It's a great time to be a Democrat!

Except for the fact that I'm not one.

Others have spoken about the election in a more timely manner, but I don't hear enough dealing with reality. Face it, Republican friends -- we got our hind-ends handed to us this week. I like to read and listen to Hugh Hewitt, and agree with him much of the time; but, I find that as elections draw near he tends to see GOP victories where there is no victory, and he predicts Democrat defeats where there is no hope.

Tuesday night -- even as Rick Santorum and Mike DeWine and Michael Steele and Tom Kean and Mike Bouchard and Jim Talent were all falling short of the lofty expectations laid by Hewitt over the previous 48 hours -- Hewitt was insisting this was no Democratic wave. I suppose if you want to define a wave as the Democrats picking up 54 House seats (a la 1994) and a filibuster-proof Senate majority, then it's not a wave.

But when the best story of the night is that Joe Lieberman beat Ned Lamont in Connecticut, when you consider that the Democrats won all but one closely-contested Senate race (the win was Tennesee's Bob Corker, who beat the self-imploding Harold Ford by 3 points when the polls gave Corker a 6-point lead) . . . that sounds like a wave to me. Regardless of the fact that the election results were close around the country, they were still close in favor of the Dems. As President Bush said in his press conference Wednesday:

Look, this was a close election. If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumping.

Others who are much smarter than me have speculated on the reasons behind the wave: the war, government spending, scandal, John McCain, etc. And I'm sure all those are true to an extent.

But I want to focus on the landslide in Oregon, which saw the re-election of a vulnerable Democrat governor, the Democratic takeover of the legislature, and the rejection of every conservative ballot measure. Can we attribute that Democratic slaughter to a national wave of anti-Republicanism? Perhaps partially, but I'd argue that the national picture was not solely responsible for the local landslide.

So what happened? I'm not an election analyst, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so here's my two cents:

First and foremost, Ron Saxton did not inspire the electorate. Polls showed Ted Kulongoski was among the most vulnerable incumbents in the nation, but I don't think Saxton ever found a way to explain why voters should vote for him instead of against the governor. Saxton never hit any heart issues -- cutting government 10 percent may be attractive to some, but it doesn't rally the troops when the ballots arrive. That's not to say Gov. Kulongoski was better at putting out a vision (in fact, he was pathetic in that regard, just like his entire first term) but Saxton didn't inspire swing voters to consider him.

I think that mindset trickled down to the legislative level, as Republicans appeared to take their House majority for granted, while the Democrats were fighting tooth and nail for every fingerhold they could find. Why the GOP would take the majority for granted in blue Oregon is mystifying, but that's how it seemed to me.

In this way, it was similar to the national race. The Republicans never did a good job of putting forward bold ideas, instead relying on the Democrats-would-be-worse meme (not to say they had no ideas, they just never found any that stirred the heart). The GOP campaign -- like Saxton's -- was more about asking the voters not to vote for the other guy.

I'm not smart enough to identify what Saxton should have done differently, but I suspect he did all he could with who he was. And that clearly was insufficient. Along those lines, I also think this election put to rest the idea that a moderate urban Republican can win in Oregon. Ron Saxton had all the "right" credentials -- a Portlander, experience in education, moderately pro-choice, not an extreme right-winger.

And yet, the county numbers show a Republican bleed across the state. Unlike the 2002 election, the 2006 Kulongoski campaign took Washington, Clackamas and Marion counties from the Republicans, including a 9-point majority in Washington County that stuck a dagger in the heart of Saxton's goals.

Saxton lost votes in 19 counties compared to Kevin Mannix's numbers, and Kulongoski gained votes in all but six counties. Just in the Tri-County area alone, Kulongoski gained more than 20,000 votes over his 2002 totals; half those votes came in Multnomah County, where Saxton also lost almost 7,000 votes (and where Mannix earned 29.3 percent of the vote compared to Saxton's 25.3).

The biggest shocker, however, was Marion County, where Saxton lost nearly 10,000 votes compared to 2002, while Kulongoski's numbers stayed static and he won a slim plurality in the county. Voter turnout in this county was 9 percent lower than 2002, and it was all Republicans! This makes me think 1) Saxton's messages about cutting spending and PERS hit home with all those government employees in Salem, and 2) Republicans didn't think much of Saxton's message.

And basically, that sums up the entire election: liberals may not have been thrilled with Kulongoski, but they'd sooner hire Mark Foley as a babysitter than vote for a Republican. They know where their bread is buttered.

Unlike 2002, the 2006 results cannot be blamed on a third-party candidate. Even if you combined the totals for Constitution, Libertarian and Pacific Green candidates and gave those votes to Saxton, it wouldn't make up his deficit.

There was also very little on the ballot to inspire conservative turnout. The parental notification measure was about it, and that really doesn't have the star power of, say, same-sex marriage as an issue.

So what's the lesson? My fear is that Hasso Hering of the Albany Democrat-Herald is correct:

For anybody seeking statewide office, the practical lesson is plain to see: Forget it unless you embrace the liberal platform. But as long as we have partisan primaries, candidates with a liberal platform are never going to win a Republican nomination for statewide office again. So Democrats have a lock on these offices — governor, secretary of state, labor commissioner, superintendent of public education, and probably all the spots on the appeals courts too — for as long as the eye can see.

However, Hering goes on to argue that Oregon Republicans of yesteryear were "progressives in one way or another," and asks if that lesson will sink in with Republican primary voters. I'd argue that primary voters gambled on that lesson with Saxton, and that gamble drew snake eyes.

I'm too young to remember Republicans like Hatfield, McCall or Atiyeh, but I'm not sure you can compare politics of the 1960s and '70s with the politics of today. I do fear that Hering speaks the truth about a Democratic lock on statewide offices, especially with the power that unions hold over the Democratic Party.

However, we're so afraid that liberals will tarnish a true conservative with the "extreme" label (regardless of whether the shoe fits) that we run to the first moderate Republican we see. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is not to select a Republican who embraces a "liberal" platform, however Hering might define that term. Perhaps it's time to stop worrying about what the left thinks of us and find the best person to hold the conservative banner. Maybe the answer is to nominate a solid conservative who can clearly communicate conservative ideals with some charisma, who isn't tainted with scandal or questionable loyalties, who isn't already a lightning rod for left-wing attack dogs (e.g. Bill Sizemore), and who gives Oregonians a reason to vote for him instead of against his opponent.

Some would argue that selecting a "solid conservative" would just put us in the wilderness for another gubernatorial term. And it might. But the closest we've come to Mahonia Hall in recent history is Mannix in 2002, and he was the closest thing to a "solid conservative" in the last 20 years.

I know, I don't ask for much. But I think he's out there.