and became like Democrats, a party of establishment power, big government and etc. (h/t RCP):

In assessing last night’s results it is important to note that it was not a defeat for conservatism; it was a defeat for Republicanism, or at least, what Republicanism has come to represent. In the past 12 years, Republicans went from the party that promised “the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money” to the party of the Bridge to Nowhere; it took control of Congress on a pledge to “end its cycle of scandal and disgrace” and went down in defeat as the party of Tom DeLay and Mark Foley.

Having abandoned its core principles, the Republican Party had nothing to run on this year, so its campaign strategy centered on attacking Nancy Pelosi — a questionable tactic given that, according to some polls, more than half of the country had never even heard of her.

Likely both explanations have some merit. In many parts of the country, including “red” areas, even GOP stalwarts like Jon Kyl had a bad scare, showing just how unhappy the conservatives were with Republicanism as opposed to conservatism.

Moreover, the independents did turn sharply against the GOP in places like Montana (almost two-to-one) and Virginia (56 to 44). In fact, in Virginia, the GOP was actually pretty successful in rallying the Republicans. The voter breakdown was: 36% Democrats, 39% Republicans and 26% independents. The GOP actually got 94% of the Republicans to vote Allen while the Democrats fell short at 93% of the Democrats voting for Webb. The crucial difference was the independent vote, which went 56-44 to Webb.

Here goes my mantra again about Northern Virginia: the Democrats were successful in rallying the urban and closer-in suburbs of D.C. while the Republicans were apparently very successful in turning out the base of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant evangelical (WASPE) voters from the rural areas of Virginia. The key battleground was the exurb, especially the now vote- and money-rich Loudoun County (where I happen to live). Here Webb received just the margin necessary (52-48 the last time I checked*) to carry the day.

People who do not live in Loudoun simply have no idea or feel for the magnitude of change that has occurred in what was once a reliably Republican exurb (touted by David Brooks earlier as the kind of stereotypical Republican exurban stronghold that delivered for President Bush and the GOP). The electorate in Loudoun County is now decidedly less white, less rural and less Christian, let alone evangelical. I live in a typical new middle class housing development that sprang up in the last three years here, and my neighbors are an ethnically mixed — but economically affluent — lot of families of Indian, Vietnamese and Korean descent (just to name a few) intermingled with the WASPEs.

The strategy of catering to the socially close-knit group of WASPEs is no longer enough and can even be counterproductive by making the party appear exclusionary to non-WASPE voters who might otherwise be attracted to the principles of conservatism, especially limited government, free enterprise and strong national security. I elaborated on this topic at some length before in Home Ownership and Minorities. Let me repeat the conclusion of that piece:

None of this means that the GOP has to dilute its conservative agenda in order to attract non-white voters. The conservative message of limited government, free enterprise, strong national defense and traditional values (not to mention school accountability and choice) resonate very well with home owning, upwardly-mobile non-white voters in this area. The issue, rather, is more one of both outreach and tone. The GOP has to join the fray and make its agenda known to them, and make them feel, not just cerebrally realize, that the GOP agenda do represent their interests as home owners, business operators and tax payers.

Indeed, what the GOP needs to recover areas like Loudoun County is, simply put, what I call rainbow conservatism. It means expanding the base by appealing to affluent non-white voters with the agenda that serves their interests — emphasizing, for example, low taxes, school choice and tough law enforcement — over the social and religious ties that currently motivate the WASPE base in the area.

If the GOP here fails to adjust, however, the base strategy of today will provide an ever diminishing return for the Republicans and will likely render the party a permanent minority in the exurbs as is the case in the closer-in suburbs of D.C.

*Update: Loudoun is now 50-49 for Webb with 96% reporting (Fairfax County went 59-40 for Webb; Prince William 51-48 for Webb; Fauquier went 57-42 Allen).

I think the Republicans are going to barely hold the Senate, with the Democrats winning 4-5 of the 7 seriously contested races. I think the GOP will lose the House, with the Democrats gaining 20-25 seats.