Wisconsin Recall: Learning The Right Lesson

I won my final re-election to the Iowa Senate by 8 percent.   The night of my victory, I received a call from a Democratic county chair (I think she was a bit tipsy) in which she told me, "I hoped you learned a lesson."

Please read the first sentence again.  I had won by 8 percent.

I thought about this morning when reading that the Obama campaign had issued a statement that Scott Walker's 7-point win in Wisconsin "sends a strong message" to the Governor.

Whenever my own party suffers a beatdown, I always remember this piece of wise advise:  "Every election contains a lesson. The trick is to understand the right one."

As Jim Geraghty says,

It’s not that surprising that Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. What is surprising is that he and his fellow party leaders are absolutely convinced that they’re not in trouble.

On the Iowa front, the ideological divides in the Republican party were on display in various primaries:  there were Ron Paul (libertarian) candidates, religious conservative candidates, and "establishment-backed" candidates (endorsed by Governor Terry Branstad).

The results: decidedly mixed.  As both Mike Gronstal and Jerry Behn say in this article, local campaigns are defined by the strength of the individual candidate and local nuances that are not under the control of political groups with a specific ideology.